Rebecca Hopkins
The Roys Report
Originally posted 21 MAR 23
Houston Christian University (HCU) once planned to name its mental health program after Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC)—the world’s leading Christian counseling organization. Now HCU is suing Clinton, the AACC, and their related organizations for $1 million, accusing them of fraud, breach of contract, and concealing Clinton’s alleged plagiarism.
AACC “knew of Dr. Clinton’s practice of plagiarizing but failed to disclose the same to Plaintiff, knowing of the importance of academic honesty to any institution of higher learning,” the suit says. “. . . Yet, AACC still entered into several agreements with Plaintiff while not disclosing the academic honesty.”
In 2016-17, HCU (then named Houston Baptist University) hired Tim Clinton and the 50,000-member AACC for more than $5 million, multiple agreements show.
As part of the agreements, Clinton and the AACC promised to deliver new enrollments to the private Baptist school and to develop 50 new courses for HCU’s counseling program. The school also contracted with Clinton to help start, lead, and promote a global mental health center at HCU for an additional payment of $26,000 per month.
However, according to the lawsuit filed March 3 in Harris County District Court in Texas, Clinton and the AACC failed to deliver “on the expressed scope of the contracts.”
The contract expressed a goal of 133 new enrollments, but AACC delivered only one student, the suit says. Plus, the new courses were supposed to be written by the AACC, the suit adds, but instead AACC outsourced the courses to a third party.
Additionally, during the time of the agreement, Clinton was accused of plagiarism. In 2018, Grove City College psychology professor Warren Throckmorton accused Clinton of plagiarism in articles Clinton posted on Medium.
Clinton attributed the issues to the use of research assistants and graduate students, as well as a former employee’s poor standards, and third-party partners’ mistakes.
