The university that granted Cheyenne Bryant her doctorate opened in May 2026 and has awarded exactly one degree in its history, according to the man who runs it. Jaquel Pitts, who identifies himself as president of Indiana Southwest Christian University, sat for a live interview on the Marc Lamont Hill Network on Saturday and confirmed the school was established roughly eight weeks earlier. He said the single doctorate it has issued went to Bryant, and that he granted it to validate what he described as her self fulfilled prophecy of being a psychologist.
Pitts came forward on his own. The chain started when Pastor Jamal Bryant, who is no relation, posted a video Saturday saying he had been trying to leave the subject alone. He explained that he apologized over a month ago for platforming Cheyenne Bryant on his show, and that he felt responsible in part because his sister is a former president of the American Psychological Association and one of the youngest people to hold the office. Shortly after the apology, he says, he received a cease and desist by email telling him not to say her name or address the controversy. He scrolled to the bottom looking for the attorney who sent it. What he found, he says, was her own signature.
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“I’m gonna walk away,” he said in the video. “I do not want to be a part of black on black crime.” He says he let it go and never mentioned it again until an email arrived from Pitts. The email, according to Bryant, informed him that Cheyenne Bryant had just received her PhD in theocentric psychology. Bryant says Pitts then told him no transcripts could be provided. When he wrote back a one line question asking who accredits the school, he says the answer came back as “Accreditation Religioso.” Other reporting on the exchange indicates Pitts also cited federal student privacy law as a reason he could not release records, a rationale that applies to institutions receiving federal funding.Here is where the story needs a distinction most of the coverage is skipping. Jamal Bryant says the state of Indiana does not recognize the school and that it is not registered, and it is true that the nearest Southwest Christian University sits in Oklahoma. But Indiana, like many states, exempts religious institutions from the oversight that governs everyone else, which means an entity can legally issue religious degrees without accreditation and without appearing in the systems people check. The accurate word is unaccredited, not fictional. That distinction matters, because the loophole is the actual story and it is bigger than one life coach.
The school’s entire web presence is a single page site. There is no campus, no course catalog beyond a short program list, and no verifiable faculty. Theocentric psychology, the field named on the degree, traces back to Paul Leon Masters and the University of Metaphysics, an institution built around God centered living that holds no federally recognized accreditation. Jamal Bryant said he looked the term up and could not make sense of the definition he found, which described a shift from ego to universal thought. He noted he did not need an AI tool to figure out that something was off.
Cheyenne Bryant has been fielding questions about her credentials since spring, when a press tour for her book Live Your Promise put her on The Breakfast Club and her answers about transcripts raised more questions than they settled. Her account has been consistent. She says she pursued a doctorate in counseling psychology at Argosy University, that Argosy lost accreditation and closed permanently in 2019, and that she therefore cannot retrieve her records. She has clarified that she is a psychology expert and life coach rather than a licensed therapist, which came after mental health professionals objected to how she was being introduced. On The Marissa Mitchell Show in May she refused to produce proof and said plainly that she has earned the title. She has kept using it, appearing as a psychologist commentator outside Sean Combs’ sentencing last October.
She has not publicly addressed the Pitts email or the interview. Earlier last week she posted a video riffing on the Netflix documentary trend, joking that episode one would ask whether she is really a doctor and the rest would investigate the haters trying to prove she is not.
Jamal Bryant’s original apology came on June 4 on his Let’s Be Clear podcast, where he called it a felony of consciousness to suggest that accreditation and licensing are unnecessary and argued that credentials exist to protect the public rather than to process insurance claims. Saturday’s video was framed as his last word. He said he is not going back and forth, told the audience to close the case, and then pivoted.
The pivot is the part worth sitting with. The only robes he wants to see, he said, are on the five hundred kids trying to get to Howard, an accredited school. He is pointing at a real and unfolding situation. More than five hundred incoming first year students were unenrolled from Howard University last week over unresolved payment issues, weeks before the fall semester begins on August 17. Howard has said it sent detailed communications to those students and families throughout March, April, May, June, and July. Students and parents have been posting about it in tears since Wednesday. Bryant, a Morehouse alum, was among the first public figures to weigh in, and his caption on the video sent viewers to his podcast for a longer conversation about it.
His argument is that one of these stories is a distraction and the other is not. He spent three minutes on the first to get to the second.
