Almostgotit.com

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: 
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

A few weeks ago the Washington Post convinced Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, to play unannounced in a Washington subway station. Bell played for nearly an hour on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. More than a thousand people passed him by, with only one man stopping to listen — for three minutes, total.  Interestingly, every single child who passed DID try to stop, but in every case was hurried along by a harried and embarrassed adult. 

Altogether, a little over thirty-two dollars was dropped into the violin case of one of the world’s greatest musicians. 

(Thanks for sharing, Chris!)

Well…It took almost exactly a year, but guess who is now officially billable at approximately 9 (That’s N-I-N-E) times her previous hourly wage as paid by The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named? And guess who is also a little horrified, given all the existential stuff that’s been going on around my house lately, by how much it even MATTERS?  (But. You know what? It DOES.)

I may even forgive my previous employer for dismantling half my portfolio (by taking down the website I’d built for them, one which was getting national attention – the whole unpleasant email discussion about which was then forwarded to me by the webmaster) (A few days before I found out I’d also not been invited to my own retirement party.) (On my birthday.)  (Just as the professional theatre I’d applied to was finally rejecting me after several sets of interviews.) (And not long after someone, who should have known better,  helpfully told me that my previous employer and board all found me “inflammatory”)

(Oh, my God, the woe…..) 

It’s still hardly any hours.  It’s still not a salary.  It may not be what I want to do with the rest of my life.  

But I will so definitely TAKE IT!  Here, have a cigar.  And guess what?  You’re next!

(and, um, that “inflammatory” thing? That’s just me, with my lighter.  And the fattest cigar you’ve ever seen.  Flaming.)

The hardest things you’ll ever have to contend with are your own interior critics: They are powerful and noisy, not to mention irrepressible. Anne Lamott calls them her “vinegar-faced ladies;” a friend of mine (who, I should add, NEVER swears) calls them the “FCC”, or “Fucking Critical Committee.” Julia Cameron calls her inner critic “Nigel.” My mother’s voices, when she contemplates putting her paintings in a community exhibit, tell her she’s “showing off.”

My beloved step-aunt-in-law (yes, I really have one of those) calls them her “thugs on a bus.”

You know them perfectly well, don’t you? We all do, these voices that tell us we’re not good enough: the ones that demand, especially if we are women, that we “sit down and shut up.”

I think they are deadly, too, spoken by a thing or things that might even be in league with those immortal terrors that Madeleine L’Engel calls the Echthroi: the shrieking naughts (as in zeroes, or nothings): black holes who want to unname and X the entire cosmos. I call them my “Toad People.”

Most times I try something brave and new (and always when I’m writing,) no matter how freely my hand is moving or how well the work is going, they are always there, cursing in my ears, banging dissonant cymbals in the background, picketing with rude and obscene signs in front of my desk. They perch on the end of my pen and jeer at me. They poke their bony figures in my eyes and jab them at my words even as I’m forming them on the page. “Bad, bad, BAD!” they screech.

While these characters have always been there, recently they’ve been particularly raucous. I think I’ve been making them nervous, carrying on despite their scolding as I never have before. My toad people are well-established after years of residency – apparently, they even have a dental plan and an 80-year mortgage. They seem perfectly confident that they can weather whatever current flight I’m taking, and I must admit I find their confidence deeply disturbing. They have very strong, hairy arms, and seem to believe that if they keep pulling on me hard enough and long enough, I’ll eventually come crashing back down. I worry, sometimes, that they be right!

But then again, here I am, still showing up at the page and still writing. And here is my friend, still looking for a job. There’s my friend recovering from divorce who’s just been accepted as a Ph.D candidate; there’s my mother who’s going to show her paintings anyway. We are all so afraid, and we are all so beautiful. Look at us, though, take a really good look, because here we are. We will not be “X’d”. We keep showing up… not only because it is our God-given right, but because showing up is our God-given obligation.

So: suck a lemon, vinegar ladies. Go jump in a dirty old lake, Nigel. **Note to all toads:** this meeting is adjourned.

Addendum: When I wrote this, I had no idea I had been scooped. Sort of. But it’s an interesting thought that perhaps we’ve both somehow intuited the same archetype: http://www.locksley.com/humor/toad.htm