Iowa State Senator Mark Chelgren already had a bit of a reputation as a lawmaker who loves to court controversy. But the scandal that came to light last week is probably not what he had in mind, and we have a feeling that he is none too happy about all the attention it's receiving.
Here's why: It now appears that a section on the senator's official website claiming that "he has a degree in business management from Forbco Management School and attended the University of California at Riverside majoring in astro-physics, geo-physics, and mathematics" in fact referred to the one year he spent in college before dropping out, and to a management course he took once at a Sizzler (yes, the steakhouse chain) in Torrance, California.
Mr. Chelgren did not respond to our requests for a statement and his voicemail box is (unsurprisingly) full. But in a phone interview with NBC, when pressed about Forbco—which we now know is not a school at all, but a company that operated a Sizzler franchise—Chelgren became vague, remembering only that "the school [read: Sizzler] was created by Forbco Management," and that he "got a degree in hotel restaurant management." That "degree" was, in fact, a Sizzler management certificate, and likely not even that; Chelgren has been unable to produce documentation of any kind.
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