Almostgotit.com

Still thinking about Marilee Jones.  A lot.  I’ve been reading lots of good commentary on the situation (some of the best to which I’ve posted links, right column) 

Our world, most especially the academic part of it, is still astonished at (and extremely resistant to) the idea that anyone can be so good at something without a degree.  Even in cases when they can produce two pages of (verifiable) publications and achievements. 

We can huff and puff all we want to about how a degree is a useful standardized measure of dependability or capability.  Or whatever.  We may even be right, most of the time.   But all our noise flies out the window when we have an exception right in front of us, proof in hand, and we turn the other way.  That is the point at which our myth is exposed.  We don’t care about the “dependability and capability” after all – our true fealty is to the degree!

Most of human chauvinism, of course, is based on self-interest, e.g.:  I worked hard on my own degree, and I need it to mean something.  I don’t WANT people without degrees to be as qualified as I am.  (Personally? I also permanently damaged my career in order to hand-raise my children, and thus don’t WANT the children of working parents to be as wonderful and well-adjusted as mine are!)  

Life is about exceptions, though.  And ah, confession is good for the soul. 

I don’t know Marilee Jones personally of course, but any accusation that she was a greedy “opportunist”  I dismiss out of hand.  We all are all of us that, and in this country it’s considered a virtue.

However, I do agree with other commentators that much depends upon whether she is a pathological liar.  I strongly suspect she is not.  I believe, instead, that much of the great good that she has contributed came from an interior acknowledgement of her own mistake.  As penance for it, even.  I think she has been truly sorry for much of the last 28 years. 

I also think it is absolutely wrong, even in the slightest degree, to look backwards now and recast her whole working history in light of this new information (that she had no degree.  And that she lied.)  To do so is fraudulent on our part, and only exposes our own grave disingenuity and chauvinism:

“She didn’t have a degree, so turns out she doesn’t know what she is talking about.”

“She lied, so therefore can say nothing to us at all about how to tell the truth.”

Garbage.

One of the things Marilee wrote about (and yes, we’re on first name basis now) was the importance of integrity.  In a book she co-authored last fall, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,  she writes:

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 come around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.

This is what I tell my kids, too.  But reading those words now makes me ache.  Just listen to her confession, her fear, even her contrition.  Thing is?  People who cheat quite often do get away with it, and people who don’t cheat quite often get shafted.  Sometimes, unfortunately, ‘virtue has to be its own reward.’  And often a pretty damned shabby one, at that.

Moreover, it’s just cheap for those who “have” to admonish those who “haven’t” for being greedy and ungrateful.

I’ve been hanging around the academy for over 20 years now.  Guys, academics do really ugly things, all of the time.  (as humans do in general, I imagine.)  They plagarize.  Have terrible, exploitative affairs. Torpedo the careers of each other’s Ph.D students out of sheer spite. 

And yes, quite often, they lie. 

According to the New York Times article on the subject of Marilee Jones’ “resignation”, Phillip L. Clay, M.I.T.’s chancellor declared:

There are some mistakes people can make for which ‘I’m sorry’ can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself.  This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her.

(The aptly-academic Latin to respond with here would be ”res ipsa loquitur“)

Dr. Clay is probably correct that there is no conceivable way that MIT or any other university could re-absorb Marilee Jones back into its ranks, but “integrity” has very little to do with it.  Jones is now a public embarrassment to them and worse, an irreducible iconoclast.   (as in, literally: “a breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration. a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.”)

She’s gotta go. 

In a fair world, though?  Half the rest of ‘em would go with her.

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Related Posts: 
MIT really blew it
Marilee Jones joke
How to (Almost) get Marilee
Coming Out: I’m a closet academical

The University of Tennessee’s Lady Vols just won their 7th national championship under Coach Pat Head Summitt.  Summitt is  the all-time winningest coach in NCAA basketball history (men or women). For 32 seasons she has proven herself as a winner and role model. Summitt’s coaching has created 12 Olympians, 19 Kodak All-Americans, 65 All-SEC performers, 45 international participants and 38 professional players.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Pat Head Summitt never actually graduated from UT-Martin, as it says she did on her resume — when one can even find it.

And what would the fans do now if UT forced her to resign over it?

By all accounts, MIT’s Marilee Jones is the Pat Head Summitt of college admissions.  The Ivy League dean of admissions is also a celebrated writer and speaker.  She is concerned about the effect on young people of the rising competition to get into top colleges, and has preached that we need to get back to supporting the “human being” rather than over-hyping the “human doing.”

Her 28-year career at MIT, apparently all spent in the admissions office, saw her rise from administrative assistant to the top position. 

Nobody knew it yet, but back when she applied for that first secretarial position three decades ago, she lied about her college credentials.  No one cared enough about such a lowly employee to investigate, and all of her subsequent promotions were based on her MIT experience and accomplishments alone.

And now she’s was forced to resign for doing on her resume what (according to CNN)  57% of the rest of us do, too. 

In a statement issued through MIT, Jones wrote:

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.  I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the MIT community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

No, she shouldn’t have done it.  But she was 26 years old, bright, perceptive, and vulnerable to the glory buzzing around her, all the time, about the sanctity of high achievement.  And maybe, as a mere secretary, she didn’t think it would matter very much.

But her first promotion came, and then her second.  At any point she could have come clean, but she knew that as soon as she did, the ride would be over.  And by every measure that mattered, she had earned that ride.  There is no “Bachelor’s Degree of Admissions Deanhood.”  She learned her job, just as any other person with a whatever-degree in her position would have done, by doing it.  And I have no doubt that Marilee Jones was so compassionate with students in large part because of her secret. 

If it turned out that Sofia Coppola wasn’t really the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, we wouldn’t take away her Academy Award.  Sure, she had a hand-up in the business (as did her cousin, Nicolas Cage) but their accomplishments are their own.

Marilee Jones’ real sin is not that she lied, but that she made a fool out of MIT.

Like any university, MIT is dedicated to the preservation and advancement of its own main product: the Almighty Academic Degree.  If Marilee had been honest from the beginning, sure she may have kept her job for 28 years, but she’d still be an administrative assistant. She could have played the game their way and gone back to school, but how galling to spend the money and time, not to mention endure such a drop in the academic food chain, when any other business would have promoted her for her chops alone.

Here’s my confession:  I want Marilee Jones’ autograph.

I’m very grateful (thanks, dad) for my own college education.  But let’s not deify credentials to the point that we’ll admit no exceptions.  This forces vulnerable people to do what Marilee Jones did.  And then it forces the rest of us to jettison them when they expose our own, far greater fraud.

A few weeks ago, world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played his best stuff on a 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius in the Washington D.C.  subway, and 1000 people walked right by him because he wasn’t playing in a concert hall.   Marilee Jones is a world-famous dean of admissions, she played her best stuff, and her accomplishments are no less impressive because she wasn’t playing with a degree.

MIT should accept Marilee Jones’ apology and make a real name for themselves by hiring her back. 

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Related Posts:
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
How to (almost) get Marilee
The Devil and Ms. Jones
The Marilee Jones Joke

Maybe Jim Fannin is just being hyperbolic when he suggests that switching our brains to “off” is the only way we can succeed (”wildly”) at business.

If so, then I suppose the next thing to do is to decide how damaging “thought” really is, not just to those trying to start their own businesses, but to the rest of us (almost) working stiffs, as well. 

Of course it is bad to obsess over non-essentials; cogitate over unchangable things in our past; or worry about things over which we have no control.

But is “thought” itself really such a barrier to action, 99.99% of the time, as Fannin suggests?  After all, in the previous century, Sigmund Freud wrote that “thought is action in rehearsal.” And a few hundred years before Freud was born, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus  opined that “thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.”    Mr. Paracelsus was considered inflammatory in his own time, too.  He tended to reject the traditional theories of his learned colleagues, and preferred to write in everyday German instead of in snooty Latin like the rest of them.   

I like this guy.

Annie Besant, the 19th century  women’s rights activist,  writer and orator believed “thought creates character.”  Her priest told her that she had read too many books.  And suggested she shut up.

Fortunately, she ignored him. 

A few years later, James Allen wrote the classic self-help book, As a Man Thinketh, which you can download here for free.  Allen believed that “right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results,” and  “you are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”  

Some credit James Allen’s book with making many other men into millionaires.

Henry Ford said that “thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it,” and Henry Ford didn’t do half badly at either starting a business or making a living, did he? 

Therefore, I submit that going on a “thought diet” is not the best way to assure a succesful career.  But even if it is the best way, I’m not going to do it. 

It was another old dead guy, Montaigne, who wrote: “The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.”

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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

For days now, I’ve been reflecting on something that appeared in one of Penelope Trunk’s recent columns. 

It seems that Trunk spoke to success coach Jim Fannin, who told her “that research has shown that wildly successful people have 1,000 fewer thoughts a day than others, which allows the successful people to have exceptional focus on their goals.”

Well now.  That certainly provides some real food for… well, something in which I’ve been overindulging, apparently.  But I can’t help myself.  You see:  I really LIKE having thoughts.

I was relieved to find out I’m not the only career-minded person who has this strange proclivity.  Maureen Rogers  wrote, in her own marvelous comment at the end of Trunk’s column:

I’m with AlmostGotIt. I LIKE having thoughts, too. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the realization that those of us who are introspective; who really, truly, like to think about things; who are highly analytical are probably just not all that cut out to be risk-taking entrepreneurs. To succeed in an entrepreneurial endeavor, you need to have supreme conviction - and thinkers tend to spend perhaps too much time evaluating risk, playing “what-if”, etc.. A better job for us: chief of staff, advisor to the throne, internal consultant….

“Advisor to the throne.”  I definitely pick that one.   (You know: for now, I mean.)

But perhaps the problem here is that I don’t have the right qualifications to have thoughts.  This possibility has been brought up before. 

At The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named (to pick an example at wild random) there is only a very small allotment allowed for thinkers, and these slots are all taken by highly-trained Thinkologists.   Many of those who have gone through the entire formation process of Thinkology are surprisingly intelligent, diversity-promoting, even iconoclastic thinkers.  However, their thoughts still must be chosen from the approved intelligent,-diversity-promoting,-even-iconoclastic LIST.

Which, needless to say, is entirely unavailable to inflammatory non-thinkologists such as myself.

I decided that Jim Fannin might be onto something.

So I visited his website.  I was glad to find that he has an online quiz,  which of course I took immediately to see if I “[Don’t] Think Like A Champion.”   Here is what I found out:

The results indicate your S.C.O.R.E. Level is dangerously low. You are not in the game. If this score persists either change your goal or approach it in a completely different way. You are on the wrong path.

Wow, this is bad. 

Fortunately, Fannin has a number of products which could help put me back IN the game. Unfortunately, unlike many of his other clients, I don’t have a professional baseballer’s salary to pay for any of them.

But perhaps I can offer him some small repayment-in-kind, at least.  Bob Sutton, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Business School, has developed another little online quiz which, I humbly submit, may be just the thing.

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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)