User:TrustTruth/History of GWC

Year 1 (1992)

 * January: DeMille begins his CRBU studies, "typically stud[ying] over eighty hours a week, sometimes more"
 * May: DeMille earns a B.A. from CRBU in five months, a "truly great, much more challenging" experience than his BYU studies; he begins M.A. studies, continues studying 80+ hours a week
 * Summer: DeMille on staff at The Institute for Constitutional Education (ICE) in Cedar City, Utah, spending "twelve-hour days and discussion-filled evenings" in seminars
 * September 21: Donald N. Sills opens a branch of CRBU in Cedar City, Utah, the "George Wythe branch", later renamed George Wythe College (GWC). DeMille later calls himself "the founder ... of George Wythe College". DeMille has separately stated that he helped Sills found the school in 1991, as he "was finishing up [his] doctoral program", although he hadn't begun even his undergraduate studies with CRBU until that same year at the earliest, and his official GWC biography states that CRBU didn't award him a B.A. until 1992 (and didn't award him a Ph.D. until 1994). DeMille is a full-time faculty member, teaching classes and "going through some of the material for the first time right along with the students."
 * December: DeMille earns an M.A. from CRBU in seven months, including three months working full-time at ICE and four months full-time at GWC
 * Month unknown: James Kirk opens La Salle University and awards DeMille a J.D.; after later admitting that La Salle was a diploma mill, DeMille maintains that the degree still "required serious study and he had learned a lot about jurisprudence"; using this degree he becomes the "James Madison Professor of Law and Politics" at GWC; he removes the degree from his resume sometime after 2002
 * Month unknown: DeMille publishes The New World Order: Choosing Between Christ and Satan in the Last Days and two pamphlets: "Alternatives to the New World Order" and "U.S. National Security in the 1990s"

Year 2 (1993)
DeMille claims he continued the practice of studying "over eighty hours a week, sometimes more" during the seven months he spent working on his M.A. (between May and December 1992). He says he spent the first three months of this period on staff with ICE, which occupied "twelve-hour days and discussion-filled evenings", in addition to his ongoing 80-hour-a-week CRBU studies. He spent the remaining four months as a full-time "young and untried" faculty member at GWC, teaching classes and "going through some of the material for the first time right along with the students." At the end of these seven months, CRBU awarded him an M.A. In addition, that same year La Salle University awarded him a J.D., a degree that normally requires at least three academic years of full-time study. La Salle opened its doors that same year and was a known diploma mill (see below). When DeMille publicly acknowledged in 2005 that La Salle was indeed a diploma mill, he claimed that the J.D. still "required serious study".

Year 3 (1994)
GWC reports that DeMille began and completed his Ph.D. sometime during the seventeen-month period from December 1992 to May 1994. In addition to his doctoral studies, it says he spent the first four months of this period continuing as one of the three full-time GWC faculty during the school's first year. During the next four months he worked to "re-establish the educational program and open the doors for Fall [1993] classes" after a fire at the school's facility in Duck Creek. He spent the final nine months as GWC's sole faculty member, teaching full-time "the core classes each semester, and [preparing] for them through the year." At the end of this school year CRBU awarded DeMille a Ph.D.

In the United States, the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), the best-known of the research doctorates, is awarded in recognition of both mastery of research methods (as evidenced in class grades and a comprehensive examination) and academic research that is ideally publishable in a peer-reviewed academic journal, but that will minimally be assessed by submission and defense of a thesis or dissertation. A master's thesis and doctoral dissertation are standard documents in graduate programs. However, DeMille does not list either a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation for his CRBU degrees on his faculty page curriculum vitae.

In the United States, the term "dissertation" can refer to the major part of the student's total time spent (along with two or three years of classes) in a doctoral program, and may take years of full-time work to complete. However, according to the GWC history, only 17 months elapsed from the time CRBU awarded DeMille an M.A. to the time it awarded him a Ph.D., allowing neither enough time for standard course work nor enough time to write a dissertation. In addition, during these 17 months DeMille spent his full time either teaching at GWC (three semesters or 13 months) or nursing the school along (four months in the summer of 1993).

Critic Richard Stout noted that a fellow CRBU student was awarded a doctorate based on his "life experience" : ten years researching and preaching "three different series on the New Age & Occult" and authoring "three books on the subject". Stout posits that DeMille's CRBU degrees were awarded in the same manner.

At some point after CRBU awarded him a Ph.D., a terminal degree, the now-"Dr. DeMille" returned to BYU as an undergraduate student, despite ranking CRBU's educational quality above that of BYU. In August 1994, he completed a bachelor's degree in international relations (with a minor in aerospace studies) at BYU. The GWC history notes that "as good as the BYU studies had been, the Coral Ridge learning was truly great, much more challenging than anything he had ever done or seen".

Year 8 (1999)
According to George Wythe College, DeMille served at GWC as the "James Madison Professor of Law and Politics", the "Dean of Leadership and Entrepreneur Studies", and later as the Provost before taking over the presidency from Donald Sills in 1999 at the age of 31.

While an adjunct faculty with CRBU in the 1990s, DeMille listed on his curriculum vitae that he had earned a B.A. from George Wythe College, with no mention of either his BYU B.A. or his CRBU B.A. However, DeMille no longer lists this degree on his CV.

Year 9 (2000)
DeMille publishes A Thomas Jefferson Education.

Year 15 (2006)
DeMille publishes A Thomas Jefferson Education Home Companion and a revised edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education.