She was a pretty lousy dean of admissions, actually.

somebody should give her an honorary doctorate!

George Bush lied about his military record, and there were no consequences to that, apparently. Unless you count mass murder and the subversion of democracy as consequences.

Well the whole point of academics is credentials. They indicate a dedication to professionalism and a sign that the person in question has successfully completed a rigorous training program. Having a high-ranking staff member with a falsified background is a pretty substantial amount of egg on the face for MIT or any institution of higher education, since their primary reason for being is giving credentials.

Kevin,..In a nation where Taps is played daily over the societal death of honor, honesty and accountability, methinks you might applaud MIT's memory of now 'quaint' mores.

Given her position as Dean of Admissions is to run an office that reviews credentials of potential students (though I realize we are just talking about high school students), I think the importance of having a clean record in that area herself is pretty clear.

The optics are just terrible. You have the Dean of Admissions saying, in effect, "lie to us as much as you want on your applications; after all, I did." Some other position they might be able to get away with it, but for someone in admissions, you have to have zero tolerance on this sort of dishonesty.

Even if she was the Bestest Dean of Admissions Evar, I think they had to can her for the reasons Chris sets forth.

Lying about credentials is pretty serious, both in and out of academia. Didn't the little "political officer" at NASA who was censoring Hansen have to ultimately resign because it turned out he had not completed his undergraduate degree as he had claimed?

This may be a case of “rules are rules�. In today’s litigious society lying on your resume remains one of the few things (along with malfeasance and direct insubordination) you can be fired for. Letting one highly placed employee off the hook would demonstrate the rule is not absolute, at which point every other person who fudged their resume would have grounds to legally challenge their firing.

It seems like a big deal to me. By doing that, MIT would be saying that it's okay to lie about your background -- specific achievements, a particular academic pedigree, even previous job experience -- as long as you do a good job after establishing yourself with those lies.

It isn't just a a big deal, it's a huge deal. In academia we are nothing without our credentials.

Sorry, but no reprieve on this one.

Yeah, CalStateDisneyland has it right...Admissions is all about assessment of potential students' credentials, there's got to be a higher standard there. It's like Alan Hevesi's use of state employees to drive his wife -- improper, but by itself not that huge a deal. When you're the comptroller, though, and it's your job to make sure other people are spending the state's funds properly, you really have to be held to a higher standard. Ditto with Wolfowitz trying to run an anti-corruption campaign (which makes me laugh just typing it).

Not being an academic myself, maybe I just don't realize how serious this situation is. But from my perch outside the academy, it's hard not to think that this didn't necessarily require the death penalty

Kevin, an unqualified person was hired to take a job. This is what's wrong. What next are you going to defend? Plagiarism and academic dishonesty? Firing is the only correct course of action. America is a meritocracy where those who do the job best succeed. Anything less than firing would send the signal MIT doesn't believe going to good schools and having the proper qualifications was important to getting ahead in life.

Hat-tip Chris. You got there first.

MIT officials recently discovered that Marilee Jones, their dean of admissions, lied on her resume 28 years ago and does not, in fact, have a college degree.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be the case that Jones continued to claim the bogus degree on her current resume?

isn't there also a point here about credentialism run amok?

No.

She lied on her resume. Kevin -- and not just with a bit of inflated puffery, but by claiming a degree that others actually did the work for. Like plagiarism, the consequences have to be serious, because otherwise what's to stop everyone from making shit up?

Everything I've read about this case suggests that Jones was not just a good dean of admissions, but something of a superstar dean of admissions. Given that, is the fact that she lied about her credentials three decades ago for an entry-level job really that big a deal?

The fact that she admitted the fabrication yesterday indicates that she didn't lie three decades ago, but rather that she was lying about her credentials for three decades. As such, her offense isn't lessened, but rather increased -- again, to give her a pass would only encourage, not discourage, out-and-out lying on resumes.

Sheesh, Kevin, what gives?

I agree with previous posters about the importance for an admission dean to have clean credentials. If she had been a prof in electrical engineering, by now her published work would have eclipsed any question about her undergrad transcripts.

I wonder what position in the Bush Administration she'll be offered? :-)

I disagree that her lack of a college degree renders her "unqualified." However, she lied about it (I don't care how long ago--she's had 30 years to get it since then!) and must face the consequences.

...and holy shit, I just agreed with Al. Mirabile dictu.

First, she is the gatekeeper responsible for ensuring incoming student's applications are complete, accurate, and truthful. If she lied on her own application, how does she treat the lies of others. Can you every, really, trust her...

Second, echoing Chris above: she is working for an organization that says you need credentials to be able to do a job well. And every day she is there she proves them wrong.

Kevin is only confused because he isn't familiar with professions where the paper qualifications are more important than the quality of the work.

Academia runs on credentials only because those are the easiest things to evaluate. The other stuff takes work to understand, and who needs that?

I was just going to say the same thing, greg.

Al, you are correct! (Gulp)

I personally have busted my ass for every piece of paper I lay claim to. When people falsely claim they possess the credentials we have sacrificed and scraped to achieve, we take it personally. It gives us a frame of reference for truly understanding the outrage real vets feel when those who never served claim to be battle heroes.

Everything about MIT is insanely competitive, not just undergrad admissions, she was toast as soon as this became known (how did it become known BTW?). There's just this image of someone with a fake resume rejecting masses of applicants to MIT every year, picking over essays and references,that's years of personal and maybe interpersonal dishonesty.

As someone who spent a good deal of time in academia I'm surprised non-academics don't see this as serious, my observation has been that people are much more uptight about resumes outside academia - maybe because resumes are faked more often in the 'real world.'

Kevin, outside of the moral turpitude issue, credentials do matter in the academy. First of all a Dean in an academic department is presupposed to have an academic background (the title "Director" is said to be more appropriate if you don't come from this background).

Next, it all comes down to credibility. A Dean of Admissions needs to be taken seriously by the students and the faculty and the administration, and one of the ways of doing that is to be able to say, "I'm one of you. I know what you've gone through academically. I know what you deal with." It's a reason that the normal track to senior administration starts as academic faculty.

Bringing that credbility to the table was what "made" Marilee Jones' career. I didn't think she was a good Dean of Admissions. There was something "off" about her dealings with the MIT community that screamed "I don't fit in here!" (self-link to blog post of mine on that). However, she was a very-much in-demand talking head outside the MIT community, and one of the reasons people inside and outside MIT thought, "she must know what she's talking about" is because she was assumed to have understood the environment and experiences of academia (particularly as a student) first-hand and she told people what they wanted to hear from a scientist when it came to MIT admissions and college admissions in general. MIT needed and wanted someone that could bring a scientific background to the table when talking about how to better improve the academic environment and evaluate incoming students of this generation. Since her perspective was rather radical, a lot of her credibility hinged on her academic background. When that turned out to be fraudulent, it brings down a lot of what she was trying to advocate for in the first place.

Kevin: from my perch within academia, the point isn't so much about credentials, but about honesty. We live by our words. Honesty and trust are crucial. That's why we care so much about plagiarism. It's also why we care about this.

It is not credentialism in the first place -- it is integrity.

Surely there was something MIT could have done to demonstrate it took this seriously without also losing a valued and high performing member of its administration?

Well, they could have given her the Medal of Freedom.

This strikes me as a case where the preventative model of punishment is more important than the punitive or redemptive aspects. No matter how good she was at her job, you can't give people the impression that there is any circumstance where faking your credentials is ok.

Political junkies like us know full well that people eager to believe something will hold onto a single fact far out of proportion to its actual significance. Academies could bring the hammer down on five hundred people who committed the same act and people would still remember Marilee Jones.

Twenty years ago I had a colleague at a financial institution who lied about receiving a college degree - when it was discovered he was fired the same day. I know of others who had the same thing happen many years into a career (after being promoted, for example, which led to a review of their entire employment file). This is nothing new and not restricted to higher ed. It doesn't surprise me in the least.

I don't think it's unreasonable that a college require its Dean of Admissions to be truthful about her academic credentials. Certainly, if any applicant to MIT lied about his or her qualifications for admission, and this was discovered, the "death penalty" would be the consequence. Why hold the Dean of Admissions to a lower standard?

Maybe a college education isn't really necessary to do a high level job like Dean of Admissions, but MIT isn't going to admit that. Why would anyone pay $120,000 for a college education if they figure out that it isn't that all useful?

I really can't emphasize enough that the fact that her bogus claim stood on her CV for 28 years doesn't make it a 28-year-old offense, but one that she continued to commit for 28 years. The offense is magnified, not diminished.

And yeah, her position as dean of admissions only compounds matters.

Surely there was something MIT could have done to demonstrate it took this seriously without also losing a valued and high performing member of its administration?

The obvious question here is, what could they have done? Kevin doesn't offer any suggestions.

That said, I can't help but wonder, Kevin: If you discovered one of your employees had lied to you during the hiring process, are you really claiming it'd be no big deal?

Maybe a college education isn't really necessary to do a high level job like Dean of Admissions, but MIT isn't going to admit that. Why would anyone pay $120,000 for a college education if they figure out that it isn't that all useful?

Of course "ex-liberal" springs to the defense of a liar. Birds of a feather and all.

Leave it to "ex-liberal" to insert bogus wingnut talking points into the discussion -- even Al didn't go that far. Shame on you, "ex-liberal."

If this was a movie, the whole theme would be how a hardworking woman without a degree managed to rise through the ranks. At the end of the movie, she would make a impassioned speech, everyone would forgive her, and she would keep her job... but this is real life. Despite doing an apparently excellent job, she was forced to resign.

The whole story raises a pretty good question: What is the value of a college degree if someone without it was able to rise so high in a competitive school like MIT?

The story certainly lends credence to the theory that college doesn't actually add much academic value (for a lot of careers, not all) and is nothing more than a way to vet for intelligence and perseverance.

Of course many people will argue that its not an issue of whether she had a degree or not, but an issue of integrity. Do you really believe that she would of even got her foot in the door if she had been honest about having a degree?

If she is smart, she will launch her own consulting company that helps students get into the colleges of her choice. She has already written one book, perhaps now she will write another exposing the dirty little secrets of college admissions.

posted at http://parentalcation.blogspot.com/2007/04/value-of-college-degree.html

Does no one see the irony? Her big message was that people need to stop being so insanely competitive (her book is called "Less Stress, More Success") and that you can succeed even if you don't have perfect SATs or aren't first in your class or don't go to a top 25 school. She de-emphasized things like resume padding extracurriculars. Now we know why she may have had such a view- she knew she had succeeded and was a productive person even without an Ivy (or any higher education) degree.

I can see why she would be fired if she did not currently possess the degree. But what if she now does? If she got her current job based on an accurate resume...what's the big deal?

I also don't buy the "she's saying it's okay to lie on your application" school of thought. That's as extreme as saying the opposite -- that she's the best person for the job, because who better to root out the ones who are shading their credentials than someone who's done it herself.

Oh, and I'm saying this as someone with two post-grad degrees.

Here's the money quote: “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,� Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. (emphasis added)

That's in the second graf, Kevin. She lied -- not once but repeatedly -- for nearly three decades -- a record "ex-liberal" must look upon with envy. What's so hard to understand about that?

Academia runs on credentials only because those are the easiest things to evaluate. The other stuff takes work to understand, and who needs that?

Exactly. And valuing credentials is self-serving to those who have them, creating a whole culture of puffery.

Though I can see how, from a pure marketing perspective, it is not good for MIT to have a dean that demonstrates you don't need an education to succeed.

On the one hand, lying is bad.

On the other hand, she performed the job satisfactorily for 28 years.

So their rationale for requiring a college degree turns out to be a bit suspect--especially since it was an entry-level job she got at the time.

The reality is that people lie to get jobs all the time--and are forgiven if it turns out they can perform those jobs. And they can do the jobs because, very often, the requirements are arbitrary and in some cases silly. (I saw job listings that demanded '3 to 5 years experience in Flash' when Flash was only two years old.)

I can't argue with the rightness of her firing--but I think MIT ows it to itself to acknowledge that she proved the arbitrariness of their requirement.

(And the cynical part of me says that this is a good way to get a lifetime of service out of someone and save on an expensive pension.)

By all means, let's let everyone lie about their credentials.

I'm a brain surgeon Kevin, and I'll gladly operate on your tumor.

C'mon Kevin, I rely on you being sensible.

Do you really believe that she would of even got her foot in the door if she had been honest about having a degree?

Actually, yes, because her initial job at MIT was as an administrative assistant which did not require a college degree (that's why her degrees were never checked in the first place). She could have then taken advantage of MIT's (rather generous, I believe) educational benefit programs to get a college degree, at which point she could have gone on to bigger and better things. Instead she cut corners-- when she didn't even need to (initially)!

As I've said, much of her career as a high-profile Dean of admissions hinged on her identity as a "scientist" who was doing admissions. That it is completely false undercuts much of her credibility.

I'm on your side here, Kevin. If those fools in academia care so much about what the "credential" means, then how bad does it look for them to go 28 years(!) completely unable to tell the difference between someone who has it and someone who doesn't.

As has been noted, this isn't one thing that she lied about 28 years ago. She never corrected her resume in 28 years on the job. Every time she moved up the ladder in that department, she had an opportunity to revise her resume to reflect the past.

Lying on your resume to get your foot in the door is not acceptable, and should be punished severely. I would also fire the person who hired her for the job, because checking someone's transcripts is pretty standard procedure.

Al is wrong, as always. "Kevin, an unqualified person was hired to take a job. This is what's wrong." In fact it seems that she was qualified; after all, she performed at a very high level at all of her jobs up to and including Dean of Admissions. She wasn't unqualified, she was uncredentialed, which is a very different thing. (It is easy to cite top research scientists without Ph.D.s, for example - qualified but not conventially credentialed). Unfortunately, it isn't simple to judge qualifications of applicants and so hiring practices depend on credentials, which are at best a poor surrogate. On the other hand, her lies about her credentials require that she be removed from her position as Dean.

What astounds me are two things.1 why on earth wasn't MIT able to check her credentials 28 years ago. Whats that say about an institution that claaims to be one of the best in the USA. 2 how and why on earth did they check it out now? Could somebody in the guilded and semi-sacred halls of academia please explain this to me.

Credentials are the be-all and end-all of academia. Talent, effectiveness, and native ability count for nothing without the credentials. Lack of talent, ineffectiveness, and lack of ability count for nothing when the credentials are available to mask such inadequacy.

And valuing credentials is self-serving to those who have them, creating a whole culture of puffery.

Obviously an uncredentialed wanker.

Do you want your doctor or lawyer uncredentialed? They get their credentials from credentialed academics, afterall. Undermining that process has far reaching effects.

On the other hand, she performed the job satisfactorily for 28 years.

No, pbg -- the fact that she continued to lie about her own background means that she by definition did not perform ehr job as dean as admissions satisfactorily at all.

The question isn't, as some would like to insinuate, whether a college degree qualifies you for this or that. As inconvenient as it might be to "ex-liberal" and his/her/its ilk, making false claims does ruin your credibility, and people and organziations are pefectly entitled to treat you accordingly.

It is a very big deal. As a now-retired business school prof, I can attest to that's the way it is. Academic credentials are not to be toyed with and lied about, not in business and absolutely not in academia. If we expel a student for cheating, we fire an administrator for lying about something that got her hired in the first place.

But isn't there also a point here about credentialism run amok?

Nope. She falsely claimed undergraduate and graduate degrees while applying for a job for which none was required to make herself appear more qualified. And she has since continued that fraud by repeating the claims in her applications for later jobs. "Credentialism run amok" would be requiring degrees not rationally related to job duties to be considered for a job. It is not "credentialism run amok", or even credentialism at all to take very seriously a substantial, ongoing, utterly gratuitous fraud.

Not being an academic myself, maybe I just don't realize how serious this situation is. But from my perch outside the academy, it's hard not to think that this didn't necessarily require the death penalty.

No on has suggested that she be killed for this, so I would think that reference to the "death penalty" is pointless. She committed fraud to get a job—not just in 1979, but when she got her current job, and every job in between. And, yeah, that costs her her job.

Surely there was something MIT could have done to demonstrate it took this seriously without also losing a valued and high performing member of its administration?

No, there isn't. Anything short of termination would have been an endorsement of fraud.

Perhaps if at some point in the past 3 decades she had voluntarily come clean, it could have been handled differently—that would have been a sign of some integrity.

Talent, effectiveness, and native ability count for nothing without the credentials.

Talent, effectiveness, and native ability are how you get the credentials.

Okay, okay, George W. Bush.

But even then, past performance -- as a lazy, incurious, un-rigorous dweeb with a sense of entitlement a mile wide -- turned out to be a predictor of future performance, didn't it?

Her real crime was that she pulled back the curtain and demonstrated that degrees don't mean shit. This is a capital offense, especially at MIT. She had to be fired.

However, in the real world we reward competence and punish incompetence. I would have fired whomever hired her without checking her credentials.

I see a rare consensus among all the regulars and trolls. Has any other topic had such agreement?

Come on, everyone knows the deal: no matter how smart, brave, or sentimental you are, you still need see the wizard.

She serves at the pleasure of the Chancellor. :)

Seriously, I agree with the others that keeping her would indicate to applicants that lying on your application will be rewarded.

If she was really good at what she does, I find it odd that she would have been fired. In my experience, lying on applications is a good reason not to hire somebody or, if you discover it later, a good excuse to fire somebody who later turns out to be a problematic but otherwise difficult to fire employee. Outside of those situations, though, it's kind of a, "huh, did you say something?" situation.

Everything about MIT is insanely competitive, not just undergrad admissions, she was toast as soon as this became known (how did it become known BTW?).

Apparently, MIT received questions and did some checking. My guess is that the attention she drew from her speaking tour and the book it promoted naturally made people want to know more about her background. One of the natural things for people to look at with someone who has a Ph.D. is their thesis, and I'd bet that what happened is someone looked for that, couldn't find it, and started asking questions.

Obviously an uncredentialed wanker.

Do you want your doctor or lawyer uncredentialed? They get their credentials from credentialed academics, afterall. Undermining that process has far reaching effects.

Gee thanks. Actually I've got a BS and an MBA.

Nice strawman, btw. Of course you want a doctor and lawyer to be credentialed, in terms of being licensed. But if someone passes the bar, and is an effective litigator, does it matter so much whether they were educated at a credentialed university versus, say, working as a paralegal for 20 years?

On the other hand, she performed the job satisfactorily for 28 years.

One of the reasons a person is an effective administrator/manager is because your colleagues respect you and because your observations are assumed to carry weight, even when they might be skeptical. Her ability to perform the job hinged, in part, on the very fraudulent claims she was making. Had an admissions administrator been hired without any college degrees, neither the faculty, nor the students, nor the administrators, nor the public would have taken her seriously (because, after all, how could she understand all of their concerns, not having had any direct experiences in academia?), and her performance would have suffered as a result, being regarded as "unsatisfactory."

This is a bit like the author of best-selling memoir being revealed to have made everything up about his life. Certainly the stories were compelling, but would they have been nearly as popular if they were marketed as fiction, rather than a recounting of actual life experiences? Probably not.

Jones was a very controversial dean of admissions, and her ability to get her ideas through hinged in part in her reputed academic background.

What astounds me are two things.1 why on earth wasn't MIT able to check her credentials 28 years ago.

They didn't (not weren't able to) because she was applying for a job for which not even an undergraduate degree was required (which makes the lying more egregious as it was needless—or extremely clever, forward looking deceit.)

Now, admittedly, that would be understandable if she had only claimed a bachelor's degree, but when someone is applying for a job that doesn't require a degree and says they have Ph.D., that ought to prompt some serious examination. While I suppose the thought may have been "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", in this case the horse was more of the Trojan variety.

Actually I've got a BS and an MBA.

So does aWol.

Talent, effectiveness, and native ability are how you get the credentials.

That and being wealthy enough to go to the right prep schools, taking the right test-prep classes, paying the tuition at a prestigious school.

I happen to think people can be talented and effective even without the right degree.

I'm with rory and pbg on this one. Sure, they had to fire her, but let's at least acknowledge the important fact that she was, by most accounts, great at her job. A college degree was not needed for her to excel. And I'd argue that it's not needed in a much wider range of employment contexts than is usually accepted. And this is coming from a dude with a doctorate from UofC. A lot of college is about social and emotional development - not learning on some higher plane. And a lot of grad school is complete crap. So more power to the community college grads!

Gregory:
What does 'performing her job as dean of admissions' mean?

She applied for--and got--an entry-level job under false pretenses. She got promoted over and over again.

Promotions are not made within an organization by looking at the resume. Or are you saying that the MIT administration was so dazzled by her RPI degree, and so promoted her over more talented and able people?

She's being fired for lying, and as I said, I can't fault them for that. Those criteria are important.

But doing one's job is a measurable, testable, real-world thing. Revealing a 28-year-old lie does not make her real achievements magically vanish.

I concur with the other commenters, Chris being first to boil it down for you Kevin.

If a car mechanic never got certified by this or that school one could overlook the lie, provided of course their services were rendered properly. Where entry into a field is not predicated on having a degree or passing a state test, degrees and plaques and diplomas only give one an aura of credibility. Whereas where one is asked about your degrees and certifications, we can assume that such degrees and certifications are prerequisites to employment in the field.

Add to that, she worked for a degree issuing institution, she presumably rejected candidates because there credentials were lacking, the institution is one of the most prestigious in the world, and her particular position was most intricately intertwined with degrees and credentials.

She has to go. If she did good work, just leave it at that, but she has to go.

If you found out that your pediatrician of 28 years was never licensed to practice medicine would you be ok with him/her still practicing medicine without a license simply because they didn't commit malpractice while tricking everyone? No, they are kicked out.

I left something out here: Talent, effectiveness, and native ability are how you get the credentials.

It also takes a certain amount of work. Jones claimed to have done work that she didn't do.

That's a firing offense in the private sector as well as academia.

So more power to the community college grads!

Speaking of CC's - I better hustle off to the last class of the day and give the students their moneys worth.

HTML foul. Mea culpa.

One of the reasons a person is an effective administrator/manager is because your colleagues respect you and because your observations are assumed to carry weight, even when they might be skeptical. Her ability to perform the job hinged, in part, on the very fraudulent claims she was making. Had an admissions administrator been hired without any college degrees, neither the faculty, nor the students, nor the administrators, nor the public would have taken her seriously (because, after all, how could she understand all of their concerns, not having had any direct experiences in academia?), and her performance would have suffered as a result, being regarded as "unsatisfactory."

I agree that without a degree, others would not take her seriously.

However, she did have direct experience in academia, just not a degree.

Also, the changes she implemented in the admissions process to make it less stressful may very well have been only envisioned by her *because* she didn't have a degree. An argument could be made that a person who had gone through the "hazing" of academia from start to a successful finish would have been too wedded to the competitive system to even imagine making it less stressful, akin to the way in which frat boys who have gone through hazing cannot imagine not hazing others in turn.

IOW, her lack of credentials may very well have been her greatest credential that allowed her to see outside of the box.

She applied for--and got--an entry-level job under false pretenses. She got promoted over and over again.

Yes, exactly, thank you! And as cmdicely pointed out, at any one of those occasions, she could have "corrected the record" and taken her lumps. I happen to agree that if she'd come clean years ago, she would have deserved consequences -- at the very least, not getting whatever job she was applying for -- but she could have then moved forward.

Revealing a 28-year-old lie does not make her real achievements magically vanish.

Again, it was not a 28-year old lie, told once and forgotten. It's a lie she has been telling, repeatedly, for 28 years. And yes, it does cast her "real achievements" in a completely different light, exactly as when, for example, a TV preacher is revealed to indulge in behavior he normally condemns.

She claimed credit for work she did not do -- exactly like palgiarism, and like plagiarism, doign so is unforgivable.

But doing one's job is a measurable, testable, real-world thing.

Exactly. As dean of admissions, she's supposed to enforce a certain standard. And yet she violated that very standard, and repeatedly at that. Her conduct automatically disqualified her from her job. A point which, I must observe, she herself agreed. Why you dispute her own admission and defend her unforgivable conduct is not clear to me.

So does aWol.

Exactly. So, in many cases, what do academic credentials say other than you were able to get acccepted and pay to go through school?

Speaking of CC's - I better hustle off to the last class of the day and give the students their moneys worth.

Apropos, really of nothing, I am reminded of something a CC philosophy instructor I had was fond of saying when his students complained of workload..."Students are the only people that complain when you give them what they are paying for."

Even further aside, this morning's posts here aren't quite what I would have expected the morning after the first Democratic Presidential debate.

Yeah, let's keep her, and then continue telling the student body about the need for the honor code, expulsion for anyone caught misrepresenting their own work (otherwise known as plagiarism), etc. . .

Yes, firing was very appropriate, esp. coming from our crowd (you know, the ones who like to talk about accountability).

Finally, this is not something she just did 3 decades ago. Every day she came to work without correcting the lie amounted to the retelling of that lie. So trying to flub it off as a youthful indescretion doesn't cut it either.

Yes, I'm in academia (PhD, full-time Asst. Professor of German)

coltergeist:
if my pediatrician of 28 years (which is kind of scary if you think about it) accurately diagnosed and successfully treated my 8 kids for their diseases and developmental problems, and if the doctors at the hospital confirmed her diagnoses when 5 of them had their tonsils taken out and Joe-Bob was confirmed to have diabetes--it still wouldn't allow her to have M.D. after her name, but neither could I deny what she did.
Which is my point.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study . Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than igorance.

IOW, her lack of credentials may very well have been her greatest credential that allowed her to see outside of the box.

That may be, Disputo, but in her position it also simply isn't credible that she wasn't aware of the serious nature of her offense. Again, if she had taken it upon herself to correct the record, it might have been one thing. As it was, though, she was content to continue to let her false claims stand, because she obviously benefited from them, when they ran completely counter to the jobs she was seeking. Her position as dean of admission makes her offense all the worse.

By the way, props to Kevin for acknowledging the verdict of the commetariat on the main page.

Kevin, an unqualified person was hired to take a job. This is what's wrong. What next are you going to defend? Plagiarism and academic dishonesty? Firing is the only correct course of action. America is a meritocracy where those who do the job best succeed. Anything less than firing would send the signal MIT doesn't believe going to good schools and having the proper qualifications was important to getting ahead in life
Al

Of course, none of the above applies to Republicans.

There you go Al, I fixed it for you.

Also, the changes she implemented in the admissions process to make it less stressful may very well have been only envisioned by her *because* she didn't have a degree. An argument could be made that a person who had gone through the "hazing" of academia from start to a successful finish would have been too wedded to the competitive system to even imagine making it less stressful, akin to the way in which frat boys who have gone through hazing cannot imagine not hazing others in turn.

Oh, yes, I agree. But I think that part of her appeal was that people "wanted to hear" from a scientist who was going to go around telling people that they needed to live less stressful, less lives less focused on relentless achievements at the age of 17. If she preached that line with full disclosure about her background, people could have said, "what the heck do you know? You tried to get a science degree and failed." I'm not saying I completely disagree with her take on some issues, but I disliked her public persona, overall, and now I understand why.

Perhaps she could have had a role to contribute had she actually spent time at MIT getting a college degree, and then she could have had a position as "Director" of admissions. However, she was pushing her vision of a formula of successful admissions policies based on experiences she claimed to have had but didn't.

So, in many cases, what do academic credentials say other than you were able to get acccepted and pay to go through school?

I'm going by memory here, but my diploma (now almost 20 years old!) says something to the effect that I satisfactorily completed the course of study as laid out in the requirements, yadda yadda yadda.

Now, the truth is, my current job has nothing to do with my degree, and yes, of course, I'm judged on my current work rather than my degree.

But I still did the work for my degree, and it simply isn't right that someone else claim credit for work they didn't do. I can't fathom why anyone would argue someone deserves a pass for that.

Kids applying to competitive schools sometimes cheat on their resumes about some credential they probably didn't need to be a successful student but did need to win the competition to be admitted in the first place.

To have a dean of admissions that cheated in the same manner would be absurd, as the institution would effectively be winking at said behavior and encourage even more cheating in the admissions process as a result.

Thus, letting her keep this job will have the ultimate effect of excluding a more worthy young person from the opportunity to study at one of the world's best schools.

I heard once from the dead of admissions at Stanford about how they discovered that an undergraduate had cheated on his application and they not only expelled him but voided all his credits, effectively leaving him $60,000 poorer with nothing to show for it. I tell this story to as many of my HS students as I can. Some are appalled at the school, but I think the more honest ones appreciate it as they end up disadvantaged in the whole process by their own honesty. And that is a shame.

That may be, Disputo, but in her position it also simply isn't credible that she wasn't aware of the serious nature of her offense.

I never argued that she wasn't.

I am arguing that academia fetishes credentials to their own detriment.

Who gives a shit? It's M.I.T., the up-market DeVry.

Anyway, she can just plagiarize something an get a professorship at Harvard Law.

Also, the changes she implemented in the admissions process to make it less stressful may very well have been only envisioned by her *because* she didn't have a degree.

Even if not that, its probably the case that its unlikely that someone would have the top-to-bottom depth of experience in admissions she had if they had the credentials she claimed and which, while they weren't needed for her initial job, were certainly important to be Dean of Admissions.

So, certainly, I think that there is a case that can be made that this may illuminate a problem in academia, particularly, the problem that certain important positions may currently filled based on the wrong credentials. The head of admissions isn't, fundamentally, a teaching or research position, its not a position that directs teaching or research, and may, quite arguably, not be the kind of position to which a doctorate, while frequently seen as indispensable, is really a particularly useful or relevant qualification, whereas other kinds of practical experience are more important.

So, yeah, I think you have a point, not that it excuses what Jones did or suggests she should have gotten off easier for having done it.

Just because you have credentials doesn't mean you can do the job. The reverse also applies.

PLAGIARISM---There is nothing that has been said , that has not been said before ! There is nothing that has been written written before !

Ms. Jones, did you or did you not complete your degree.

Um, I don't recall....

Seems in 3 decades, perhaps she could have gone ahead and bought one from one of those reputable online degree mills. Bet they'd have even backdated it for her.

A non-degreed person bossing degreed people. It just isn't done, Sir.

It seems to me that having THIS sort of lie uncovered for someone in THIS sort of position is pretty clearly a firing offense.

On the other hand, the fetishization of credentials has been pretty clearly on display in this thread with the example that people in academia wouldn't have listened to or taken seriously this woman's ideas about admissions...JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T HAVE THE RIGHT SET OF INITIALS AFTER HER NAME.

Having a degree or credential should be demonstrated in one's thinking or one's work. The simple having of a degree or credential, however, shouldn't convey with it a certain status all its own, independent of the demonstrated ability and skill of the individual.

Mike

But I still did the work for my degree, and it simply isn't right that someone else claim credit for work they didn't do.

I'm certainly not defending Jones, or lying about a degree. Rather, I'm just criticizing the supposed value of degree credentials as an indicator of intelligence, ability, or even knowledge.

I agree with Disputo - academia fetishes credentials to their own detriment.

Her real resume didn't support the mission of the university. That is a fact.

Other than that, it's an argument between those time hallowed folks known as boors and snobs. Or the people who pretentiously think they are.

I don't think she should have been fired. Reprimanded, demoted, but if she'd been doing her job well, that just goes to show how meaningless a degree can be. Academics won't see that because without their credentials, most of them are nothing. (I say that as an academic myself.)

If the academic training she lied about were essential to actually doing the job, would she not have been discovered years ago by her incompetence?

Marilee Jones is a charlatan, yes, but is not the "value" of credentials in this case also shown to be a ruse?

how is what she did or did not learn 28 years ago at college relevant to her job today? doesn't 28 years of experience make up for it?!

Nailed it:
"Marilee Jones is a charlatan, yes, but is not the "value" of credentials in this case also shown to be a ruse?"
Posted by: intelligent design on April 27, 2007 at 1:39 PM | PERMALINK

If the academic training she lied about were essential to actually doing the job

Strangely enough, not lying about academic credentials was essential to her job as dean of admissions.

And again, she lied 28 years ago and every day since for 28 years, because she never "corrected the record."

Her real resume didn't support the mission of the university. That is a fact.

I think that's the key point, isn't it? The mission of the university is to perpetuate excellence in academia from others who were excellent in academia.

how is what she did or did not learn 28 years ago at college relevant to her job today? doesn't 28 years of experience make up for it?!

No, actually it doesn't. There's a claim to be made that higher education might not make you smarter or better-informed, but it does change you, culturally. Jones was pushing through a set of controversial policies while claiming to be part of the culture she was hired to serve and yet actually wasn't.

There's only going to be one time in life when you had to write a thesis, deal with a recalcitrant advisor, and deal with the academic rivalries and teamwork with your classmates. That time is as a university student. If you didn't go through that, 30 years in the working world isn't going to make up for it. In 90% of cases, that probably doesn't matter. The fact that her position is as one of the top administrators of a university means it does matter.

Well for one thing it shows you don't need a college degree to do that job.

someone should doublecheck Rachel Screwlouse's creds. Yale my aching ass.

probably another grad of Pat Robertson's School of Law 'N Bahble Study

third rate hacks
from fifth rate schools
running things at Justice.

Sad, sad day

I think what is truly sad about this whole thing is that she proved that she had the gift to do an amazing job...and it all was undone because she never buckled down and did it herself.
I would say she earned herself a sad realization that she just blew 30 years of her life away with this lie.
She has nothing now...and the sad commentary of it all is she is the author of this fiasco, and a good institution is going to loose a good adminstrator.
On the upside of it all, though, is that the local Denny's is going to get a fantastic manager.

Well for one thing it shows you don't need a college degree to do that job.

Well, I guess I am left to take the contrary position on this. MIT is basically saying the 28 years of service she performed was worth nothing at all because she did not have a degree that it is clear wasn't really needed in the first place.

A penalty other than termination was called for here. The penalty given is unjust, and it is surprising to me that more here cannot see that.

More here are credentialled.

I'm unaware of any licensing requirements for college administrators, so I don't really see the analogy to lawyers and doctors. Here in California, you CAN get a license to practice law without going to law school.

However, I suppose judging other peoples' qualifications based on their resumes and other pieces of paper is one job where you probably shouldn't be lying on your pieces of paper.

Still, the fact that she worked her way up through the system to the top job says to me that she knew what she was doing, even if she learned on the job rather than in class.

Unfortunately for her, she chose the wrong place to work.

Sounds like a good movie in there somewhere...

For what it's worth, here's the response from my boyfriend, an MIT grad:

First reaction: how the hell did it take THIRTY YEARS to find out about this?

Second: she had to go.

And my reaction to the tool who refers to it as an upmarket DeVry: Sounds like the sour grapes of someone who got rejected by even Iowa State University.

The penalty given is unjust, and it is surprising to me that more here cannot see that.

It was of course unjust, but it was nevertheless necessary. MIT could not allow one of their employees to continue demonstrating to their customers that their product is unnecessary.

MIT could not allow one of their employees to continue demonstrating to their customers that their product is unnecessary.

BINGO!

MIT could not allow one of their employees to continue demonstrating to their customers that their product is unnecessary.

Depends how many of their customers aspire to be admissions administrators/media personalities. And even then, many would argue her value system as an admissions admin was off-kilter.

Yancey Ward wrote: Well, I guess I am left to take the contrary position on this.

How ruggedly individualist of you.

MIT is basically saying the 28 years of service she performed was worth nothing at all because she did not have a degree that it is clear wasn't really needed in the first place.

No, MIT is basically saying her 28 years of falsifying her academic record disqualified her from being dean of admissions -- for which the degrees she falsely claimed no doubt are required.

And, I must repear, Jones is on record as agreeing.

But of course, it's not surprising that Yancey Ward takes the side of someone whose dishonesty is now a matter of public record. Birds of a feather and all that.

It is a little surprising that Yancey Ward so spectatularly misunderstands the issue. No, wait -- it isn't, really.

MIT could not allow one of their employees to continue demonstrating to their customers that their product is unnecessary

AFAIK, she didn't claim a degree from MIT.

And my reaction to the tool who refers to it as an upmarket DeVry: Sounds like the sour grapes of someone who got rejected by even Iowa State University.

Spare us the childish snobbish insults. I got into MIT, but I didn't go. I went to a better engineering school.

"They didn't (not weren't able to) because she was applying for a job for which not even an undergraduate degree was required (which makes the lying more egregious as it was needless—or extremely clever, forward looking deceit.)"

Reminds me of a friend at college in the UK: let's call her Miss X. She was highly competitive, wanted a political career. Pre-exams, she joked about getting a 3rd (low grade of degree). I checked when the exam results came out, and she got a 2:2 (mid-grade). I congratulated her in front of some friends, and she changed the subject rapidly. A few days later, she told me at a party there'd been a mistake by her professors and, she'd gotten a First. I said "Oh, OK then, well congratulations, that's great!".

About 15 years later, I'm in a different continent, an email an old political acquaintance, and he mentions to me "did you hear about X?". I google it, and it turns out my old friend X had been fired after two weeks in a high profile, $350K job because she'd lied to the UK Law Society a decade when applying for a scholarship: she said she'd gotten a First, when she'd got a 2:2.

She started lying about her degree less than a week after receiving it.

A non-degreed person bossing degreed people. It just isn't done, Sir.

3 Points, I would encourage you to work with more entrepreneurs. Particularly in the computer industry there are plenty of people who never finished college who have their own businesses, and they boss plenty of people. They boss people with Ivy League degrees. They sometimes fire Ivy Leaguers because they can't perform. I personally have seen this many, many times. (And lest I be painted as an 'uncredentialed wanker' here, let me just mention that I do have my degree.)

It can't be overstated that Ms. Jones worked for people who sell education. Her personal story, which directly questions the value of what her employer is selling, is dangerous for MIT.

Spare us the childish snobbish insults.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Disputo.

Depends how many of their customers aspire to be admissions administrators/media personalities.

The balloon still pops no matter where you prick it.

And even then, many would argue her value system as an admissions admin was off-kilter.

Of *course* they are. I imagine that a full rewrite of her career as a bumbling boob is in the works. Of course, MIT can only take that so far....

I agree that she had to be fired no matter how good she did her job-the University has to maintain *their* integrity even if she didn't. If her position really doesn't require a degree to perform effectively-then they shouldn't be requiring the degree. After WWII and the GI Bill you had a big flood of working class people going to college for the first time. For a few decades this was a great thing-tuition was affordable and getting into the "top" schools didn't have quite the pressure it does now. The skill level of the workplace was greatly improved. However, since the 80's it seems that credentials are often being used as a cheap screening device-a way to keep raising the bar and moving the goalposts (for many positions-not all). If many occupations really do not require a degree to perform the duties effectively-what about the economic waste and inefficiency (time and opportunity costs)that were incurred? I just don't see how that helps us collectively as a society.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Disputo.

As ever you miss the point, which was to show that one shouldn't be a snob because they can always be out-snobbed. I don't go around bragging about my credentials, except to show for fools those who do.

Kevin,

Speaking as someone who isn't one of the country's best and brightest, I think it's grossly inappropriate that someone who failed, for whatever reason, to get a college degree should be in a position to decide who gets to attend one of the country's most prestigious colleges...or that someone who lied on her job application should be paid to judge student applications.

If she were in any other role, I might agree with you...but come on.

Sincerely,

theperegrine

How many thousands of dollars and years of time would the degrees have cost the MIT dean at the time if she had truly earned them?

In a sense it's like stealing from the institutions the dean claimed she graduated from. Her lying also degrades the value of the degrees graduates of those institutions truly earned.

Doc, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that corporate America suffers from an obsession with credentialism while at the same time believing that in this case, such a concern isn't warranted.

Disputo, I know plenty of people who are successful in their own niches without degrees. In the niches I and many MIT students hope to occupy? Not so much. If the maxim that the balloon pops no matter "where you prick it" were to apply, it would have popped long ago. I'm not really sure how saying to a generation of students, "you don't have to go to college. you could end up as successful as Marilee Jones" was ever a compelling argument.

The point of academics is most assuredly NOT credentials. That would be the equivalent of claming that the point of visiting other countries is to get your passport stamped! The point of academics is to discover, interpret and communicate information. Credentials are nothing more than documentation that a person has successfully completed at least the minimum requirements of a particular program of study. They do indicate certain level of intellectual ability and so are of value in the job market, but employment is hardly the point of academics!

The Dean of Admissions at MIT was hired, in part, because she misrepresented her credentials, but once hired, each paycheck she collected was in exchange for her labor. She did lie about her credentials and persisted in that lie and should be disciplined for her lack of integrity, but if her job performance has been satisfactory (annual performance appraisals are credentials too), there was no reason to fire her.

"In academia we are nothing without our credentials."

If that were truly the case, you would be nothing, even with them.

Di