Almostgotit.com

Fantastic book for parents of children applying to college, co-written by Marilee Jones and pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg.  I love my  copy!

Marilee Jones was the highly-esteemed dean of admissions at MIT until an anonymous tipster informed MIT that Jones had lied about her degree once upon a time, way back when she submitted her first resume for a low-level secretarial job that did not require a degree in the first place.  

I obsessed about her downfall for weeks on this blog. 

Yesterday’s story about the resignation of Lan-Lan Wang, the highly-accomplished dance professor who has also founded several dance companies, has made me think of Marilee once again. 

And again, the downfall of a qualified person was brought down by an email “tip” about bogus academic degrees.   What is really going on here?

Alison over at Ask A Manager fielded a question there on Monday from a person wondering if s/he should tattle on a coworker for misrepresenting her own qualifications, and Alison gave exactly the right answer:  No.

Lies are rarely if ever acceptable, and lies on your resume will invariably bite you on the butt.  Important note: don’t lie, and don’t ever lie on your resume.

But lying v. not lying is not my point here.  Nor was it my point when I blogged about Marilee Jones.  In fact, if anything, all of the noise lately about people who lie on their resumes, especially about their academic degrees,  only illustrates what I believe is an even bigger problem in the current job market.

We all need to stop worshipping the Almighty Academic Degree. 

An academic degree only maps a fairly specific set of accomplishments:  it cannot and should not be used as a catch-all measurement of over-all talent, experience, and skill level.     Much less a measurement of anyone’s essential value as a human being.

As a theoretical measure of teachability, academic degrees serve a bit better.  However, a history of accomplishments in one’s actual field can and should be the best measure of all.

Full disclosure: my husband is a professor, and both he and I have academic degrees from top-tier institutions. 

But a degree does not magically enable a person to invent Microsoft.  Bill Gates, who never finished his own degree, was clearly the man for that job. 

Nor did Marilee Jones become the best dean of admissions MIT ever had by getting a degree, and there is no degree in any case in “Dean of Admissions-ness.”  She started at MIT as a secretary, and worked her way up the ladder in a fully-transparent process of ever-increasing accomplishment.   Her experience was her credential, and everyone accepted it exactly as such.

I do believe that someone with an undergraduate liberal arts degree is going to be a better all-around job prospect — but not always, and not in any specific way. 

Again:  Bill.  Gates.

I’m also willing to concede that a degree in physical therapy can be a value-add for someone wanting to be, oh I don’t know, a physical therapist.

However, I’ve seen many job advertisements that require applicants to have an advanced degree without even specifying why, or what that degree should be in.  And I completely fail to see how a generic “advanced degree,” e.g., an online Masters Degree in basket weaving, better qualifies a person in a completely unrelated job, e.g., one in public relations.  

What do you think?  What is the proper place for an academic degree in today’s job market?

Don’t ever have children: it’s just too damn hard to let them go.

On the other hand, if you get carried away and one thing leads to another and what were you thinking when you drank all that champagne nineteen years ago, you still have your friends.  Most of them already went away to college, so now they can stick around with you instead.  These people will accept your leftover piles of compulsively-baked cookies, as well as your grief-crazed emails re: Love, Abandonment, and Divorcing God Forever.  Instead of calling the mental health professionals they quietly nod and hand over the kleenex. 

Like a little Xanax would be such a terrible thing?

And there are crazy-fun blogger friends, too.  Laurie over at Punk Rock HR invited me to join her Human Resources Bloggers Network today. Though I nearly broke out in hives at the thought of submitting an application to something, given my pretty much -perfect -record of total rejection, they actually let me in.

Then when I found this video Laurie made and posted there a couple days ago, it totally clinched the deal.

Three cheers as well for David Rendall, who has kicked up the pace at  The Freak Factor.  I thoroughly approve, even though he clearly stole his entire blog from my own subconscious one night when I was asleep and unable to defend myself.   I think we’ve established that I love him too much to sue, however.

Finally, I enjoyed wonderful Marilee Jones flashbacks when I read this recent article in CNN.com about the amazing lies people tell on their resumes.  That rascally Marilee Jones!  She remains  my freaky hero.  What ever happened to her after MIT fired her, anyway?

Creative Commons photo by Sister 72

Author Elizabeth Dewberry has just left her husband for Ted Turner. Dr. Dewberry’s husband is some guy named Robert Olen Butler, and I’m delighted to say I’ve never heard of him.

Apparently Butler is both a professor and a Pulitzer-prize winning author himself. I didn’t know this. What I did know was that his now-estranged wife is no slouch. She’s served as a Playwright-in-Residence, has written plays, articles and at least four novels, one of which is called His Lovely Wife, which I quoted in an earlier post because its description of what it can be like, being married to a professor, was so spot on. I didn’t realize it was quite so autobiographical! Apparently, Dewberry — who is quite lovely — often found herself being introduced just like that, as in, “And here is Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Author, Robert Olen Butler!!” pause. “..and his lovely wife, Elizabeth Dewberry.”

Butler is currently in a lather because of an email about the affair which he sent around to a few of his students, which “somehow” was released to Gawker. I have no idea what Dewberry thinks of her husband’s revelations about her own life history, but Butler clearly believes himself to be quite the unappreciated hero.

In truth, he sounds like a patronizing, class “A” jerk. Not all that different from the other men he describes as Dewberry’s abusers.

Butler (whom, I’m pleased to repeat, I’d never heard of) bemoans the fact that his pretty little wife could never get out of his mighty, Pulitzer-winning shadow, despite his best efforts to pat her on the head as often as he could. This from a man who, rumors have it, once told someone wanting to introduce him at a conference that “When you have won the Pulitzer, you no longer require an introduction.”

Nice. And a great guy to be married to, I’m sure. I wonder what Mr. Marilee Jones is like?

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Related Posts:

The Devil in Ms. Jones: His Lovely Wife
How to (almost) get Marilee

From Time Magazine Commentary: “MIT Dean Marilee Jones Flunks Out” (May 4, 2007):

M.I.T. has lost an apparently great dean at a time when you don’t read a lot about successful university administrators. And, it turns out, she is one who had a personal as well as professional understanding of the stresses of our résumé culture. It would be a useful lesson for M.I.T.’s students if the gatekeeper who gets to award the golden credential of a degree from the world’s most prestigious technical institution is someone who lacks that kind of credential. It would say, “Don’t let it go to your head. An M.I.T. diploma isn’t necessary. In fact, it isn’t sufficient either. There are qualities that M.I.T.’s admissions office can’t sort for and its distinguished professors can’t teach. And as you go off to face the world with your M.I.T. degree, you may or may not have them.”

Instead of dumping her, M.I.T. might want to consider giving Jones an honorary degree. We’re coming up on the season when universities hand out these things with abandon, often to people who never saw the inside of a classroom at this, or sometimes at any, university. These folks get honorary degrees because they gave the university a million or two from piles so large you can’t even see the dent. Then she could go to the university health services and get another piece of paper stating that the résumé fib was the result of stress. She’s the expert on résumé stress, after all. And then let her go back to the work she apparently does so well.

Click here to read the whole Time article  (it’s short!)

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Related Posts:
MIT blew it
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
The Marilee Jones joke
How to (almost) get Marilee

I promise not to mention Marilee Jones any more but this once.  I was very pleased today, however, to have been able to unearth an online copy of one of my all-time favorite essays by one of my all-time favorite essayists.  Here it is, from the October 2005 New Yorker Magazine: Getting in: the social logic of Ivy League admissions,  by Malcolm Gladwell. 

What is talent?  What REALLY makes people economically successful?  How much does “being smart” matter in business, let alone in the general scheme of things?  And who decides and unlocks the gates for us?

I’ve added some related links (see right) which you may be interested in reading, too, especially if you have children (as I do) heading to college soon.  Enjoy!

N.B.: Once today’s links have expired, you can always find them in my “del.icio.us” archive by clicking directly on the ”del.icio.us” links headline, or by clicking here. 

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Related Posts: 
MIT blew it
Marilee Jones joke
Hail Marilee, denied any grace

How to (Almost) get Marilee

Coming Out: I’m a closet academical

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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Related Posts:
MIT blew it
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
The Marilee Jones Joke
The Devil and Ms. Jones

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: 
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This one’s for my really smart friends, with & without degrees

An educational institution advertised for a “Young Harvard graduate or the equivalent.” Among the inquiries received was one from a Yale graduate who inquired, “By equivalent do you mean two Princeton grads or a Yale grad part time?
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When Marilee Jones saw the same ad, her question was: “By equivalent do you mean four young Princeton grads, two Yale grads, or someone who can actually do the job?”

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