An Iowa state senator who wants universities to hire fewer Democrat-affiliated faculty listed a steakhouse company as his alma mater, according to NBC News.
Republican Mark Chelgren’s official bio claimed that he earned a business degree from “Forbo Management school.”
But the institution that handed Chelgren his “degree” happens to be a company that ran a Sizzler steakhouse in southern California.
“This was a management course he took when he worked for Sizzler, kind of like Hamburger University at McDonald’s,” a spokesperson for the Iowa State Republicans told NBC News. “He got a certificate.”
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Grilled about this fact, Chelgren reportedly claimed that the school was located outside Los Angeles, and that he got his degree in the late 1980s.
“It’s going back a ways so I don’t remember,” he said.
The dubious degree has since been removed from Chelgren’s bio, but he still lists that he went to the University of California at Riverside and majored in”astro-physics, geo-physics and mathematics.”
However, the New York Daily News learned that Chelgren only attended that university for one year and didn’t graduate.
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Chelgren’s questionable educational qualifications haven’t stopped him from having a running beef with Iowa’s public universities, however.
He recently put forward a measure that would require state universities to ensure that Democrats on the faculty roll don’t outnumber Republicans by more than 10 per cent.
Two years ago, he proposed a bill that would allow tenured faculty to be fired if they got poor evaluations from students, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
It remains to be seen if these new revelations will serve to stick a fork in Chelgren’s attempts to reform the way universities hire and fire faculty.
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