Christine O’Donnell Falsely Claims to Have Studied at Oxford
The GOP’s anti-wanking, anti-evolution candidate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has been caught in another “embellishment” of her education record; her bio claims she attended the University of Oxford, but as Greg Sargent details, the truth is she attended one course from an organization called the Phoenix Institute, that rented space at Oxford.
Chris Fletcher, who oversaw the Institute’s 2001 Oxford Summer Programme, which included the course O’Donnell took, tells me the course was not overseen by Oxford.
“We never represented it as a course run by Oxford University,” Fletcher, who is now an assistant professor of religious studies at Benedictine University in Illinois, told me. Fletcher said the only connection to Oxford is that they rented space there and organized some lectures with “guest lecturers from Oxford and Cambridge” as well as from other institutions.
“It wasn’t an official course of Oxford University,” Fletcher said. “It wasn’t sponsored by Oxford University. We rented the space.”
“It was our curriculum, and we did the grades,” Fletcher continued. Fletcher’s conclusion about O’Donnell’s Oxford claim: “It’s misleading.”