Almostgotit.com

Turns out Marilee Jones does have a college degree: a BA in biology from the College of Saint Rose, a small Catholic College in Albany.  Along with Saint Rose and MIT, Jones was awarded the degree in 1973, six years before she first applied to MIT.

However, MIT now also claims that while Jones inexplicably omitted the Saint Rose degree, she not only claimed two other (unearned) degrees when she first applied, but later added the third (unearned) degree from Albany Medical College AFTER she began working for MIT.  This contradicts Jones’ own statement made last week, which still suggested she had no degree whatsoever, and only lied the once.

I’m going to need therapy over this.

My thesis has been than Marilee Jones lied, but that she is not a LIAR.  It makes all the difference.  Too many people have wanted to essentialize Jones, repainting her entire character and accomplishment with a single flaw: a tragic error which, nonetheless, I think I’ve argued is both understandable and forgivable. 

MIT’s chancellor believes he’s being charitable by describing Jones as “short on credentials but long on potential.”

An angry letter  published in the Boston Globe sputters:

In the eyes of this alumnus (1950 and ‘53), Jones has disgraced herself, dishonored a prestigious educational institution, and tarnished the reputations of the tens of thousands of MIT graduates for whose admission she was responsible. There is no substitute for honesty, most especially at a research institute whose main contribution to society consists of graduates imbued with the zeal to become productive citizens seeking the truth in whatever they do. How do we alumni now know what criteria have been applied for decades in selecting the pool of MIT freshmen each year? Jones’s “positive legacy” now needs to be carefully reviewed and amended appropriately.

Okay, look.  I have never said that it was okay for Marilee Jones to lie on her resume.  While it’s true that I carry big ugly cigars around in my purse now, it’s because they remind me that it’s okay to be bad every now and then.  But I don’t actually smoke them, because life feels a lot better when one is not throwing up. 

I do actually have a point here, and I want to say it one last time, very emphatically, before I’m quite ready to drop this whole thing, okay?

Memo to snotty Dr. MIT Chancellor and all the rest of the world:  Marilee Jones was FULLY credentialed.  Her legacy stands.  If this were a surgeon who lied about going to medical school (it’s happened!) that would be different.  A skilled mimic might actually become quite good at performing routine appendectomies, but if a complication arose,  his or her medical training would be called into play.  

But there is no “Dean of Admissions” school.  Jones’ 28 years of experience in MIT’s office of admissions *are* her “credentials,” just as surely as they would have been if she had not lied on her resume.

Nor is it at all helpful to suggest, as some (with degrees!) have done, that “had she gone to college, perhaps she would have taken a course in ethics.”    Since when did a course in ethics make one ethical?   Are we really now going to start making THOSE kinds of arguments?  If anything, I would hope that college-educated people, particularly those who have taken any philosophy, let alone any history, would have learned better than THAT.

I’m going to go lie down, now.  Tomorrow: new subject.

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Hail Marilee, denied any grace
The Marilee Jones Joke
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