"Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976."
What the evidence says
Hovind's 'doctoral dissertation' was submitted to Patriot Bible University, an unaccredited diploma mill in Colorado. The document lacks a title page, table of contents, proper citations, and contains only about 100 pages of the claimed 250 — written at roughly a seventh-grade level with no original research.
The opening line of Kent Hovind’s doctoral dissertation reads like a letter to a pen pal, not the introduction to a work of scholarship. This is not a minor stylistic quibble — it reflects the nature of the entire document.
The institution is a diploma mill: Patriot Bible University is not accredited by any agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The state of Colorado grants it only “Religious Authorization,” which explicitly states that its degrees “have no state recognition.” At the time Hovind enrolled, the institution operated from a small residential building with no meaningful faculty. Degrees could be earned in weeks for approximately $37 per month.
The dissertation is incomplete and substandard: Hovind’s introduction claims the work contains 16 chapters totaling 250 pages. In reality, only 4 chapters exist — roughly 100 pages, with large sections repeated verbatim across chapters. The document has no title page, no table of contents, no proper bibliography, and no footnotes. It was printed on a dot-matrix printer. Placeholder text like “book title to be added” appears in citations. The first external reference does not appear until nine pages in, and it is to the Book of Isaiah.
No original research: The content recycles standard young-Earth creationist arguments from other sources. It was approved by a single reviewer — Wayne Knight, Patriot’s president — rather than a standard committee of three to five scholars. Organic chemistry professor Karen Bartelt, who debated Hovind in person, described the opening as “equivalent to ‘Hello, my name is Barney, the Big Purple Dinosaur.’”
Hovind tried to suppress access: Both Hovind and Patriot Bible University refused to make the dissertation publicly available, violating standard academic practice. WikiLeaks published it in 2009. Despite all of this, Hovind routinely introduces himself as “Dr. Hovind” to claim scientific authority on topics ranging from evolution to geology to cosmology — fields his degree does not even cover, as it is nominally in “Christian Education.”