A Certain Degree of Mystery Unravelling the truth behind Kent Madin’s elusive and fabled Arts Degree from a bankrupt College Fact or Fiction? Fabled international Cyberstalker and Troll, Kent Madin has always wanted to be admired like his high-achieving, highly educated brothers. So it’s only natural that at some point he would start to tell people that in fact he was educated like them, only slightly smaller, with a Bachelors of some sort, not a Masters or a Doctorate. And he conveniently got this degree from some totally obscure never- heard-of backwoods hippy college, so nobody could challenge whether he got it or not. He has claimed online for more than seven years that he holds a Bachelors Degree which he has variously described as a Degree in Outdoor Education and a Bachelor of Arts, with Minors in Spanish and Buddhism, whatever that means. Although others now describe it as a Diploma. Because Kent Madin has published online so much that is proven lies, nonsense, defamation, angry rant, twisted meanings, bizarre meanderings and a barely literate stream of consciousness, all of it simply made up by an unhinged mind that is unable to tell fact from fiction, and all of it doubly fact-checked by a group of concerned citizens, we can be sure that nothing Kent Madin says can be believed unless it is backed with clear, independent and incontrovertible evidence. Which brings us back to his purported Degree and his frankly pathetic attempts to get us to believe it exists. Firstly, mimicking real academics, he created a pseudo academic researcher account on Academia.edu on which he published his brand new, and rather amateurish CV, listing his new Degree. In time, observers discovered his supposed College went bankrupt before his Degree was awarded, while online documents revealed that the institution had lost its status as a College and its ability to grant Degrees. This cast doubt on the veracity of his Degree, especially when documents discovered online registered the fact that no Degrees would be given, and those students would miss out. When Kent Madin was confronted with this strong evidence that his claim to a Degree was possibly fraudulent – given Madin’s great difficulty with the truth, displayed over a decade, the point had to be made forcefully - his response was to post online what he claimed was his Degree Certificate. But there were two problems with this so-called Certificate. The first was discovered by a trained forensic document examiner: the design and fonts were wrong and the coloured inks used did not match an original Prescott College Certificate. The second was more obvious: it was signed, not in 1975 by the then College President Mr Frank Mertz but 40 years later, around 2015, by the current College President, Mr John Flicker. This meant the document was not in fact an original Certificate, but an elaborate hoax and nothing more than a souvenir. The evidence shows that some original certificates were awarded in May 1975, despite the College officially closing and without academic status in January 1975. If Kent Madin had been awarded a Certificate from a then non-existent ‘College’, he would have offered this original document as evidence of his degree, not something that was blatantly a confection, signed by a new President who we can only imagine trusted Madin at face value without doing any due diligence. We know that no due diligence or consulting of the archives was done because a current administration employee admitted this was the case. In fact she pleaded that she was sure Kent Madin must have been awarded a Degree because, wait for this, he told her so. And so determinedly and overpoweringly persuasive is he that no one would dare contradict him. And, of course he told her so, or ‘headed her off at the pass’, because the last thing he wanted was anyone consulting the archives because of what might be exposed. Such as the fact that he did not gain a Degree, and had just exploited the utter confusion of the period as an opportunity to slip his claim ‘past the guard’. It appears that, if such were the case (and no one on earth knows for sure) he considers that he got away with it, which his now much-vaunted souvenir Certificate attempts to evidence. It is entirely reasonable to assume that Kent Madin has all this time knowingly concealed the fact that he was not awarded a Degree from Prescott College, or any other permutation of names associated with this nebulous organisation. And there is a compelling reason to support this view: Madin has a history of providing a range of conflicting dates for many of his claimed exploits, including – on the very same document, not two cm apart – giving his Prescott education as being from 1969 to 1975, a total of six years to finish a three-year degree, and 1970 to 1975, or five years to complete a three year degree. Which one is true? Well, the real question is that had he been a normal student, would he not have completed his degree in 1972 or 73, where there would be no question about whether he completed or not? So why did he take so long, given it was not a part- time program but a full-on residential program. Perhaps the answer relates to a learning difficulty or intellectual disability he suffered, explaining why he did not follow his illustrious brothers into a University in California, with all the advantages of his father’s very senior academic influence and being close to home. And then there is another twist. The Prescott administration staffer describes the outcome of his presumed studies as a Diploma, not a Degree. And perhaps therein lies the real issue. Kent Madin may have only completed a Diploma and so, by persuading the current President to trust his false claim and sign a poor facsimile of an actual Degree, Madin has just awarded himself a Degree to conceal his Diploma. It is an ongoing feature of Kent Madin’s many false claims about himself and, more importantly, his outrageously false and defamatory claims about other people (none of whom he actually knows) that leaves us all with no choice but to simply dismiss everything he says as driven by his inner fantasies, filtered through an intellectual disability. Whatever, it is tragic and in some ways deserves our sympathy.
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