Oriental University Bulletin.
1904--1921? Monthly, irregular
Washington, D.C.. Publisher: Faculty of the Oriental University. Editor: Helmuth P. Holler.
1/1, January 1904. (The beginning date of the journal is extrapolated from the volume numbering of surviving issues, and the existence of issues before 1912 is dubious.) 30 cents to $1.00 a year, 4-28 pp.

This was the official bulletin of Oriental University of Washington, D.C. It carried the expected lists of course offerings and the names of the more than 100 resident and correspondence faculty around the world, but its real purpose was to advertise its work (more than 400 degrees offered, including medicine, law and mediumship) and to add a note of seriousness and respectability to the venture and rebut the numerous charges of fraud leveled against it across the United States and in various foreign countries. It also functioned to establish its graduates' bona fides by giving them something to display in their waiting rooms to impress clients/patients. (The Bulletin offered bundles of 50 with the graduate's name prominently printed on the cover for $2.00.) The university was a notorious mail-order degree racket that Helmuth P. Holler (1871-after 1934) ran for 20 years until he was jailed in 1924 for mail fraud. Holler was a German-born sometime Lutheran minister and missionary in India. His first effort (1903-1907) was the Oriental Mission Seminary in Boston and then Gowanda, New York, which sought to create interdenominational missionaries for Holler's mixture of Lutheranism and monism (Theomonism). In 1908 he transferred his efforts to Washington, D.C., and started Oriental University, an intricate web of meretricious academic offerings that masked the fact that the bewildering array of degrees could be received by students for a surprisingly small payment accompanied with some high-sounding passages copied from an encyclopedia or other source. Its faculty in turn, and "branch" institutions--like J.M. Peebles, the Weltmer Institute in Nevada, Missouri, and Latent Light Culture in Tinnevelly, India--seem to have been recruited by exchanging or bestowing degrees in lieu of payment. The degrees were widely peddled worldwide, especially in Germany, and resulted in denunciations in Zeitschrift fur Okkultismus of "Die amerikanischen Doktorfabriken" that were infiltrating German occultism at the time. The university's charter was revoked in 1923 and the Post Office began to return (stamped "fraudulent") mail addressed to it, and the next year Holler was convicted and jailed. The journal was preceded by Church and Mission Herald published by Holler from Gowanda, New York. On Holler and Theomonism see also the notes under Official Theomonistic Record and Oriental University Progressive Studies. LOC.

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