The Slatest

Iowa Republican Trying to Kneecap State Universities Got His “Business Degree” From a Sizzler Franchise

This Republican knows how to cook a steak.

Lisovskaya/Thinkstock

Iowa state Sen. Mark Chelgren has said his experience with “liberal professors” inspired SF 228, the law he introduced in the Iowa Statehouse that would impose a hiring freeze on the state’s public universities until the number of Republican and Democrat professors approached equilibrium.

But while it’s true that professors tend to be liberal, that’s not a bias associated with the Forbco Management School, where Chelgren claimed to have received a degree in business management.

In fact, as Corky Siemaszko reports for NBC News, Forbco is apparently a company that operated a Sizzler steakhouse franchise in Southern California—not a management school, or an educational institution of any kind. “This was a management course he took when he worked for Sizzler, kind of like Hamburger University at McDonald’s,” a spokesman for the Iowa State Republicans told NBC. “He got a certificate.”

Chelgren also claimed he “attended the University of California at Riverside majoring in astro-physics, geo-physics and mathematics.” But he only attended that school for a year, NBC reported. He earned an associate’s degree in science from Riverside Community College, he told the outlet.

Before entering politics, Chelgren was best known as “Chickenman,” a fun-loving character who wore a chicken hat, wielded a supersoaker full of beer, and biked naked in Iowa’s famous RAGBRAI bike race.