So I'm wondering what accounts for the intense popularity of this story about an M.I.T. dean of admissions -- Marilee Jones -- who got fired 28 years after faking her credentials. She said she had three degrees when, in fact, she had none.
"I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since."Ironically, she's written a book that's all about advising students not to stress out about college admissions. It says:
“Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners... But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.”So how is this story like brownies and doggiewoggies? The personal element? Maybe there are a lot of folks out there with faked credentials or friends who look upon their success and suspect they've faked their credentials.
ADDED: Why was she discovered after all these years? How do we know she didn't choose to let the story out to get attention and set up her next book project? After 28 years on the job, she may be ready to take her retirement package and start a new life. With public shaming over something that presumably many people suffer from secret shame about, she's got the perfect entree to the Oprah show and all the other confessional, self-help media.
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Or it's just interesting that someone could have dodged the bullet for so long and been such a hypocrite about it. You know, in charge of the accuracy of incoming transcripts.
I look forward to seeing withoprahlesleystahlthetellallbookmoviestarringglennclosenationallecturetour
What does this say about the actual need of an advanced degree for most jobs that require them anyway?
People still ask about what my undergrad degree is. And my answer is "What does that matter now?" The first job I ever had shaped my work life far, far more than college did, and there have been many jobs since.
It's just the culture of credentialism that cannot forgive such a sin as she committed.
"What accounts for the keen interest?"
1) the hypocrisy irony: Admissions officers look at credentials. They can't do their job right unlesss applicants are honest with them. Jones wasn't honest with MIT.
2) the guilty irony: It didn't matter that she wasn't honest with them. By all reports, she was doing a bang-up job. Her credentials were worthless. The fact that she really didn't have them made no difference in her ability to do her job.
Don't most of us secretly fear that our degrees are "union cards" which allow us in the door (or to be eligible for promotion) even though they have almost no direct bearing on our ability to do our jobs?
And isn't this unfair to those who were not as attuned to school as we were?
(And isn't this especially unfair to ethnic minorities? Employers are not allowed to set requirments for employment that differentially affect, say, blacks and whites. Except for one thing: schooling.)
(The meta-irony is that she was deciding who would be allowed to get the credential of a college degree. But she didn't have the credential herself.)
There's an interesting discussion on the value of degrees going on now at
http://volokh.com/posts/1177738708.shtml
Ooooooh, an academic fugitive! Fascinating! OK, not so academic...but a master manipulator. I'm just wondering how she got away with this for so long, as academic colleagues often recall and share about their educational and training affiliations and mentors. She had to have been a social loner in her first years of teaching to get away with it. How odd that no colleagues questioned her obvious lack of relationships with former fellow students or profs from her college/training/internships, etc. Weird.
It's all of the above, plus more. This wasn't Chicken Bone Community College. This was M.I.T., and it was M.I.T. who never bothered to check the credentials of it's Dean of Admissions. And it wasn't just that she fudged here or there or embellished a little about it. She flat-out lied and made it all up. And she didn't get away for it for just a while. She got away with it for 28 years.
All that makes it a story that makes it more than just an idle curiosity.
Schadenfreude.
Dean of Admissions is like HR, not of much consequence to the mission. This person probably found that nobody really cared about her credentials, and from what I've seen of HR offices it is not surprising. Those that can't do hire those that can.
Will they require her replacement to have a degree of any kind, now that she's demonstrated the total irrelevance of that requirement?
What's so dismaying about NYT readers' interest in pets and food? Their e-mail preferences are evidence that even on the upper West Side, people see more value in doggie tail-wagging than in Rich & Krugman's daily diatribes.
BTW, the brownies were pretty good.
I work in HR and HR is a department that is a "partner" to the business. HR depends on the individual in the position as well as the company in which the HR person works.
I agree, that some HR departments are old school personnel offices. These "personnel" staff tend to work in "old" industries: unions, manufacturing, government and tend to me not the most strategic indivuals.
But in other industries HR is much more. I work in Biotech and am involved with most if not all decisions regarding acquisitions, mergers, new product launches, offers, compensation planning etc. I work in International HR for a biotech company and it is actually fairly complex: international compensation, international product launches, etc. (In other words I am really important-gag)
I think what is fascinating about this story is that this individual 1) worked at MIT (probably not much interest if it was small vocational school; 2)she lied about all of her degrees-she said she had three and she has none; 3)I am sure there are other individuals out there that are probably "lieing" about their degrees and it has some impact on them 4)she worked in admissions.
My company conducts background checks on all employees including criminal, drug testing, work history, credit (for those working with money) and education.
Education is the number 1 area where applicants lie. 7% of our hires lie about their education, even when they know we are about to do a background check. I think some of them believe we aren't going to do it.
Also, I agree that this says quite a bit about the "requirement" for a degree for certain jobs. Most jobs really don't have to require a degree but the companies tend to want those candidates to show that they achieved or accomplished a goal and completed their degree.
Unfortunately, at my company, because we are in Boston and there are a ton of colleges around us, has a bias for employees at certain business schools as well as certain undergrad schools which I think is BS.
What that does is eliminate a company's ability to have a "diverse" workforce based off their education. Also, I don't necessarily believe receiving a degree for a particular university equates with being a superior performer. Although, overall companies to tend to be biased over degrees from specific instituitions.
So we tend to have a bunch of Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, Brown etc employees running around. It is sad when some managers look down at potential candidates that went to BU,BC, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Bates-which are all great schools.
It's a story of the worthlessness of academic degrees, that are nevertheless still required.
She apparently did the jobs quite well.
This is a suspicion most people have of academic degrees, that they acquire from meeting the credentialed people that they meet.
So it's mailed as ``yet another case of the same old same old.''
You might be good at something, but then normal people notice that instead.
What accounts for the keen interest?
The hypocrisy. That is the issue more than the necessity of college degrees. From the 1950's to the early 1980's tons of jobs right up to the CEO level were held by non-degreed people. Her job did not necessarily need a degree at that time, but the fact that she lied about it, enhancing her resume, while then spending her career encouraging others to not be so ambitious is the problem...(not to mention the ridiculousness of that advice, coming from her purch at the gate of M.I.T, an institution that is not about to slack in overall credentialist inclinations when we live in a world where China and India are churning out highly educated workers en masse).
I think the articles that get emailed around tend to reflect those things that are soothing, or stories that are surprising, but in a manner where the responses from the readers are likely to be similar. Kind of like, "Here check this out, isn't this just crazy?" or, "Ooh, look, tell me that steak does not look good."
There is the curiosity factor as well.
That french fry article, (actually a meat and potato restaurant review), what with the pleasantly voiced photo montage, was quite nicely done, and made me feel like running out for grilled meat and delicately spiced potatoes. I actually look for articles like that, finding them rather transporting. It's the same effect as when Ann posts a picture on this blog of some cafe, or bookstore or natural vista.
It has to do with people stepping out of their current frames of experience and wanting distraction.
In addition to what Mr. Sweeny wrote:
The proof (that degrees are less important than we think) comes from a prominent university--not just any university, but one that believes its degrees are better than degrees from most other schools.
From their admissions department, which encourages people to come to the campus to get their degree so they can be successful in life.
From a lady who once published a book exhorting others to honesty.
ok...so for instance, let's say she resigned about a year ago..or far enough back that it was before there was a hint of potential for looking at her resume. say she said that there was something on her resume that she felt was untrue (nice way of saying it)and she wanted to reapply for her position.
so as her work history she cites so many years of excellent work at MIT heading the admissions department, great letters of praise, merit awards, etc. and for education she wrote "limited" or "some college" whatever...
If MIT refused to hire her because of her lack of formal education or because she appeared to have lied, even though she confessed.
further, what then is the hierarchy between accomplishment and qualifications to be in a position where accomplishment is possible.
Maybe the interest in the story has to do with the quandrey.
My take is slightly different. I think it's a story about the rigors of living in a more transparent world, where privacy hardly exists anymore, including the privacy of the little lie.
When this lady first took the job, she faked her credentials in almost complete confidence that no one would ever know or bother to check. Then, probably, a few years back, it hit her that now that information could be easily checked, and it was probably only a matter of time before she'd be found out.
It's Poe's "The Telltale Heart" as rewritten for Dilbert.
I'm sure there are thousands of people like her out there, nursing the same worries, and that's why the story is so popular. We might be well-advised to declare a year of fake-resume amnesty and let people clear up their deceptions without penalty unless it affects a life-and-death profession like brain surgeon or airline pilot.
I never heard of Jones before this kerfluffle surfaced, but at least now I understand why I was accepted into MIT lo those many years ago. I'd always wondered about that; I can testify to the fact that perfect SAT scores were not a requirement.
JohnStodder's analysis is spot on.
Ann,
"It's a source of humor and dismay for me. Day after day, I see the proof that what people really want to read about in the newspaper is pets, food, travel, relationships. All week, people have been fascinated with the subject of how a dog wags its tail." [emphasis added]
Could you elaborate on the dismay part? Why is this troubling to you? Perhaps the majority of the NYT readers simply share your aversion to politics. After all, the anti-"campaign-finance-reform" folks like to point out that we as a nation spend way more on pet food than we do on political campaigns.
I agree with rhhardin, this illustrates that college degrees are a joke for most professions. The higher education system has been committing systematic fraud on all of us for years. They've convinced the populace that you don't just need a degree, but one that requires a shit load of useless dumbass classes.
(When I make a list of the very best people I've worked with in various jobs, the vast majority do not have degrees in the field of their profession.)
Let us also not ignore the fact that her lies put her in a position to bump off contenders who actually met the criteria of MIT. Ask those people if her deciet didn't matter.
Writing a book about not lying doesn't seem that weird to me. Perhaps she understands why students might feel that they *had* to lie, but also understand that they really don't.
I would never lie about my credentials or work history but then I never had any anxiety about it or need for the social parts of "looking good" and impressing the Joneses.
My husband has had some experience with the "must have degree" mindset of some people. It was curious that in the depressed economy of Fargo, the fact that he'd had *years* of experience as a senior systems engineer meant nothing next to his lack of a degree. It was almost like a whiny "I followed the rules and have this crap paying job to show for it. How dare you think you can break the rules and get paid more than me?"
Anywhere else the lack of degree hasn't mattered. Anywhere else employers cared more about their bottom lines and production than about someone being so uppity as to think they could just skip the part that everyone else was forced to do.
Kirk: My aversion to politics isn't about wanting more shallowness. My dismay is over the idea that the newspaper is read by people who are looking for the sort of things that appear in women's magazines. I'm afraid the newspaper, as it struggles to maintain its market position, will cater to these readers, and hard news and serious culture and science coverage will suffer.
For an incredibly obvious reason, I enjoy recipes for brownies.
The story of the MIT dean is a nice little modern morality tale, with the initial ironic lie (the false degree screens degree applicants), decades of service while concealing her shame, and then the hubris required to write a book that called attention to her, inviting her ultimate fall from grace.
In fiction, such a narrative arc would be considered improbable .
The only reason this story had any traction at all for me is that when my daughter was accepted to MIT and we attended their pre-admission visit thingy (from the latin: reson) her presentation could have been used to illustrate "smug, supercilious, and patronizing."
So, yeah, a little bit of schadenfreude.
If you are interested in the most-emailed list in the Times, then you should definitely check out this Onion piece about it.
Yeah, I've seen that Onion piece. Very funny (and apt). I've written about the most-emailed list before. And when I had my NYT column, I paid plenty of attention to whether I got on the list and once on whether I went up and where I peaked, etc.
One could be snide and say, 'You weren't disparaging when the preacher was found to have a homosexual liason.' But really I think it would have been better if MIT had taken a deep breath and said 'Miss X is embarassed as are we, but you know she has done a terrific job for us and we're keeping her. We have altered the job requirements to fit our/her experience.' When I was a kid and got accepted to Stanford I expected that money wouldn't be an object. After all, Harvard's info said 'no one does not come to Harvard for monetary reasons.' I think it's useful to realize that sometimes people/institutions say things because 'they have to' and it's best to keep that in mind. And I would have been less disappointed in not going if I had thought of that as well and not taken such statements in a childlike interpretation.
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