Saturday, October 15, 2005, Globe and Mail
An unlikely tribute to a small Canadian university is scribbled, in magic marker, on the walls of a holding cell in Seoul: Acadia University “rocks.”
It’s a dubious honour for the Wolfville, N.S., school, which through no fault of its own is developing a tarnished reputation in South Korea. Fake degrees in the institution’s name are at the centre of a crackdown on English teachers by authorities there.
Korea has long enticed English instructors from Western countries by promising free rent, low taxes and good wages. All that’s required for the work visa is a university education.
Lately, however, a segment of the teaching population has been detained and deported for fudging education credentials. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department says at least 50 Canadian citizens have been caught in a crackdown this month.
The arrests have largely followed that of a Korean recruiter with a reputation for being a one-man convocation ceremony: A fixer who could readily churn out bogus degrees from Acadia University and the University of South Dakota.
No one knows why those two universities, with a combined enrolment of about 13,000, were picked, but the scam was widespread before being uncovered recently.Now, droll deportees are writing “Acadia Rocks; South Dakota rules” on Seoul jail walls and making toasts to alma maters they never attended on forced plane rides home.
At the same time, university graduates who say they studied in Wolfville find themselves being questioned by Korean immigration authorities.
“They looked at my diploma briefly and then showed me copies of other Acadia University diplomas,” said Crystal Rhyno, a graduate who was pulled out of her English class this month by two inspectors. “I told them that I knew my diploma was legitimate.”
In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, she wrote that “they seem to be targeting graduates of Acadia University” and that several of her friends are under investigation. One she said, “was taken to immigration offices in a bus with bars on the windows.”
In Nova Scotia, Acadia University’s registrar is aware of the problem and is trying to work out a solution.
The university “has been dealing with officials in South Korea as well as Foreign Affairs,” spokesman Scott Roberts said in an interview. “We’ve offered to take a look at the degrees for them, and we can pretty quickly determine whether and how it has been forged — whether it’s bogus or made up.”
He added that five bona fide graduates in Korea have contacted the university, asking for transcripts.
Young teachers who have been deported for having false degrees say they are being wrongly demonized.
Speaking from his family home in Barrie, Ont., Andrew Dekker, 28, described the chain of events that led Canadians like him to be jailed in Korea alongside illegal factory workers from Pakistan and China.
He says he turned himself in to immigration authorities early this month, but spent five days in custody before being deported.
“I thought I would be given exit papers and possibly fined,” he said.
“Next thing I know it’s ‘Stand here and take your clothes off.’ I said ‘Whoa. Whoa. I’m talking to my lawyer,’ and they’re like ‘Turn your phone off. Take your clothes off. Put your shoes in this basket.'”
Mr. Dekker soon discovered he was not alone. “We had a Canada House in prison,” he said, explaining that several of his countrymen had been locked up alongside him.
He remembers calling his parents in the middle of the night, to say he was being held in a dingy foreign jail cell with a hole in the ground for a toilet.
“I said, ‘Mom, come on, please do something,'” he recalled.
Across Canada, dozens of parents recently got calls like this, and they, in turn, began to light up the switchboards of Foreign Affairs and their local MPs.
Mr. Dekker, who travelled extensively and worked as a cameraman before going to Korea, admits he used bogus documents.
“I just wanted to travel, make some money, and pay off some debts,” he said. So he hunted around on the Internet and got in touch with a recruiter. “I said I only have high school, can I come to Korea? He said ‘Yeah — it’s perfectly fine.'”
But upon arrival, he says, the recruiter established his bona fides by presenting him with a fake diploma from the University of South Dakota. “There’s lots and lots of people who go through this guy,” Mr. Dekker said, adding he believed officials were aware of the problem long before the crackdown began.
He says that the Koreans long turned a blind eye to, or even outright encouraged, immigration fraud.
Besides, he added, degrees shouldn’t matter all that much. “You’re either a good teacher or not a good teacher,” he said. “In my case, I think I’m a good teacher.”
Mr. Dekker says many people are unsympathetic to this argument — including a cousin, who works as a border guard in Canada.
In any case, he said he was exceptionally happy when he was finally deported to Canada.
“I walked past the customs guard and hugged and kissed the pillar in the Vancouver airport,” he said. “I said, ‘Canada!'”