Colby Nolan

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Colby Nolan is a housecat who was awarded an MBA degree in 2004 by Trinity Southern University, a Texas-based diploma mill, sparking a fraud lawsuit by the Pennsylvania attorney general's office.^[1]

Colby Nolan belongs to a deputy attorney general. In looking to expose Trinity Southern University for fraud, some undercover agents had the then six-year-old Colby Nolan obtain a bachelor's degree in business administration for $299. On the cat's application, the agents claimed that the cat had previously taken courses at a community college, worked at a fast-food restaurant, babysat, and maintained a newspaper route. Then the school informed Colby that, due to the job experience listed on his application, he was eligible for an executive MBA for $100 more. The agents then sent for Colby's transcript, which claimed that Nolan had a 3.5 grade point average.

Jerry Pappert, Pennsylvania's attorney general, filed a lawsuit against Trinity Southern University upon learning that the cat had received the degree^[2]. In the lawsuit, Pappert also told the diploma mill, which had used e-mail spam to sell degrees, to provide restitution to anyone who had ordered a degree from them.

Since 2005 Trinity Southern University's website at www.trinitysouthernuniversity.org is offline.

[edit] Similar events

On December 11, 1967, The Times reported that Oliver Greenhalgh had been accepted as a Fellow of the English Association of Estate Agents and Valuers, after a payment of eleven guineas (his two references were not taken up). Oliver Greenhalgh was a cat belonging to Michael Greenhalgh, a cameraman with Television Wales and the West who were investigating bogus professional associations.

Ben Goldacre, a UK-based science journalist, obtained a diploma in nutrition for his late cat, Henrietta, while investigating the qualifications of Gillian McKeith. ^[3]