MIT Dean of Admissions Resigns in Lying Scandal

Billosaur writes "CNN has a report that the Dean of Admissions at MIT has resigned her post after admitting to lying about her academic record. 'Marilee Jones, who joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979 to lead the recruitment of women at the university, stepped down from her post after admitting that she had misrepresented her academic degrees to the institute, according to a statement posted on MIT's Web site.' The school had recently received information about her credentials and the subsequent investigation uncovered the misrepresentations. Question is, why did it take 28 years?"

Comments

It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

It took 28 years because she is a woman. They needed a woman as an alibi for gender balance earlier. Now they found another woman so they could expose this bitch.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[tomhudson]

"Question is, why did it take 28 years?"

Answer: because the person who hired her lied about THEIR qualifications - they can't read. There are more than a few university graduates who can't write a 2-page letter, summarize an editorial, make a decent presentation or speech, formulate logical arguments, ...oh .... BRIGHT ... SHINY ... THING ...

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Duhavid]

Is this the same dean that was the subject of some news articles
on the subject of promoting getting women into MIT ( preferentially )?

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[jesboat]

You're wrong. It's because she was damn good at her job, and, frankly, it'll be a loss to MIT that she resigned.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[omeomi]

"I have a ball. Perhaps you'd like to bounce it?"

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Lumpy]

REALITY: she actually did a great job during her tenure, and in reality a degree truely means nothing about the persons ability.
Problem is most people that have degrees tend to be degree-racist and look down their nose at non degree holders with no good reason to.

I have met several IT and CS people in my life that were far smarter and better educated than Master degree holding fresh graduates.

Problem is managers hand out promotions like candy to a degree paper and ignore the incredible work and experience of the guys that are actually better at it.

Schools are incredibly degree-racist. They want a PHD holder for the janitor positions! (Ok, that might be a bit of a stretch)

Reality is that many MANY people self educate or get education from the "school of life" that is far more comprehensive and rounded than anything you get in a institution for around $100K or more plus a few years of your life.

I was lucky enough to have rich enough parents that I was able to afford to go to college full time. Most people in the world do not have that kind of luck.

honestly, if MIT does not beg for her to return based on her merit and 28 years of exemplory work, then MIT is pretty scummy.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[boredguru]

If i had mod points i would have modded you up. This was the thing that ran through my mind when i read the summary. How was she at her job? Was she good? Not whether she had a piece of paper that claimed that she could be good at her work.
Of course, she has no other option but to resign. After all she did lie.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[bogjobber]

Problem is most people that have degrees tend to be degree-racist

You don't have to use the term racist to describe anyone who is prejudiced. There is already a word that encompasses that.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Ironpoint]

Problem is managers hand out promotions like candy to a degree paper and ignore the incredible work and experience of the guys that are actually better at it. Exactly. Employers want cheap, highly skilled labor. Skills will get you a job, but only a degree will get you the correct salary. Employers do not reward skills on their own. They reward the ability of a person to leave and get a job somewhere else. When changing jobs, degrees represent a third party endorsement and make it much easier to change jobs.

The idea that individual skills get rewarded is what keeps the country running on budget.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Frequency Domain]

Okay, I call bullshit. You clearly don't know anything about MIT, and have an axe to grind when it comes to academics.

Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees. They care about performance and ability more than about degrees.

Fact 2: They also care about integrity. A place like MIT earns and maintains its reputation based on both the quality and the integrity of the work done there. Integrity is where the dean screwed up, and why she is being canned.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Oligonicella]

"Reality is that many MANY people self educate or get education from the "school of life" that is far more comprehensive and rounded than anything you get in a institution for around $100K or more plus a few years of your life."

And the reality is, that many MANY people who self educate don't fucking LIE about it. I've worked for years in telecom without a degree and never lied about it. Hmmm? Wasn't necessary.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[alshithead]

"Question is, why did it take 28 years?"

"Answer: because the person who hired her lied about THEIR qualifications - they can't read."

You reply may be supposed to be humorous but either way, respectfully, I'll disagree. I think it's because 28 years ago people didn't put as much effort into checking references as they generally do now. Also, take into consideration that her position 28 years ago was more than likely entry level, not nearly the same scrutiny is applied. These days, anyone applying for the position of dean of admissions for MIT would certainly have some critical examination applied to their resume. References would be checked and transcripts requested.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[alshithead]

"Okay, I call bullshit. You clearly don't know anything about MIT, and have an axe to grind when it comes to academics.

Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees. They care about performance and ability more than about degrees.

Fact 2: They also care about integrity. A place like MIT earns and maintains its reputation based on both the quality and the integrity of the work done there. Integrity is where the dean screwed up, and why she is being canned."

Thank you for showing how institutions like MIT maintain their reputation as true educational institutions. If our public schools systems were willing to grant teaching certificates to those with the aptitude, necessary knowledge, and desire to teach instead of requiring any bogus bachelor's degree plus classes in "edumication", we probably wouldn't be graduating so many kids with a high school diploma who are functionally illiterate and unable to make change even with a cash register doing the calculating. In my opinion, that is why there is so little integrity to the US public school system.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I do because I see engineers who stopped at their BSE or MSE and got in the field and are actually making money for the company with new ideas and designs get shafted, while bullshit artists like the company's "technologist" that has multiple PHD's and is the biggest bullshitter I have ever met get's a high 6 figure income.

Every person outside of science that has advanced degrees typically are bullshitters that really do not know what the hell they are talking about.

This piece of crap (and every other "technologist" I have ever met) is a useless piece of meat that spews forth useless information and speculation that is more accurate if you used a Magic 8 ball. THAT is the product of higher academics, not useful people.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[joystickgenie]

Wait wouldn't that revoke their accreditation? I am pretty sure having all professors with a degree equal or higher then the degrees they teach for was a requirement of accreditation.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[6e7a]

"Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees."

Can you cite an example, please?

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[xrayspx]

I have looked at MITs tech job postings, and one thing that really stood out is that they seem to be looking for Skillset, not degree. Many/most companies post job postings saying "BS EE/CS" blah blah, MIT seemed to say "If you know how to do X, apply for job Y".

I actually thought that was kind of progressive for an engineering school. Especially when, you're right, some engineers can be pretty biased against people they see as being Children of a Lesser God.

Honestly, I believe it's because she lied. It's not like she could have held that position for 28 years if she wasn't good at it. That has nothing to do with anything, it's that she misrepresented herself and MIT seems to have standards for conduct and honesty.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[pipingguy]

look down their nose at non degree holders

A degree used to be something special; now "everyone's" got one (apparently, they can also be purchased), so where's the cachet? The best reason today to be a university graduate is for the connections.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[alshithead]

"Wait wouldn't that revoke their accreditation? I am pretty sure having all professors with a degree equal or higher then the degrees they teach for was a requirement of accreditation."

I believe there are multiple accreditations for colleges/universities. Which one(s) are you referring to?

If an honorary degree was conferred, does that count?

From Wikipedia, an often valid source, "MIT is governed by a 78-member board of trustees known as the MIT Corporation[47] which approve the budget, degrees, and faculty appointments as well as electing the President." If the MIT Corporation approves someone who does not have a degree as a faculty appointment, does that cause them to lose their accreditation? Would someone like Bill Gates, who has three honorary doctorates cause an educational institution to lose their accreditation if he were to teach there? While Bill Gates may be a somewhat controversial example, it's difficult to say that any institution of higher learning would be less than proud to say that he is a member of the faculty. My point is that I can't see any school losing accreditation for having some oddball on their faculty as long as the majority of their faculty meet the status quo.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[ghoul]

A PhD is as much about doing research in a lab as about playing politics to get your wagon hitched to a Professor on the rise, play politics to get the foreign student in the group do the shitty jobs (after all he cant work off campus), writing up nicely written funding proposals, budget that money, lobby for funding, network for postdoc positions. All of these teach skills which are usefull for the technologist or chief mentor or Standards body member kind of positions in Industry. Sure you as a BSE or a MSE may be better at the day to day technical job but the PhD is always going to be trusted with the higher positions because executives understand that PhDs already know how to play the politics and networking game and also they had the stick to itiveness to survive 6 years of crap.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mangastudent]

Accreditation organizations and MIT are known to play something like the game of "chicken" with each other. Basically, if one of them, especially in the field of engineering, were to pull MIT's accreditation, it would reflect a lot more on the org than on MIT, and so they tend to work out accommodations when e.g. their educational philosophy/pedagogy significantly differs with MIT's.

One frequent example is whomever accredits the EECS department. At least in times past, they had an obsession with "teaching design". EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, there is no specific design only course, although many that include teaching design in the context of what else the course is teaching. So they run around looking at the required courses and assign design credits to each one, totalling enough to satisfy the org.

I can just imagine MIT's reaction if such an org said of a professor who'd been vetted by his department, school (engineering, science, etc.) and the visiting committee for the department, "I'm sorry, you're just going to have to fire him because he doesn't have sufficient credentials...." ^_^

I wonder how many of the professional SF authors who have taught at the Institute had PhDs in English? Few, if any, I'd suspect. As noted, MIT cares a lot more about what you can do that credentials. MIT for the most part is a place about actually doing things, not piling up credentials, useless papers and books, etc.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[WEFUNK]

"Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees."

Can you cite an example, please?

I don't believe that Ed Fredkin has any degrees (except probably honorary ones, I've seen him titled as "Dr." and he is certainly deserving), but he was appointed a full professor at MIT in electrical engineering in the sixties, while on his way to becoming a pioneer in artificial intelligence (reversible computing, the Fredkin Gate, etc.) and establishing his concept ("digital physics/philosophy") that the universe can be represented as a discrete/finite cellular automata, or essentially as a computer program. He dropped out of Caltech at 19 to become a fighter pilot and built his experience at MIT Lincoln Labs and through a career as an early computer entrepreneur, working with the PDP-1. He has held other positions as a professor in physics and is currently a "Distinguished Career Professor" at Carnegie Mellon.

I'm certain there are other examples where MIT professors lacked advanced degrees particularly in the early computing days and where successful entrepreneurs have returned for appointments. Certainly this is common at Ivy league schools such as Harvard where former politicians and other notable figures frequently hold appointments. To someone's point about accreditation, certainly the qualifications of the faculty are an important component but this does not generally require that 100% of teaching or research staff hold advanced degrees, particularly if they have practical experience and/or published research.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mapkinase]

Though that was not a main factor, it certainly played a certain role. You overstating that do not deserve slapping you with "Troll" moderation. May be "Overrated". I think the Troll and Flamebait categories should be removed and people should just use Overrated category.

Slapping someone (instead of the message, BTW) as Troll and Flamebait is trollish and flamebaitant by itself.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[tomhudson]

I have met several IT and CS people in my life that were far smarter and better educated than Master degree holding fresh graduates.

One of the problems is it takes so long to untrain, then retrain, the grads. They're usually either pissed off or in denial when confronted with the fact that they spent years and money and sweat to learn stuff that was, in many cases, obsolete when they first applied to their school.

Almost everyone "puffs up" their resume. A good first step would be for people to stop handing out resumes in the first place. Or at the very least STOP PUTTING YOUR HOBBIES AND OTHER INTERESTS AND PERSONAL SHIT IN THEM!!! It just gives another reason to toss them in the bin as "freaking amateur". Also, don't try to make your labs sound lie they were real-world work. Trying to pass off your coursework as "real experience" is double-dipping (you already got "credit" for it with your sheepskin) as well as easy to see - 20 resumes, all with the same "coded x,y,z applications for the abc industry" ... zzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzz ... boring!

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

As noted, MIT cares a lot more about what you can do that credentials. MIT for the most part is a place about actually doing things, not piling up credentials, useless papers and books, etc.

Perhaps this is the public face that MIT (and many other institutions) puts on. However, and I realize that I am only one data point, I have quite the opposite experience with the culture that does value prestige more than substance:

Years ago, when I graduated among the top of the class of a very large high school (if high schools can indeed be prestigious, and they really cannot, then this one would certainly qualify, boasting numerous perfect ACT and SAT scores, a handful of National Merit Scholars, as well as a very robust Advanced Placement program), bearing all sorts of honors and a membership to the Gifted and Talented program, MIT didn't waste time recruiting the top of the class and aggressively filling our mailboxes with promotional brochures. I knew that I couldn't afford to live in Boston at the time and I had the promise of a good scholarship from a respectable university, and so I chose to apply to the less expensive school rather than pay the $200 application fee charged by several of the big-name universities that were recruiting us. I feel as though I got a fine education. Many of my professors had obtained degrees from or taught at the other universities, and very few times did I feel that I was robbed of proper education (quantum physics being one of those unfortunate times when the professor didn't hold up his end of the deal; the school was informed by the students taking the course, we taught ourselves the material or picked it up in follow-on courses, and the professor was not there the following semester, but that is a different topic for a different time), I had professors teaching my courses rather than TAs or RAs, and I had the opportunity for more one-on-one time with the professors that I may not have gotten if I were sitting in a class with 300 other students. All-in-all, I felt that I made the right decision for me, and never expected to experience problems as a result of my choices.

Fast forward to the end of my three-or-so years at university. I was on the verge of graduating with my engineering degree (early), and was in the process of closing out a second engineering degree--no small feat, in my very biased opinion. I had worked on several extensive research topics (including some that crossed paths with MIT.) The company I was interning with sent me to Boston for a conference, and I thought it a good chance to stop by MIT, to see what their graduate school might offer. I was greeted in the office of one of the engineering schools, and spoke with someone. The meeting didn't last long. One of the first questions the woman asked was: Which university are you attending? I told her, and she immediately shut down. Mind you, she was polite, but instead of asking about my qualifications, my test scores, my life experience, my research, or the content of my studies, she (openly) labeled me as an "unknown quantity" (because she didn't immediately recognize my university) and expressed that my odds for admission were not good. I persisted that I had a deep interest in the subject matter, measurable success in the area, research, teaching and mentoring experience with the subject, and a proven academic record. She, and I am paraphrasing here, expressed that because I didn't complete my undergraduate studies at MIT or one of the "big schools" (that she had in her mind), she doubted the ability of an unknown quantity to come in and perform at the level of MIT students. That seems pretty clear to me--she had no interest in what I had done or could bring to the table, and didn't even attempt to find out; the encounter was a waste of both of our time. I walked through the door as bright and enthusiastic a young female engineer as I could be, motivated and ready to shine, and having previously been courted by this school, but I left feeling that

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you were so insecure about your own abilities and decisions that you let a perceived, unspoken slight from some random office worker at MIT scar you for life? And generalized that slight from one bitchy administrative assistant to the entire world of prestigious universities? I do hope you've gotten over that by now, or that you can at least restrain yourself from making life miserable for others in retaliation for this terrible, humiliating non-experience. I'm certain the people you encounter care far less about the name on your diploma than that enormous chip on your shoulder.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mangastudent]

A very quick reply, as I need a piece of information before I can make a substantive reply: what field are you in? E.g. EE, CS, MechE?

And I'm sorry to tell you and anyone else this, but if no one knows the professors who taught you as an undergraduate, your chances of getting into a top graduate program in ANY technical field are low, exactly because you are a total unknown, and departments can afford to make only a few such bets. That woman was fully aware of this reality, and that's why you got such treatment: if you were specifically enquiring about grad school at MIT you were wasting her time. At least she was polite about this brutal reality....

The local barely above a community college in my home town sends about one science (biology or chemistry) graduate a generation to MIT, and one of my best chemistry TAs came from such a school, but ... engineering is different, we don't agree on hardly as much as the sciences do.

Also, it is generally the case that MIT students have better things to do with our time than enter into competitions. We are sufficiently connected to industry (from the very start of the Institute), and in a sufficiently "industrial" and entrepreneurial area that we tend to get work or research experience (both of which have formal programs) instead of doing competitions. Perhaps my bias from the foot I have in EECS is showing, but competitions have no weight in those fields at MIT.

The only exception I am familiar with is the solar car group as of the late '80s plus or minus (and that is in part a special case, one of their leaders was a polymath fellow classmate who went on to become a professor), but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to that side of things....

More later after you tell me which field you're in.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank-you for the response!

I endeavored to leave specific faculties out of the above comment because I didn't want my single data point to reflect on those colleges as a whole, understanding that this culture I speak of is only resident in the system, but does not completely compose it. With that disclaimer, I will be more specific. My first engineering degree was in electrical engineering, and I was also finishing a degree in mechanical engineering at the time. I was specifically interested in pursuing electrical engineering at that time.

This was not a barely above-community-college-level school from which I was graduating; it was a nationally recognized private university which leads the nation in one of its other engineering disciplines (although not EE or ME specifically), but is certainly not MIT nor Virginia Tech, and doesn't carry the universal recognition that these two schools carry. I could speak to your average person on the street about MIT, and they will already have a general idea of the school, regardless of whether they know the difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic or an electrical engineer and an electrician; my school probably wouldn't carry that same recognition outside of certain industry circles. My school was, on the other hand, one of those schools where a 32 on your ACT (nothing to really raise eyebrows at, but not too shabby either) would not earn you a full ride, as it would at many schools; in fact, a National Merit Scholar friend of mine that scored nearly perfectly on his ACTs and was a viola prodigy wasn't sure about his scholarship chances at one point. Although ignorance of my school's name would be understandable, I believe my academic record would at least merit some investigation were one willing to go so far as to meet with me, or perhaps even humoring a chance for me to sell it would have been, at least, non-offensive.

As mentioned before, many of the professors from my school graduated from or taught at some of the more prestigious schools, and continued to conduct research with several departments at MIT. My university was simply not as picky about who went into what program, or at least it seemed that way, and I never encountered a case where it was otherwise. Some people may go through their entire careers at MIT, depending on who they interact with, and feel the same about their school; for all I know, there was an elitist culture somewhere in my own school, and I simply was ignorant of it. Of course, this isn't about selling my school (although I am slowly going down that tangent it seems.) I do not believe that one is superior to the other, necessarily, in all respects. I readily admit to MIT having a stronger graduate program in electrical engineering, or else I wouldn't have shown interest. As I mentioned, I am simply providing one data point where I know the case of substance (or paper creds) over prestige to be untrue about MIT, and many other organizations. It might sound like I am bemoaning the idea that name-recognition gets you places in society; I really do not mean to, although it certainly sounds that way from my above statements. I have directly benefited through dropping names and utilizing professional networks myself, but I wouldn't pretend that it was otherwise; you mention that MIT is quite connected in the industrial sector from day one, and I respond that mine was as well, although perhaps not as aggressively so. I am have worked amongst MIT grads as well as graduates from my own university, afterall. ;) By stating that a university always cares about substance over prestige is (unintentionally) disingenuous. The culture is there, and I was the unlucky one to encounter it on that day. On another day, I probably received job offers because my own school happens to be well-known for certain specializations, which I pursued and made contacts through.

The competition point, as I stated, was admittedly a petty one. I assure you that MIT did have a stake in it (I can

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say that it scarred me for life. I was only recounting one experience in response to a post stating something opposite of my own experiences, and stating my own lack of surprise at the situation with the Dean; I was admittedly intimidated by the woman's response (I won't pretend that I wasn't), and probably wasn't equipped to handle it in the same way that I would be today (I was barely three years out of high school, and more wrapped up in the challenges of double-majoring in engineering disciplines, conducting research, and carrying an internship than I was concerned with learning how to not internalize the statements of people like these--I lived and breathed engineering, after all), but I think you either misread the intentions of my post or perhaps I wasn't clear. Rereading, there is a definite hostile tone there which wasn't intended. I elaborated here, and perhaps that will give you a better feel of my thoughts.

I am not sure where you got the idea that I was speaking to a "random office worker" or "administrative assistant"; I quite purposely did not indicate the exact position of the person involved, because I wanted the freedom to elaborate later (see my other response) without calling out someone in particular. I suppose this invites speculation. The idea is to focus on this culture rather than one individual as my intention is not to grind axes; rather, I wanted to dispel the notion that decisions are always made on substance rather than by prestige or credentials. Basically, I was stating the obvious. As I mentioned in a follow-up post, I regard many of the opportunities that have befallen me in life to have come from who I knew or where I was at at the time.

I also did not intend to generalize her opinion to the entire world of prestigious universities, although it reads that way in my above statement. My point was supposed to be tempered by stating:
"I realize that I am only one data point"
"staggered about their school" I was unclear; I mean here that I know it doesn't compose the whole of the school, but the culture can be found in some areas, through certain individuals.
"isn't the opinion of everyone at MIT"
"culture is certainly present in some circles there"

As for your comment in which you suggested that I "restrain [myself] from making life miserable for others in retaliation for this terrible, humiliating non-experience", I think that is uncalled for. I was recounting an experience that was in direct opposition to the assertion made by the parent post, and instead of responding "Nuh uh!" (which is equally as bad as "me too!") I instead chose to describe why I didn't agree. I am just one of those people that (unfortunately) run on two pages in my endeavor to do so. I don't think I gave the impression that I thought retaliation was necessary. In fact, I believe that I said, "And the graduates of the more "prestigious" universities are great people, and I don't hold against them the culture of the good old boy network that is staggered about their school, unless they have bought into it as well." I admit the last part of that sentence might seem contradictory to the first, but basically the statement isn't to say I hold against people their use of professional networks or paper creds to get ahead in life (I have already admitted that part of my success can be traced to this as well), its the idea of the "level of the MIT student" being unattainable by someone who has done comparable research is silly. There are indeed schools which are better at some things, but not everyone they produce is golden, and not everyone who didn't start on this path is precluded from being able to rise to it. I am not a unique snowflake, either, for that matter.

Luckily, most people tend to get this, and university affiliation (among those who don't buy into "the Idea") becomes a near non-issue within a year after graduation, just

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mangastudent]

Wow, you do realize that by having a chance to collaborate with the quasi-ultimate polymath Jerry Lettvin you are more fortunate than 99.99% of your colleagues? He is a very special person, "quite a personality" indeed ^_^! (I see that I have to add a couple of anecdotes to his Wikipedia entry.)

One data point, one experience, one opinion. I am certainly open to criticism.

Unfortunately, I'm going to move to close debate (after unfairly unloading on you below :-) on the grounds that I don't debate (unless it's truly important) people who debate unfairly. To wit:

[S]tating that a university always cares about substance over prestige is (unintentionally) disingenuous.

That is indeed true. Fortunately, I did not make such a broad statement, and to construe what I said as applying to every member of the MIT community (roughly 30,000 people) for all periods of time is frankly beyond the pale.

Of course there's going to be exceptions; you're an EE, you can even suggest some likely probability distributions. The fact that you had one bad experience with one person in a situation where you admit you may not have projected very well, and to a rather rare bird (at any school), the woman EE---well ... I'm pretty much at a loss for words. Surely if you cared enough about this (and I sense in your writing that you do care very much) you could have collected some more data points?

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with her, but I re-emphasize the point I don't think you quite got. Or rather, let me turn it around. Here's the 99.99% sure way of getting into a grad school: you get one of the professors to say "Admit this person, I'm going to advise and fund him (i.e. bring him into my research group)."

Now, how do you accomplish that? Obviously, the professor has to know you well, or absolutely trust the judgement of someone who knows you well. It's a "web of trust" sort of thing, and yes, it's unfair to schools and departments that are small and obscure, but the professors in a department have to be very careful in who they choose for the limited number of graduate student slots they have (also remember these slots are limited by the funds they can bring in).

And they're very limited in MIT's EECS department, because while MIT doesn't restrict admission based on undergraduate major, and at the time you visited EECS probably had around 40% of the undergraduates (!!!), it's very conservative about letting a department grow before the field has shown it has very long term staying power. Aero/Astro is a very sobering example, for anyone who remembers the early '70s bust, and now EECS looks to be following it.

Yes, research is going to be healthy in the fancy building that was forced upon the CS community, but if they had been allowed to bulk up enough to match the undergraduates they struggled to teach, well, I suspect things would be very ugly today. Even MIT can attract only so much research funding, especially in a secular downturn of the economy and a worse one in these fields.

I wonder if you had approached her with "thus and so professor [at my school] who has done research with thus and so professor [at MIT]" if it might have gone better, except:

Your point that denigrates the concept of people being at the "level of an MIT student" shows you don't "get it", you don't understand something that makes MIT MIT. I personally don't believe MIT has a harsh culture (although I saw many people who through their own lenses perceived it as such), but it is an extremely demanding one.

I would describe MIT's true undergraduate educational philosophy at its base with three words, all equally important: mens, manus and firehose. The first two are from the school motto, "Mens et Manus" (which is Latin for "Mind and Hand"). MIT believes that anythi

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

you do realize that by having a chance to collaborate with the quasi-ultimate polymath Jerry Lettvin you are more fortunate than 99.99% of your colleagues?

No, I actually didn't realize this. I realized that he was quite impressive and had written some incredible things (his apparently very famous paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" was the very first paper I read upon starting my new research project. My adviser and I were trying to map the "electrical signals" between the frogs eye and and its brain, and compare this with the way human eye/brain interaction occurs, with the idea of creating artificial vision), but when you put it that way, I do feel very fortunate. To be fair, my speaking to him was less collaboration than it was my picking his brain for his expertise. My adviser may have had more dealings, but mine was mostly to ask him questions. I remember the first time he said hello on the telephone...I didn't know what to say. I felt utterly stupid when faced with his expertise, and was already taken aback by the sound of his voice. It was a good learning experience, nonetheless. Thank-you for pointing me toward his wikipedia entry; although I suspected that he was very respectable and probably carried name recognition, I really had no idea.

Fortunately, I did not make such a broad statement

Rereading, I see that you did not. Either I missed the qualifications in your statement, or I combined your statement with that of another and reacted to a false position. As I do not see the post I might have combined with your own, I will proceed assuming that it doesn't exist and that I simply misread your statement. For that, I apologize.

and to a rather rare bird (at any school), the woman EE

Much like myself. :) Well, not anymore. I suppose one could say "once an EE, always an EE," but like many engineers eventually find themselves, I rarely play with the toys anymore. ;) But I am definitely still a woman. haha. And I still have my own analog oscilloscope, Fluke multimeter, and power supplies, and probably have a version of PSpice hanging around here somewhere, so that should at least count for geek points, if nothing else.

Surely if you cared enough about this (and I sense in your writing that you do care very much) you could have collected some more data points?

I care much less now about the specific situation than I did then, but I suppose that I do care that people realize the constructs in which they are hired and educated; less so for seeing it stop, because I believe it is inherent in the system and perhaps a necessary part of it, but more so with the hopes that people will be able to recognize this, and know when they have directly benefited from or been hurt by it. I must admit, though, that I would like to see cases where it is unfairly applied without any flexibility stop. It is important to know why people act the way that they do; in this case, the Dean probably felt that her merits would not be received in a way that reflected her true performance potential, and so she found a dishonest way to achieve her education. I simply walked away and found a different solution.

I started this thread with the (contrary) intent of providing an opposing single data point, perhaps arguing for the sake of arguing, assuming that it wouldn't be read at the AC threshold, and it grew to a much longer thread than I intended. Insert some great responses on your part, and the result is that I have devoted much more thought into this than I had intended, and ended up recounting something that I hadn't thought about in a long time. You have given one of the most well thought-out responses that I have received on Slashdot; so, silly as it might sound, I think I just enjoyed getting a chance to respond to someone who isn't obviously trolling.
You are correct in that I didn't collect other data points. Perhaps it is laziness, but I didn't feel it necessary since I w

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mangastudent]

Oops, before a substantive reply, here's one thread I forgot to connect:

MIT believes that anything very specific they teach you will likely be obsolete before your career has gotten very far

As they should! This is incredibly insightful, and comes as a shock to many students. The teaching method of my undergraduate university seemed to support this, but this philosophy wasn't explicitly laid out to the students as it should have been. While those of us with a hand in industry understood this quite well, there were many students (and if industry is any indication, this isn't unique to one school, but is characteristic of the bright-eyed engineering student) caught flat-footed.

Hmmm; I haven't studied other engineering schools (I'm really a chemist who due to finances ended up programming), but MIT is very explicit about this, in both science and engineering. I distinctly remember being told about it as a freshman, and it being repeated later on.

And it was tied together with the "firehose": one of the things MIT teaches you perforce (or at least insures you can do) is how to learn quickly. In a work world that changes so quickly, it's a necessary career survival trait.

I will note they do ease into this at the freshman level. Today, the first term is still graded pass/fail, and in my time both terms. You are given time for the wrenching adjustment to college life at a boarding school, starting with a whole week up front devoted just to that, and plenty of support and understanding is given, especially if your freshman advisor(s) are any good. But you are expected to "stand and perform" ^_^, as you must, for it will most certainly happen in the real world sooner or later.

More later after I wake up.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two balls. Perhaps you'd like to suck them?

This means one of two things...

[brejc8]

Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much.

Re:This means one of two things...

[larry bagina]

you forgot option 3: social promotion.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or she was very good at her job, and should not keep it.

Wholesale lying on one's resume is usually considered a serious offense, and more so in academia because the degrees and credentials are a large part of what they're selling people. Another thing to consider is that she probably lied routinely when people asked her about her college days; it is a basic violation of trust. What if your mentor turned out to have completely falsified their background?

But many top jobs rely much more on the people skills than on technical knowledge, and this is one of them. So yeah, it is interesting that a dropout from a no-name college could become so successful in this role, in the estimation of her peers.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

But many top jobs rely much more on the people skills than on technical knowledge, and this is one of them. So yeah, it is interesting that a dropout from a no-name college could become so successful in this role, in the estimation of her peers

Due to the extreme self-selection of MIT's applicants the job of picking out a class of ~ 1050 students each year is pretty easy.

MIT knows what are the metrics that signal likely success (e.g. class ranking is one of them, strangely enough, at least as of the late '80s). For admissions, MIT (again, as of the late '80s) just has two people read each folder (one of the readers is generally a volunteer outside of the admissions unit), ranks them on two axes and into nine boxes, admits pretty much everyone who scores #1 in both, doesn't admit anyone who scores #3 in both, and the people spend a lot of time agonizing over the middle cases, as is inevitable.

As I remember, managing yield (guessing how many will accept) is also fairly easy compared to other highly selective schools; in the last three decades or so they only screwed up once, and had to house a group of freshman in makeshift quarters in the basement of the graduate dorm (which for most of them actually turned out to be a very positive thing, a little adversity and bonding and all that).

Before this woman, and a real pro in the field, MIT had for the longest time a non-professional who probably also rose through the ranks; by and large admissions were on auto-pilot for something more than a decade, and the Institute survived quite well.

MIT also accepts essentially no transfer students, and of course the various departments handle graduate admissions.

This wouldn't work at, say, most of the selective schools other than Harvard; managing yield must be a nightmare, with large wait lists for insurance against too many students accepting.

Re:This means one of two things...

[slashdotmsiriv]

"Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much."

Or her job is so easy that even a retarded liar can do it.
Seriously, how difficult can it be for a bureaucrat to
pretend that it manages a bunch of other stupid bureaucrats and to go through resumes
and select those with 100% test scores and GPAs?

This case goes to show how overestimated bureaucratic positions are, and how
people in prestigious scientific centers should wake up and put those bureaucrats
in the place they deserve. That is:
a) at most 20-30% of faculty stuff salaries. Hell those stupid idiots should get
even less than graduate students.
b) absolutely no respect. I am seek of watching students and professors begging every
retarded secretary to do the minimum of his/her job.

Re:This means one of two things...

[bmeiers]

If she had her degree, she would still have her job.

University degrees are worth plenty.

Re:This means one of two things...

[PatriceVignon]

Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much. No, that's not the point: her (first) position did not require a degree at all. In this article from the Boston Globe MIT says

Because the administrative assistant job for which she was being considered in 1979 did not require a degree, the university did not check Jones's academic credentials, said MIT chancellor Phillip L. Clay. If it were any other position, she should maybe be forgiven because of her strong performance. But since her job is to make sure that you do not lie on your application she was rightfully forced to quit.

Re:This means one of two things...

[mrbluze]

Or: University degrees aren't worth very much. I agree. They don't even come on parchment anymore, most of the time. I feel so ripped off!

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

She may be good at her job but I think her job would entail rejecting an applicant if she found the applicant to have lied about their accomplishments. Despite good deeds, one cannot continue in such a position if found to have a basic lack of integrity like this. True she may have lied 30 years ago, but anytime she had her business card printed up with the fake credentials, she basically re-committed the act.

Re:This means one of two things...

[keyne9]

Ironically, it also proved that you don't need a degree to do her job well.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Firethorn]

Or her job is so easy that even a retarded liar can do it.
Seriously, how difficult can it be for a bureaucrat to
pretend that it manages a bunch of other stupid bureaucrats and to go through resumes
and select those with 100% test scores and GPAs?

Well, it's a little more difficult than that. After all, you have to figure out how many students you want, then look at the applications and decide who the best are going to be. Can we require a 4.0 GPA? Or, in order to get enough students do we have to accept 3.5 GPAs? What about those wierd schools that use a 5 point scale?

Do we want to require 2 years of foreign language in HS for entrance? What about that really smart kid from a small school that didn't offer it?

Then there's the whole affirmative action. By golly, we have to be 10% black or we'll be seen as discriminatory!* What do you mean we'd have to accept them with 2.0GPA's? Just do it!

Still, OJT counts for much in a job. Even if she wasn't prepared for it initially, I'm sure that the experienced subordinates under her would be able to keep things going while she learned.

*Yes, there are discrimination problems in the USA. It's also a sad fact that if I make any educational requirements, such as requiring a HS degree of a given GPA , and have the decisions made after removing all indications of race and sex that blacks would be underrepresented, on average. There are many problems with affirmative action; especially for something as late as college.

Re:This means one of two things...

[0kComputer]

no, sorry, its not black and white and it certainly doesn't fall into either of those categories. It means this: she lied. Period. One could also draw a conclusion as to her character and integrity for perpetuating the lie for so long.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

But since her job is to make sure that you do not lie on your application she was rightfully forced to quit.

Why? Who better to know the tricks and traps of lying on applications than someone who's successfully done it?

Re:This means one of two things...

[ChromeAeonium]

Well, it's a little more difficult than that. After all, you have to figure out how many students you want, then look at the applications and decide who the best are going to be. Can we require a 4.0 GPA? Or, in order to get enough students do we have to accept 3.5 GPAs? I disagree, especially in this case. MIT will get enough students, so they can be very selective, and ever since a few classist numbers became the only way to measure an individual's worth, it basically amounts to putting people in a database and skimming a few off the top. Unless, of course, MIT has adoped a legacy clause without telling anyone, which wouldn't particularly surprise me, considering how they're one of the most elite(ist) colleges.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Rogerborg]

Third option: it's easier to retain a lying incompetent to handle your anti-male discrimination than it is to face the wrath of angry fugly bull dyke feminazis on the rag.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Firethorn]

It's not quite as simple as a simple GPA selection. A 3.5 is an indication of better achievement in many midwest schools than a 3.9 in many southeast schools(Mississipi, I'm looking at you). They also want to see if you took a challanging HS curriculum. There's a huge difference between a HS graduate with a 4.0 that took all standard 'putz' courses, and a graduate who took AP/Honors/College credit classes.

The metric is more complex than just the GPA. There's still a metric, however.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Master of Transhuman]

Exactly.

This whole affair is so fucking stupid it reminds me of the line:

Why is academic infighting so vicious? Because the stakes are so small.

Humans. They will do literally ANYTHING to prove they're better than someone else - even if means proving they're actually worse.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

the only legacy system in place at MIT is that smart parents often raise smart kids.

--anonymous flunkout

Re:This means one of two things...

[Kjella]

But since her job is to make sure that you do not lie on your application she was rightfully forced to quit.

I guess they don't subscribe to the "it takes a thief to know a thief" philosophy...

Hypocrisy

[dshaw858]

The thing that really annoys me about this whole ordeal is the nearly unfathomable amounts of hypocrisy which envelop the entire scenario. First of all, she was the dean of admissions--it was her job to admit and deny people, to make or break what I'm sure were many of the applicants' dreams. I'm a high school senior (trying to decide between UCSB and the University of Washington for next year), and this makes my blood simply boil. I didn't apply to MIT, but I know a lot of people who did. Think about how horrible and betrayed they must feel that the dean of admissions didn't even go to college herself! And all that talking and prodding about academic honesty...

I think the worst part, though, is that she wasn't just the dean of admissions--she was capitalizing on her position of power as well, giving speeches to high schools (such as my own) to promote herself and the book that she wrote. That's what really irks me.

In some situations, I would have said that after 28 years doing a good job in her position, she should be reprimanded but not asked to resign. However, her blatant abuse of the system and extensive lying and hypocrisy simply drive me crazy.

- dshaw

Re:Hypocrisy

[Jazzer_Techie]

While I agree that her actions were quite hypocritical, there is fortunately no evidence that she was doing anything wrong in the admissions process itself. There are many people involved (15-20 I believe) so its not as if she makes the admit/reject decision herself.

Re:Hypocrisy

[geekoid]

She was not in control of the entire process, and admissions is bigger then any one person. There is no report of her abusing or doing anything inappropriate at all.
So calm down.

You are young, I know you don't feel young, but you are. Focus your energy elsewhere. Getting mad at this is just a waste of you youth.
Forget about this.
Do what you love to do no matter what anyone else says, and always live as far below your means as possible.
Do not get stuck in the money trap, where just a little more will be enough..all the time.
Be successfull before getting married and having kids.

FOllow those and you will be happy and empowered for the rest of your life.

Re:Hypocrisy

[romland]

Be successfull before getting married and having kids.
Wtf? :)

Some would argue doing the latter of those two IS being successful.

Re:Hypocrisy

[Anonymous Coward]

Who asked you for inane, patronizing advice, fuckwit?

Re:Hypocrisy

[ztransform]

I agree..

This sort of thing happens often in business as well as academic institutions. Powerful people (who usually gain their power through dishonesty) get powerful jobs and rarely have their qualifications checked.

In cases of fraud like this I believe the employing institution should be permitted to sue and recover all income paid to that employee. Certainly, though, it does nothing to reverse the damage caused by the dishonest employee.

It's never okay to lie at a job interview. If you don't have the skills or the experience then it is up to the employer to determine if you are worth taking on board and training.

Re:Hypocrisy

[Aqua OS X]

Eh, she had a senior administrative job. It's not like she could've majored in Bureaucracy Studies in order to prep for that position. What really mattered was experience, her ability to network, her ability to raise money, etc. Moreover, admission standards are typically set by department chairs who understand their department's student body and curriculum. In the end, those are usually the people who set the important benchmarks.

Quite frankly, there are a LOT of desk jobs in the world that don't require a college degree as long as you're a reasonably competent and experienced individual. Thousands of college students graduate every year and enter a professional career that has nothing to do with their former major. I imagine the only college skills they reference are the the basic reading / writing / critical thought skills acquired from 1st and 2nd year General Ed. For many, a BA or BS is little more then a piece of paper that allows you to apply to new stratum of employment.

That's not to say you don't specialized degrees for specialized fields, and that's not to day she shouldn't step down. However, those potentially "crushed dreams" probably have little do with her ability to do that job.

Re:Hypocrisy

[fyngyrz]

And others would argue that having kids represents abject failure (of everything from contraception to one's ability to pursue a lifestyle that isn't subjugated to raising additional people the world doesn't appear to need.)

So obviously, there are people on both ends of the issue, and some in the middle. He was just expressing his opinion that one might want to get the lifestyle stuff done before the subjugation begins; so where is your comment coming from?

Oh, wait - you thought your opinion was worth more than his. I get it now.

Re:Hypocrisy

[fyngyrz]

Did someone hear something? Let me check the sensors... score 0... source is AC... nope. Must have been the wind.

Re:Hypocrisy

[DrIdiot]

to make or break what I'm sure were many of the applicants' dreams
When your dreams rely on something as unpredictable as college admissions, then you shouldn't be surprised when they are broken. Except for IMO winners and the like, no one should expect to get into MIT, no one should plan their lives around getting into MIT, and no one should feel particularly angry when rejected by MIT.

I didn't apply to MIT, but I know a lot of people who did. Think about how horrible and betrayed they must feel that the dean of admissions didn't even go to college herself!
I also know people that were rejected from MIT and none of them really care quite as much as you. Her resume falsifications didn't lead to their rejection/acceptance. The admissions process is much more than just her.

However, her blatant abuse of the system and extensive lying and hypocrisy simply drive me crazy.
Blatant abuse? I think you're really over-hyping this. She lied about her degree to get into a position that didn't require one. Other than that, she seems to have worked her way up from there within the bounds of the system. You seem to make the implication that because she falsified her resume (one single event), her entire career has been nothing but corruption and abuse, with ill self-interested intentions. That seems like a logical fallacy (hasty generalization) to me.

I honestly don't see why people are making such a big deal out of this. Most people that got into MIT are feeling really bad for her and want her to stay. You think she's a terrible corrupt individual. Most of the staff at MIT do not feel negatively toward her at all. Her resignation was more of a necessity. In the end though, nothing really terrible came out of her lying. There are other lies with very negative consequences that I think are more worthy of your outrage.

Re:Hypocrisy

[parrillada]

I went to UCSB as an undergrad (BS in physics, math, at the College of Creative Studies), and am now finishing my second year as a grad student in Physics at UW, so if you have any questions regarding your decision I can probably answer them. Feel free to send me a message.

UCSB had really nice weather, and some great parties, and the College of Creative studies is pretty cool, but I have to say I didn't really enjoy the social culture there, and overall I prefer Seattle. Being somewhat of an intellectual I didn't quite get my fill at UCSB. Now, had I been a surfer it might have been a different story...

Re:Hypocrisy

[Oligonicella]

So, a liar in control of admissions demanding honesty from someone trying to be admitted isn't wrong?

Re:Hypocrisy

[Jazzer_Techie]

It is, and that's exactly why she was asked to resign. However, the fact that she lied on her resume doesn't imply that she was doing bad job of choosing who to admit. Now that the lies about her credentials are known though, it is as you say, clearly she could not be allowed to continue in a position that consists of evaluating the credentials of others.

Re:Hypocrisy

[scaz]

You have mis-represented the role of the admissions office, and a dean of admissions, on most modern college campuses. In her position, she would not at all be involved in raising money, and her ability (or inability) to network would make only a minor difference in her job performance.

Furthermore, the admissions office handles admission of high school students to the undergraduate program. Department chairs (and faculty in general) have almost no role in this process. Admissions folders are read and evaluated by admissions officers within this office (who are not part of the faculty). The primary role of the dean of admissions is to maintain the quality, integrity, and consistency of these evaluations. (This is in contrast to admission to graduate programs, in which individual departments and faculty play a very large part by reading and rating each application.)

Put simply, the job of the admissions office at a school like MIT is to sort through a pool of near-perfect, almost identical-looking applications to select the small percentage who they believe will have the best chance at success at MIT while ensuring diversity among geographic, ethnic, economic and other factors.

Why would you trust this process to an indivudal who had no idea what it was like to even go to college?

Re:Hypocrisy

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I've never like the concept of hypocrisy. It seems like a way of rejecting an idea, or piece of advice based on the person, not the advice/idea itself. Perhaps we should be judging her for her skill at the job above her history.

Re:Hypocrisy

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, but we have natural selection to deal with those people.

Re:Hypocrisy

[xenocide2]

"Why would you trust this process to an indivudal who had no idea what it was like to even go to college?"

Probably because the idea of individuals who do know what its like to go through college marketing MIT to girls wasn't working.

Re:Hypocrisy

[DarkOx]

I am getting tired of reading how good at her job she was and how much time she had been doing it excuses her lying.

Lying is WRONG, I don't think anyone can make a serious case against my next statememt. If you can please by all means try:

Society as a whole should discorage or at least avoid rewarding liers.

Serious this kind of gross misrepresentation is dangerous. Its this total lack of integrity that is destroying this nation. Just look at our politicans and leaders for cry out loud. With each passing year we get progressively worse cheats and crooks. Unless you want a whole generation of young people growing up honesty is not important we damn well better toss this woman out on her ass and as publicly as possible. She should not have been allow to resign she SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED imediately.

This is crazy would you want someone doing surgery on you because hell they read some medical text books and figured they could do the job, so what the heck. That is exactly the kind of example you set by letting this person stay where she is.

Thre are a couple things we should all take away from this.
1. Its time to serious start looking at morality, honesty, and integrity because if we let them slip away we will no longer be a great people, just a bunch of criminals who had rich parents. That sentiment exists around the world about Americans already, lets not let it be true.

2. Policies where a person is not let in the door just because they don't have a degree certification etc, is in most situations extreemly short sited. If your somebody responsible for hireing maybe you should get off your lazy ass and come up with a way to evaluate applications beyond how long the list of initials and acronyms tacked on to there name is. Academic Degrees might be a good inidicatior of ability but just because somebody does not have one, is not a reason to just dismiss them.

Re:Hypocrisy

[Anonymous Coward]

So? She cheated; the most deserving candidates probably got in, and the ones you "know" who applied to MIT would've floundered at best. BFD. There are far bigger issues to get upset about, but you're too young to know that. If you live long enough, you will understand.

Re:Hypocrisy

[naddington]

Go to Washington.

Mega ironic

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Because on her speaking tours, she would blabber on with her fat mouth about how kids were trying too hard and that you didn't need a degree to do well.

Re:Mega ironic

[Reason58]

Mega ironic You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Mega ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that her main talking point was that it was important for high school students to live for themselves rather than basing everything they do on whether it will help them get into college. She wanted to admit students who knew how to live, not just who had the best grades or were student council president etc. Now it's revealed that she had to lie to get to where she is, when she kept telling applicants how important it was to be honest and enjoy themselves.

As a student currently on MIT's waitlist, I've been following this news closely. I hope it doesn't affect too strongly who/how many they decide to accept.

Re:Mega ironic

[bmeiers]

Apparently you do not need a degree to do well.

You do, however, have to lie about it.

Re:Mega ironic

[superpulpsicle]

"She wanted to admit students who knew how to live, not just who had the best grades or were student council president etc."

This is probably one of the few schools where grades or academic skills do matter. You can't accept people who can't hack it, but know how to party. Social skills take a back seat in engineering schools. We need to check the credential for every professor, staff member in every school.

Re:Mega ironic

[Poromenos1]

I don't understand all this contention over the word "irony". As far as I know, it means words suggesting the opposite of their literal meaning, or, taken to a situation, an absurd incongruity between what's expected to happen and what actually happens (especially when that's the opposite). Even in Greek, we'd say that that situation is pretty ironic (because she came to be judging who got a degree while she had none or whatever).

I'm not trolling or anything, I actually have seen this many times and I would like to know why people argue that this usage of the word "irony" is not acceptable.

Misrespresent?

[Reason58]

"At various times she claimed to have received degrees from Albany Medical College, Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute, and Union College and we confirmed that she had not graduated from any of these schools." That's not misrepresenting, that is outright, bold-faced lying.

Re:Misrespresent?

[minus_273]

yeah and she also claimed to have a phd in some places. the CNN article is very weak/deceptive

Re:Misrespresent?

[telso]

From Wikipedia:

In criminal law, fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them - usually, to obtain property or services unjustly.

[...]

Fraud, in addition to being a criminal act, is also a type of civil law violation known as a tort. A tort is a civil wrong for which the law provides a remedy. A civil fraud typically involves the act of intentionally making a false representation of a material fact, with the intent to deceive, which is reasonably relied upon by another person to that person's detriment. A "false representation" can take many forms, such as:

• A false statement of fact, known to be false at the time it was made[.]
  

Re:Misrespresent?

[fm6]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misrepresen t

Let me get this straight

[A beautiful mind]

Jones was named dean of admissions at MIT in 1997 and received MIT's highest award for administrators, the "MIT Excellence Award for Leading Change." She was also the 2006 winner of the "Gordon Y Billard Award" given "for special service of outstanding merit" performed for the school.

Sounds like she was doing her job well. Yeah, she lied. Does it matter 28 years on?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Shihar]

Under some circumstances, it probably would not have been the end of the world. It certainly deserves a reprimand under any circumstance, but perhaps not sacking her altogether. The real issue is that this woman was the dean of admissions. You can't have someone who lied to get into their position be responsible for admissions. The kind of message it would have sent would have been intolerable. It isn't a hard leap to rationalize misrepresenting yourself on your entrance qualifications under the justification that the frigging dean of admissions did it too.

It is sad and perhaps a little telling about how much weight we give to pieces of paper, but people in positions of such responsibility can't lie about their credentials and then have the moral authority to demand that no one else does the same.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Moridineas]

Well the question is, once a liar always a liar? Being a multiple liar like she appears to be, calls into question all her other achievements. Not to mention her judgement, etc.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Puls4r]

The ends don't justify the means. Yes it matters, and yes she should be fired. She is ethics and morally corrupt, and holds her own advancement above honesty. Are you under the illusion that awards like that mean a damn thing?

Re:Let me get this straight

[tomhudson]

... or everyone can say "f*ck it" and go to school here.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that sometimes qualified people fall through the cracks - what if she was really, really good at her job? Now, if she hadn't lied, she wouldn't have landed the job in the first place. I'm all for not lying, but I'm also all for people being judged on merit and not pieces of paper.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shark swooner]

and perhaps a little telling about how much weight we give to pieces of paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_(economics)

Spence began his 1973 model with a hypothetical. Suppose that there are two types of employees -- good and bad -- and that employers are willing to pay a higher wage to the good type than the bad type. Spence assumes that for employers, there's no real way to tell in advance which employees will be of the good or bad type. Bad employees aren't really upset about this, because they get a free ride off of the hard work of the good employees. But good employees know that they deserve to be paid more for their effort, so they invest in the signal -- in this case, some amount of education. Spence assumes that education doesn't enhance the employee's productivity at all. But he does make one key assumption: good-type employees pay less for one unit of education than bad-type employees. This is not indicative of the cost of tuition and living expenses, as one would expect better employees to get educated at better and more expensive institutions. Rather, it is indicative of the opportunity cost that is paid by the time and effort invested into obtaining the education, which for a more efficient "good" employee, would be less than for a less efficient "bad" employee getting the same degree with the same grades from the same institution.

Spence discovered that even if education didn't contribute anything to an employee's productivity, good employees would still buy more education in order to signal their higher productivity to employers. (Economists sometimes call this the signalling hypothesis in education, often cited as a reason why government should not subsidize higher education for workers: more education allows workers to be paid a higher wage but doesn't make society more productive.) Bad workers, for their part, would accept a lower wage rather than pay the higher price (for them) of getting more education. And employers, seeing that the education signal really is correlated to employee productivity, would condition their wages on the signal, offering better wages to those who had invested more in the signal. This is called a signalling equilibrium.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact is, once a liar is finally caught lying, every else becomes suspect. Think about it: you ask someone, generally, "Are you honest?", and you really are waisting you time because you should expect realistically to ever only get one answer. What counts is reputation. You can't count on dishonest people to be honest and tell you when the are lying and when they are not. Once evidence finally reveals the dishonest person's dishonesty, you have to suspect everything that has happened in the past and can't trust anything from them in future.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell. We are only talking about integrity. She is just going to have to enter a field she is certainly qualified for, Politics. Regardless if she does a good job. She lied. She should have been fired.

No, the real question is.

[juuri]

Why does it matter, now? If it took 28 years to come out and she has been continually rising in both job responsibility and performance (which she has), then why does anyone really care? Obviously she can do this particular job well. She screwed up... twenty... eight... years ago.

CNN had a poll yesterday asking if people lied on resumes. The last time I glanced at the results it was something like 85% saying they never had. Rigggggggght. I've seen more than my fair share of resumes through the years and easily half of them have something that is shady. More so, many of them have inflated experience and importance for tasks at previous employers. Sadly, this is the norm, not the exception as that CNN poll would have one believe. Then again given that the modern resume is more a sales sheet than a real starting point for evaluating someone's competence for a task, should we expect any different?

Re:No, the real question is.

[gravesb]

Because it did come out. How can she ask that kids applying not lie on their resumes if she did? It creates a standard that would make admissions to MIT almost impossible to administer. If it hadn't become public, maybe MIT could have dealt with the issue, although I'm not sure I would be comfortable as her supervisor continuing to supervise someone who lied on such a fundamental thing. You'd never know what else she lied about, and trust is important in all working relationships. Yeah, her 28 years of service and award show that a degree isn't that important for that kind of job, but honesty and credibility with the high schoolers are, and she's lost both of those.

Re:No, the real question is.

[miskatonic alumnus]

If it took 28 years to come out and she has been continually rising in both job responsibility and performance (which she has), then why does anyone really care?

Because SOME of us actually place value on ethics. What message does it send to people by overlooking this type of behavior? Dishonesty will become the norm.

She screwed up... twenty... eight... years ago.

So, all is forgiven if enough time passes. Nice philosophy.

Re:No, the real question is.

[Legion303]

"CNN had a poll yesterday asking if people lied on resumes. The last time I glanced at the results it was something like 85% saying they never had. Rigggggggght."

There is a *slight* difference between writing "Java" under your "Programming Languages" section and fabricating Ph.Ds you never earned from schools you never attended.

Re:No, the real question is.

[baboo_jackal]

She screwed up... twenty... eight... years ago.
...and then continued to screw up every single minute that has passed since twenty-eight years ago by not telling the truth about her fake degrees.

Rigggggggght. I've seen more than my fair share of resumes through the years and easily half of them have something that is shady. More so, many of them have inflated experience and importance for tasks at previous employers. Sadly, this is the norm, not the exception as that CNN poll would have one believe
I still believe that two wrongs don't make a right. The point is not how well she's done since then. The point is not how many other people also lie. The point is that she used fraud to get where she is today.

--baboo

Re:No, the real question is.

[Anonymous Coward]

CNN had a poll yesterday asking if people lied on resumes. The last time I glanced at the results it was something like 85% saying they never had. Rigggggggght. I've seen more than my fair share of resumes through the years and easily half of them have something that is shady. More so, many of them have inflated experience and importance for tasks at previous employers. Sadly, this is the norm, not the exception as that CNN poll would have one believe. Then again given that the modern resume is more a sales sheet than a real starting point for evaluating someone's competence for a task, should we expect any different?

Odd you should mention this, as my latest resume has been hugely condensed, with the publications list removed altogether, university degree removed and all positions held retitled to sound as lowly as possible. In addition I have intentionally misspelled my name and left out my home address to defeat credit checks, as I have a bad credit record due to a cell phone provider being unable to admit that they were in breach of contract, not I. (I refuse to pay for services not rendered, there is no sense fighting it, an individual's word means nothing compared to a corporation's, no matter how wrong and criminal that organizations behavior.)

Yes, I am lying on my resume, but for the exact opposite reasons that you expect. My real (truthful) resume had not got me a single interview in over a year of hundreds of applications. No one wants to hire a university educated professional for minimum wage jobs. However, since I removed the university degree and misspelled my name, I have had two interviews in the last month and expect an offer from one of them soon.

You may ask, why have I abandoned my professional career? I got sick of working for people who did not know what they were doing, and the work actually meant something to me. I cannot tolerate incompetent management in meaningful employment, it has happened to me over and over, excellent owners/managers replaced by know nothing twits with the sale of the business or restructuring of the organisation.

So as a survival mechanism, I have decided to get a job flipping burgers, mopping floors, answering phones, whatever - so long as it is meaningless to me, as I have concluded that incompetent management is inevitable.

So my new resume makes me sound as inexperienced and unskilled as possible as opposed to "inflated experience and importance". So far, this new strategy is working and I expect it to succeed.

Instead of the old saying: "Do what you love", I am subscribing to the mantra of "do whatever you can tolerate, it matters not, for seeking meaning in life through one's work is pointless in today's society, and in fact harmful to a person's well being". Seek meaning and joy in your life outside work, work is just to pay the living taxes imposed on us by the capitalist regime of the day. Retirement is not an option, if you are not useful, then life is over. My retirement fund consists of a shotgun and a shell.

I am a symptom of the disease that is eroding the foundations of modern society, academia and industry. Its all about the money for most.

For me, its about life outside.

Re:No, the real question is.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, her 28 years of service and award show that a degree isn't that important for that kind of job, but honesty and credibility with the high schoolers are, and she's lost both of those."

Quite frankly, I am a high schooler, and she has lost neither "honesty or credibility" with me. I still respect her as both a professional and a person, and for me, it is very sad to see her go (although I do acknowledge the message it would have sent if MIT would have let her stay). I do wish her the best in finding a new position, because I know after the amount of press this has received, it will most likely be very difficult for her to find a new job. Maybe this means I'm morally decrepit, or maybe it just means that I've somehow learned to see past imperfections and focus on the good that people have contributed to the world, not just the bad. It's a whole lot easier for people to criticize and chastize than congratulate, and I feel as if Marilee has been a victim of such a time-honored tradition of the media. It's a shame that it took a controversy for people to recognize all of the positive ways in which she has revolutionized the college admissions process.

Perhaps I'm biased because I was accepted to MIT and will be attending in the fall, but I can personally say that I probably would not have even considered applying there without her undeniable influence on the admissions process. For anyone who has applied to MIT, you will know that it's not just some beaurocratic machine, as most people would expect from a tech school, but rather a very personalized exchange of information between both parties. The admissions office even sent me a Valentine's Day card, for goodness sakes. How many schools do that? Very few, I would imagine.

The thought I want to leave everyone with is this: stop beating a dead horse and criticizing the poor woman and saying how "ironic" or "hypocritical" the whole situation is. As Ben Jones and Matt McGann, admissions officers for MIT, said on their admissions blog, "It is what it is." She knows she did something wrong, and proper actions have been taken. We should all stop amplifying the controversy and stop trying to make it worse by making accusations that she tried to "capitalize off of her position" or simply "sell books."

All I can say is that I've met Marilee Jones in person before, and she is one of the most amazing, genuine, and energetic people I know. She has not lost my respect, and I wish her the best in her future endeavors.

Re:No, the real question is.

[ceoyoyo]

Dishonesty is or is quickly becoming the norm, because too many people think like the grandparent: hey, if you can get away with it, go for it.

Re:No, the real question is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I ... I think you are my clone.

Re:No, the real question is.

[koreaman]

So, basically, she let you into MIT, so you support her? Why am I not surprised...

Re:No, the real question is.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure there are many thousands more just like us. The rich and incompetent will run modern society into the ground. Fuck it, I don't care anymore. They cannot take my soul, though I very nearly let them.

Re:No, the real question is.

[General Wesc]

Yes, that's exactly what he said. Or, no wait, it's not.

Think you could manage to attack his argument instead of baseless ad hominem accusations of bias? He(?) said he wouldn't have even applied if not for her. Sounds like she'd have his support even if he hadn't been accepted.

Re:No, the real question is.

[koreaman]

No, he supported her before applying because he thought he had a chance. He supports her after applying because he got in.

Re:No, the real question is.

[General Wesc]

Got an basis for that claim? They're not the reasons he gave.

...why did it take 28 years?

[msauve]

Because she was qualified and was doing a good job, obviously.

Unfortunately, even more than most of society, academia is focused on credentials instead of knowledge and ability. It makes some sense, from a self-serving perspective.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[king-manic]

Because it's shared agony. A bachlors/masters/doctorate degree is a serious marathon of agony. They refuse to admit anyone into their club that did not walk through those coals. Those that can do the job but didn't ensure the same torture are excluded because of this. Thats what university is, not higher learning but a institution to excludes those who could not hack the course. We are rightly upset when someone claims the credentials when they didn't endure like we did. Like it or not a degree does show endurance and work ethic or inate brillance. Not every job needs a certain degree for it, but a applicant with a degree has endurance and work ethic or inate brillance while a person without one is a unknown quantity.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Because she was qualified and was doing a good job, obviously.

She obviously was not qualified since she didn't have the appropriate certification, and if MIT couldn't even verify her credentials, they probably did an equally stellar job of monitoring her performance.

Please don't confuse "certification" with education.
The real irony is that MIT stays in "business" by marketing the value of their "certification".

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[fyngyrz]

Thats what university is, not higher learning but a institution to excludes those who could not hack the course.

Could not... or simply did not. For some people, college is largely a combination of going over things you already know more about than the college does, and going over irrelevant things some person in power thinks you should know, when in fact you don't need to know any such thing.

I certainly wouldn't hold a college degree against an applicant, but it isn't an indicator of anything significant to me. Except perhaps the ability to endure your ass cheeks falling asleep while sitting through things you probably could have learned on your own, sprawled on a couch with your arm around your favorite person, or fooling about on your own workbench while occasionally knocking the cat out of the way.

Most college graduates have traded years of potential experience actually working in a field for a piece of paper. Very few of them actually walk in the door looking for a job, having any kind of decent ability to apply their classes to the job at hand. If a degree is anything, it is a metric to cull, and not a really great one at that. Sometimes I think we need to go back to the apprentice system.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[MikeBabcock]

That's not as obvious as you may think. Many people in academic circles get away with not doing their jobs the way others think they ought or just being eccentric on the basis of their credentials. "Oh, he's like that, but he's a genius so whatever" type thing. If people believed she had strong credentials, its quite possible they didn't question her on that basis alone.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[king-manic]

Coleges vary in quality. I refer only to university degrees. There is a difference and Science vs arts is a huge gap in difficulty.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[belg4mit]

No. What is with you people? "She was doing a good job for 3 decades" She was hired as a
secretary, she's only been doing this job for 10 years. Yes, that's a a rather long time,
but it sure as hell isn't 30 years of stellar decision-making which ought to somehow
exempt her from the repercussions.

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Elemetary schools vary in quality too, apparently!

Re:...why did it take 28 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unfortunately, even more than most of society, academia is focused on credentials instead of knowledge and ability. It makes some sense, from a self-serving perspective."

As someone who's beein involved with admissions evaluations, that's nonsense. It is regularly the case that the admissions letter counts for a great deal in the decision, because it is a good demonstration of ability. And if I'm evaluating whether to take on a student for a project myself, I want to see more than their marks or other credentials. I want to talk to them, I want to see an example of some of their written work, perhaps a presentation, whatever. I'll talk to their references on their application. All of this because I know there is more to it than credentials.

I've taken on students who, from their academic transcript, don't look that great. I've done so because they showed a spark of independent thinking, enthusiasm, knowledge, experience, whatever, that adds up to more than their record shows, and which will count a great deal to succeeding in the proposed work. And they've done fine, and even exceeded expectations. I've also worked with students who have excellent records -- on paper -- but do poorly. Anyone doing these sorts of evaluations has that experience. It isn't only about the credentials, or even mainly. They are only a starting point for an evaluation.

So my experience is completely at odds with what you are claiming, and I know that people have been admitted *without* relevant degrees because they have otherwise demonstrated their experience and ability. It's rare, true, but that's because degrees are the standard demonstration that most people use. To demonstrate the same ability and effort as a degree using other means is a challenge, but it can be done. That's why it is equally rare for teaching faculty in a university to not have a Ph.D., but they certainly do exist.

If it took 28 years...

[grolschie]

...then maybe she was doing a great job anyways? I am not justifying lying, but if she were to lose her job, it should've happened years ago. If she hadn't resigned, would she have been fired after all this time?

Re:If it took 28 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

...she was forced to resign. it was a choice between saying that she resigned and saying that she was fired. the job was gone either way.

Work performance

[biocute]

Has she been doing a good job during all these years?

I guess it doesn't matter because honesty and credibility are, if not the most important traits.

Job performance

[Salo2112]

If she's been there for nearly three decades, it sounds like she's been doing her jobs well enough to earn promotions whether she had degrees or not.

Merit vs Education vs Scandal

[PresidentEnder]

Jones was named dean of admissions at MIT in 1997 and received MIT's highest award for administrators, the "MIT Excellence Award for Leading Change." She was also the 2006 winner of the "Gordon Y Billard Award" given "for special service of outstanding merit" performed for the school.

Several (unrelated) ways to look at this:
If she has such a meritious service record, why is her educational background important?
Wait, those awards are for people who deserve them, and education is the only way to be that good. The award system is flawed.
She only got those awards because she is a woman!
Lying is not to be tolerated, and it undoes any good she may have done.
No way. This entire story is a lie. Girls don't exist on the internet (even CNN.com)

Re:Merit vs Education vs Scandal

[Anonymous Coward]

Girls don't exist on the internet More to the point, I think, is that girls don't exist at MIT...

Re:Merit vs Education vs Scandal

[belg4mit]

No, you've conflated us with Caltech. MIT is about 60/40.

Mega advice

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and that you didn't need a degree to do well."

Can we get her to post into the "Ask Slashdot" section?

not just that

[minus_273]

she didnt just misrepresnet her degrees, she had none. She claimed that she went to various schools and had a phd when in reality the most college she had was some part time work and never completed anything other than high school. And the irony of this was this is the person in charge os admissions and very vocal nationally about how high school students should worry less about their resume. She got away with this in the public eye for 28 years and became the dean of admissions at a place like MIT. now that is impressive.

Boston.com has a much more informative article the summary does not tell you the scope of this.

Re:not just that

[lysse]

"And the irony of this was this is the person in charge os admissions and very vocal nationally about how high school students should worry less about their resume."

At least she was consistent, then.

Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[romland]

To be honest, judging by the replies I may have a bit more relaxed attitude towards this because I'm from Europe or something, not sure...

But:
Question is, why did it take 28 years?
That is not the question. The question is why does she/they feel like she has to go *after* 28 years of apparently doing her job? Who the hell cares about education at this point.

There's got to be more to this story...

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[romland]

There's got to be more to this story...
I say before RTFA. Oh well, it's not like anyone here expects less.

(less is more)

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[stoicio]

After 28 years education counts for nothing next to experience.
The experience *IS* the education after that period of time.

Academic credits, while indicative of what a persons interest are and
on what genre of expertise they have focused, are *NOT* an indication
of level of skill or competence.

Universities and Colleges are businesses selling a *PRODUCT*. Just because
I drive a specific type of car doesn't make me a Formula 1 driver. Likewise
being able to afford to attend math at MIT doesn't make me any better at
understanding hermitian polynomials or even basic statistics for that matter.

There are numerous people out there with doctorates that are
completely incompetent in thier chosen fields of expertise.
Their accreditation only shows that they can jump through hoops,
play the system, and generally keep thier grades above a pass.

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[LurkerXXX]

So you are saying Europeans don't care about honesty and integrity? Good to know.

Actually, I believe others from Europe probably understand perfectly. It just says something about you.

Her job was to judge people for admission on their academic resume, while she was lying about her own. The top tech school in the country couldn't really have that.

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[dosboot]

Lying like this has to be punished, period. Even if it were not for maintaining the university's public image it is still otherwise in their best interests for people to tell the truth when applying for a job.

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[romland]

...or it could be that I meant that I simply have never heard of the woman before due to being from Europe.

But troll away.

Re:Question is, why did it take 28 years?

[LurkerXXX]

It was no troll. No one here (except folks from MIT) have heard of her before either.

You said you might have a relaxed attitude about it (her lying) because you were from Europe. Back pedal away though if it makes you feel better.

Additional Reporting

[DTemp]

from The Tech, the student newspaper: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N21/jones.html

Re:Additional Reporting

[belg4mit]

Actually the Tech's article is incredibly crappy; a shame, I was hoping they'd get out in
front of everybody on this. It's no better than the local NPR news blurb I heard the day
before. On the other hand, The Boston Globe's (boston.com) article had a fair bit of
substance.

applying for a job

[pytheron]

I have some sympathy for her.. after all, she can't have been that bad at her job if she managed to survive 28 years. In fact, she's probably quite competent.. It's a sad state of affairs that there is so much stock held in a piece of paper that basically states "I can commit to memory a certain amount of data given several years". How many of us have been to a job interview, that you breeze the aptitude tests they give you, you wow the boss with your skill and depth of knowledge, but you get a sorry from the HR person "It's company policy to only hire people with degrees.. sorry". It's no wonder that people lie on their CV's to get in the door and past these narrow minded policies. Come to think of it, every technically brilliant person that I've worked with either dropped out of university, or never went at all. Every few years or so we'll bump into one another whilst I'm contracting somewhere, and these companies that did 'take a risk' and employed them without a degree treasure them immensely.

Re:applying for a job

[Anonymous Coward]

She lied about THREE fucking degrees. That isn't just lying to make sure you get in even though you are underqualified, that is lying to make sure you get in above the people who really are qualified.

Re:applying for a job

[Anonymous Coward]

No they don't treasure them. I have a number of friends who did not go to school after HS. I did yes they found jobs. Yea they got bumped up in title and got some raises for time served doing good work while I was in school. Sure I did not make as much as they did at first. After a year thats not true anymore. I get paid as well as they do and have been promoted one myself and then moved on to another even better job ---Because I could---

They can't most of them even admit as much. They have gone about as far as they are going to be allowed to go where they are with no degree and its a higher better paid place then they could get anywhere else walking in the door without proving themselves all over again for a few years first. Their jobs are secure yes, the do as good a work as somone with similar experience and a degree could but are less mobile. HR knows they got'em now. They don't have to offer any more carrots to get them to keep them, minor cost of living adjustments at best, no real raises and no more promotions.

Re:applying for a job

[rs79]

"Come to think of it, every technically brilliant person that I've worked with either dropped out of university, or never went at all."

I've noticed that too. I do know some people I think are tehcnically brilliant and have (advanced) degrees, but I can count these on the fingers of one hand. Yet I've met so many yutzy BSc com sci grads that are just hopeless.

Re:applying for a job

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT ... did they LIE to you about possessing degrees!!! You're saying that a degree is not necessary if you can do the work. Agreed. Your saying that you know of companies that "took the chance" and were pleased after hiring competent, but non-degreed persons. VERY commendable for those companies. The story here is THAT SHE LIED, and therefore she cannot be trusted. What else will we never know about that she fabricated??

Re:applying for a job

[Anonymous Coward]

At the same time, however, for every technically brilliant person without a degree they've hired, the must have interviewed 10 people that, with or without a degree, looked good on paper. It's a risk, hiring people. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it does not. As a person with 2 degrees (one theoretical, in music, and one practical in library and information science) you can roll the dice with everyone, or you can roll the dice with just the people who have degrees. Usually degrees mean that, at the very least, you're able to commit to four years worth of work, that you're basically competent (although not necessarily stellar) and that you have basic literacy (or literacy coping) skills. If it's a loaded, mixed bag of applicants, all looking good on paper, you can begin to narrow it down by setting an education requirement. Yes, you might miss that brilliant person that doesn't have the degree, but you're also protecting you from the 9 other nutjobs that applied because they saw the job posting in the paper.

Why it took so long

[Jazzer_Techie]

The reason that it took so long is that 28 years ago she applied to be an administrative assistant. That position did not require a degree. While her credentials should have been checked then, they weren't. By the time she got around applying for Dean of Admissions, she had already been at MIT for 2 decades, and it wasn't policy to recheck credentials for internal promotions. The lie was finally discovered because of an anonymous tip. Previous to that, there wasn't any reason to check them as she was quite competently performing her duties.

Re:Why it took so long

[Anonymous Coward]

It does seem fairly slipshod to promote someone to the level of Dean without checking credentials, especially since they clearly had no record of checking them before. If this happened at a large corporation, at least we'd hear a promise about new procedures that would prevent this sort of thing from happening again. But in academia, we just hear about how tragic and unfortunate it all is.

Re:Why it took so long

[TubeSteak]

By the time she got around applying for Dean of Admissions, she had already been at MIT for 2 decades, and it wasn't policy to recheck credentials for internal promotions.

I wonder if she would have gotten all those internal promotions if her resume accurately reflected her (lack of) educational achievements.

Colleges/Unis often pull in non-staff candidates for evaluation when they're looking to replace high level positions like deans and I doubt someone without any higher education would have even been considered without significat previous job experience.

just goes to show

[Loconut1389]

you just cant trust wikipedia to vett their contributors... I mean, after all, it never happens in real life that someone misrepresents themselves.

reworded: if MIT can miss that kind of lie for 28 years, I think people were a little harsh on wikipedia a while back when that editor had misrepresented him/herself.

Ohhh, so that's how it's done

[Anonymous Coward]

Recruiters keep telling me I'm under qualified. I was starting to believe them, and here all along I'm just as qualified as the big shots. I just don't lie as well.

Re:Ohhh, so that's how it's done

[Holistic Missile]

... I'm just as qualified as the big shots. I just don't lie as well.

Maybe that's what they mean when they say "underqualified".
;-)

Re:Ohhh, so that's how it's done

[flyingfsck]

Typically, 3 to 4 years of relevant work experience is counted as equivalent to 1 year of tertiary study. So after 28 years, this woman had the equivalent of 9 years of tertiary study - probably sufficient for her paper pushing job...

Re:Ohhh, so that's how it's done

[ceoyoyo]

But she's a liar and fraud artist. Do YOU want someone with those qualifications working for you, especially in a position of power? If so I believe there are quite a few white-collar ex cons who would love to help you with your accounting.

Re:Ohhh, so that's how it's done

[lmnfrs]

I agree that the parent is funny. But that statement is also true.

Before getting my current job I struggled just to get interviews, even when I was completely qualified for the position. I have lots of knowledge and experience, but no formal education. Perhaps recruiters assumed I was exaggerating my skills because I don't have an 'Education' section on my resume.

I finally got the job I have now, and am the most qualified person on my team (IMO). Another guy started on the same day as I, from the same contracting agency. He had an impressive resume listing all kinds of related experience and Web technology skills. It turns out his related experience was as a phone tech reading answers out of a manual, his Web knowledge of things like PHP are actually him installing PHP extensions and using pre-made .php files, and he doesn't know his left from his right (I'm not joking, it took 30 seconds for him to find the icon at the bottom right of the Control Panel window. The whole time I sat, with my jaw down, watching his cursor hover up and down the left side). And guess what: he makes the same hourly wage that I do.

Has anybody else experienced this or something similar? Are you completely honest in your application materials? Thanks for helping me realize my errors Mrs. Jones and AC. I always told the truth on my resume and just tried to present it as well as possible. In the future I'm pretty sure I will try adding a little bit of fiction.

Special situation because it's at a university

[digitalderbs]

This is a special situation because she was working for a university. Integrity is the most important value in academia. I consider it unethical that she maintained her post at a university while misrepresenting herself -- it's just like plagiarism. However, the degrees themselves obivously didn't matter. She was highly competent at her job, and if this were in another setting (corporate for example), this likely wouldn't be much of an issue.

Re:Special situation because it's at a university

[Oligonicella]

Actually, no on two counts. Integrity is simply the thing touted as most important in academia and you can bet your ass that she would have been escorted out the door if a boss in corp america found she'd lied to his face for decades. I've seen it happen.

Re:Special situation because it's at a university

[freepay]

Let's retire the "integrity" word and note the real issue here -- greed. Academia has long been given a lock on most well-paying jobs in the middle and upper-middle class. It's business model is selling diplomas, not learning; most students don't pay exorbitant tuitions and fees for love of knowledge, but for love of money. That's why faking the credential is unforgivable.

This system has failed -- no surprise since it throws away so much talent. Thirty years ago the disastrous war policy in Vietnam had been designed and implemented almost entirely by people with college degrees. They never learned, and now that tragedy has repeated itself as farce.

She did go to college

[Anonymous Coward]

She just lied about graduating. So, she was a student admitted once upon a time.

Re:She did go to college

[dshaw858]

She was a student for one year, I believe, at one of the three institutions from which she claimed to have a degree.

Or...

[b1ad3runn3r]

While she was good at her job, everyone must be subjected to the same standards of honesty and culpability. She made a mistake, and has benefited from it for a while. However, the truth came out and she must now, like she preaches to high-schoolers, accept responsibility for her actions.

Re:Or...

[thrillseeker]

She made a mistake

She obtained a high-visibility job that put her in a the position to affect the lives of thousands of applicants by intentionally and significantly lying to get her job - and now she and others want to call it an itty-bitty mistake - but only after she was caught of course. A lie is something far greater than a mistake. There are military officers who have committed suicide over less - but hey, this is the high-integrety acadmic world - blatant lies here are just - have a nice day - simple little mistakes. Poor little thing - there's got to be a way to blame this on the vast right wing consipiracy.

Re:Or...

[fucksl4shd0t]

there's got to be a way to blame this on the vast right wing consipiracy.

Nah. All falsified credentials are blamed on Wikipedia, aren't they?

Re:Or...

[b1ad3runn3r]

Maybe. I think this falls into intentional, non-malicious, possibly but not probably harmful, and illegal. Moderate speeding (80 in a 65) is a good metaphor (if of somewhat different magnitude). I'm not up in arms about this. Credentials get you in the door, performance gets your employers their value from you.

Re:Or...

[tfoss]

She obtained a high-visibility job that put her in a the position to affect the lives of thousands of applicants by intentionally and significantly lying to get her job - and now she and others want to call it an itty-bitty mistake - but only after she was caught of course.

Actually, she obtained a high-visibility job that put her in the position to affect thousands of lives by being damn good at it. Yes, she fucked up 28 years ago by padding her resume with degrees she didn't earn (to get a job that ironically, did not even require a degree). That deception was wrong, no question. However, she ended up being stellar at her job, and produced superb results for MIT and for the applicants and incoming students (and probably orders of magnitude more with her book on trying to de-stress college admissions). Pretty much everyone who has dealt with her thought she was the bee's knees. I'm not sure whether i think she should have been fired, lying is bad...but in this circumstance, it seems to me that the lie had approximately zero to do with her ability to do her job extremely well (and benefit loads of kids). Context matters, and in this case it's not totally clear-cut.

There are military officers who have committed suicide over less - but hey, this is the high-integrety acadmic world - blatant lies here are just - have a nice day - simple little mistakes.

Right, that's why MIT sacked her as soon as they found out about the deception...'cuz academics have no integrity. You are an idiot.

-Ted

Re:Or...

[ceoyoyo]

A mistake is something you make without realizing it's wrong.

What she did is called fraud.

Re:Or...

[ceoyoyo]

I'm amazed, reading all these posts, at how little willing people are to minimize what she did. She committed fraud. That says something about her ethics. She's in admissions... does that mean I can slip her a few bucks and she'll let me in? Or maybe I can slip her a few bucks and she WON'T let in that other guy I don't like?

She didn't make a mistake, she committed fraud. Now she's been caught and it's time to face the music. Getting fired is a pretty minimal punishment. Lots of people who commit fraud go to jail.

Re:Or...

[hey!]

Actually not. She obtained an entry level job and worked her way up through the ranks by being the best there was at what she did.

Does that make the fact she lied on her initial job application right?

No.

Should her years of devoted and innovative service be counted against that wrong?

I think so.

People lie all the time. It is certainly not a good thing, but not all lies are treated with equal severity. What makes this a terrible crime is not that it is a lie, but that it strikes at one of the foundations by which academia sustains itself. One such foundation is academic honesty: not claiming credit for the work of others. But this strikes at a much more questionable foundation: the importance of a degree as a entrance qualification for work.

Had she exaggerated her participation on a research project on her CV (which is not unheard of), the moral magnitude of her crime would have been greater, but outrage less so. Her crime was two fold: first against the person who would have obtained the job instead of her; second against the pretense that a degree is necessary and sufficient qualification for doing even relatively menial work. It is the latter and lesser crime for which she is being held up for shame.

The irrational excesss in the reaction to her crime is no better shown by your oblique suggestion that this is something for which she sould consider committing suicide. That is the kind of action that is spurred, not by a healthy sense of pride that cherishes accomplishment, but by malignant and false pride.

Justice without mercy is not justice. Justice does not consist of treating every crime equally according to its nature. That approach is a sham by which petty crimes are elevated while greater crimes are left unpunished. Justice is best served when humanity itself is served, and this requires a certain tolerance for universal human frailty so that the human good may thrive. The best people are not those with the fewest faults.

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

-- Shakespeare

Re:Or...

[Bloke down the pub]

The funny thing is, if someone else had written false bad things about her, it'd be just a joke - and we can't crack down on freedom of speech, oh noes11!

Yet she says something false and good about herself, and everyone wants to burn her at the stake.

Re:Or...

[ceoyoyo]

Actually, you can go to jail or be sued for saying false bad things about someone that are not true and can be shown to damage them in some way. Particularly if you're in some sort of official position.

There is a difference though. Her lie wasn't "hey, I'm a great person." Her lie was that she has specific credentials. The point of credentials and certifications is so that people can at least KIND of trust you without evaluating your performance over a long time period. That's why lying about them is a big deal.

Re:Or...

[Kelbear]

The case of this MIT dean aside, I'd like to respectfully disagree. I believe that justice is good and mercy is better. Delivering justice instead of mercy is not wrong, it is still good. Delivering mercy instead of justice is better. However, mercy all the time means there would be no justice. And justice all the time...would still at least, be just.

Coming back to a particular case such as this MIT Dean, I don't believe she deserves any punishment beyond the embarrassment of apologizing. She shown she can do the job and making a big deal out this doesn't guarantee anything constructive. However, now that the secret is out, she can't continue. Not because of some great moral error on her part, but for the maintenance of social order. If she can lie, get caught, and get off with a slap on the wrist, it's providing an example that sometimes it's worth it to just lie if you can get something good out of it. And without the risk of punishment when the lie is exposed, then only the honest will suffer because the dishonest will all have lied their way past the honest.

Like vigilantism. Where's the moral problem if the vigilante justice results in a punishment equal to the punishment that would have been handed down by the system? I don't see any moral problem. However, even if the vigilante is /dead-certain/ that what he's doing is right, and even if I agree he's right in that case, I would still agree with laws that discourage vigilante justice. Because that law exists to preserve social order. Even if he's doing what he thinks is morally correct, he could still wreak havoc if he's got the wrong person, or if he encourages others who are less discriminating to follow his example and apply more punishment than deserved. That's why it needs to be left in the hands of the justice system instead of a vigilante who is personally invested and may do tremendous wrong even when absolutely certain that his actions are moral and correct.

Re:Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jayson Blair, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were all good at their jobs as well.

Re:Or...

[qwix]

Actually, she obtained a high-visibility job that put her in the position to affect thousands of lives by being damn good at it.

Actually, and in short, she obtained the job by lying and she was good at it, but it's impossible to know whether somebody else would have been better at the same job, simply because there is nobody else to have had the exact same job.

And the fact that she was good at it seems quite understandable. From the very little amount of facts we are presented with, it seems that she was willing to do even ethically questionable things to achieve her goals.

c0m

[Anonymous Coward]

fa7al mistakes, a nned to play That he documents project somewhere during which I Numbers continue

Are you French?

[porkrind]

You sure act like it ;)

Words change. Get over it.

Re:Are you French?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GGP's statement was the opposite of ironic. It'd be ironic if the definition of irony changed to something that is expected.

Re:Are you French?

[DrIdiot]

That's not neologism. That's just stupidity.

Re:Are you French?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between words naturally changing, and ignorant people not understanding what they're saying. Also, since when does
French" == "Not A Dumbass"?

Re:Are you French?

[Dephex Twin]

But it is particularly un-ironic. Claiming that this is due to words changing is like someone saying "The current president is Bill Clinton", and then claiming that "words change" when someone points out this is not correct.

Re:Are you French?

[sgt_doom]

The French? Oh yeah...they're the ones who just built yet another super train (damn shame we can't build those in the ole US of A, huh?)...aren't they flying Tac support in Afghanistan for a goodly number of years now?? I guess it was because those USAF Air National Guard pilots kept bombing, and killing, friendlies (Must have trained with George Weasel Bush, no doubt). And didn't the French Intelligence people keep warning the USA's Feeb Bureau of Investigation about 9/11/01????

And wasn't it French investigative journalists who found out that Khalid bin Mahfouz's number one daughter is also Osama bin Laden's number one wife??? (Mahfouz was the one who bailed out Bush's Harken Energy - yet another failed Bush enterprise - lucky thing the Bush family is making so much money off those torture videos from the Bush Family Torture Chambers, huh?)

Re:Are you French?

[sgt_doom]

Oops! Damn! Meant to sign that:

Sgt. Doom, D.Sc., PhD, JD, OBE (may be fudging a little here.....)

Re:Are you French?

[jrockway]

> That's not neologism. That's just stupidity.

Unfortunately, 99% of people in our society are stupid.

I disagree

[geekoid]

they are both liars.
The fact that one of them wasn't caught for 28 years doesn't mean the other one deserves less severe treatment.

Re:I disagree

[Loconut1389]

you misunderstand- I'm not saying not to be harsh on the people who lied- but that wikipedia was harshly treated by critics looking for any reason to discredit wikipedia itself.

Re:I disagree

[JacksBrokenCode]

Wikipedia's treatment may have seemed unduly harsh but that is simply because it is still the underdog fighting an uphill battle. Put it this way-- Jackie Robinson didn't have to just show up and be accepted, he had to earn his way into a white baseball league. The things he had to put up with were much more harsh than for any other player, but that was his burden. Wikipedia is still the Jackie Robinson of information sources. It's good, but it's different, so the mainstream media has yet to embrace it. Being "as reputable" as other sources is simply not good enough, Wikipedia has to be more reputable (if such a thing can be done) to gain legitimacy.

Another major difference between the Wikipedia and MIT situations is that (and I haven't done the research to back this up so it's just conjecture) the person who originally hired Jones is probably gone. It's easy to assign blame to the single person who should've checked Jones' credentials, especially if that person is no longer employed at the university and won't suffer for it. To the best of my knowledge there is no one person whose duty it was to check credentials at Wikipedia and thus it was easier for the media to blame the organization as a whole. One person didn't fail, Wikipedia failed.

Your're right on both counts

[l2718]

As an academic, I'd be the first to tell you: (high-quality) academic degrees are worth a lot if you are going to do research in that field. They are of little value for "general education" and life experience. Attending a top college is good for your networking and your resume, but otherwise I'd say only go to college if you want the education.

In this case, she was clearly doing the job well. Since we are no longer trying to predict how good she'll be at the job, her lying is irrelevant on that count, and if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees). However, she was Dean of Admissions. As such, she was in charge of using people's resumes for application purposes, and MIT would be sending an odd statement to future applicants by letting her keep her job had she not resigned.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[billcopc]

It would have been doubly bad press had MIT not fired her, since it would effectively show that the college degree is worthless and redundant.

Me, I just wish there was a better way to gauge a person's proficiencies than the college diploma. As a document, all it indicates is that the person registered and theoretically attended classes, and the establishment was paid tuition fees (whether the loan is being paid or not). It says nothing about the person's work ethic, mental prowess nor marketability in the real world. You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.

I used to see university students walk in to the shop with their Ba.CS and an A+ cert, looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day, then offer them a 5-minute test: fix that rig on the test bench, and format the primary hard drive from a boot floppy. I always kept a pre-broken test rig for these cocky twits, all with simple "problems" like a reversed floppy cable, incorrect jumpers on the hard drives, nonsense BIOS settings and a disconnected 4-pin ATX plug. Dozens tried, none passed the test. I even had a few "experienced" techs that had been downsized, they couldn't get it either. When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds, and that's when most of them finally demonstrated the skills they learned in college: the art of bullshitting. They'd yap until I kicked them out, sometimes getting hostile or pulling a pity card.

I don't have much faith in the system, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I'm sure MIT's former Dean of Admissions will find success elsewhere, and with the experience she's gained she won't have to lie about her academic accomplishments to get a good job.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Orp]

...if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees)

Uh, I disagree.

I am also an academic. If I had lied about my degrees, it means I hadn't done the work required to get the degree. It means that I not qualified to be a college professor at any university (that I am familiar with).

Note that I do not mean to say that all college professors with degrees are doing good work / are good teachers, nor am I saying that you *have* to have a degree to be an effective teacher, or maybe even researcher, at the undergraduate level (I would say graduate level: no way). The most tremendous failures I have personally seen in the classroom are people with lots of "life experience" but who are not lifelong academics.

I also disagree about "general education" being treated differently. It's a sore spot for me, because I put a *lot* into my gen-ed classes (e.g., "weather for poets") and believe my research and breadth/depth of knowledge makes me a much better teacher than a temp. faculty member with, say, a Geography degree who is looking for a better job while "teaching on the side."

You say there are many "college professors" with no degrees. Can you provide examples? I've never heard of such a thing. Even our temporary faculty for intro-level courses have to have at least a Master's Degree.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[afidel]

The most tremendous failures I have personally seen in the classroom are people with lots of "life experience" but who are not lifelong academics.

I would strongly disagree with this as a generality. One of the best professors I ever had was a non-academic, she was a career professional who taught Calculus to adults at night. She was able to teach me and many others a difficult subject when most of us had failed to learn it multiple times from "academic" mathematicians. Particularly in technical subjects those who are the best researchers are often the poorest teachers.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[hazem]

When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds,

Well, it's pretty easy to fix something quickly when you know exactly what the problems are (ie you put them there).

I've done a lot of PC repairs and as you say, none of those things you mention are terribly difficult to solve, but I wouldn't rush to make changes to bios, jumpers, etc until I'd taken some time to study the system, figure out what it's doing and what it's not doing. I've seen enough strange stuff in computers that it would be foolhardy to just start changing HD pins or reversing cables.

You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.
There is a huge difference between doing science and being a technician. I worked at an engineering school where they thought they could save money in the IT budget by having the CS professors do the systems administration and maintenance. The plan came to an abrupt halt when one of the CS profs suggested that additional money could be saved by having the EE profs handle wiring issues, ME profs take care of HVAC, and CE's taking care of plumbing.

looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day,
Nice. Most part-time jobs are places where people learn the details of a trade, with a significant amount of OTJ learning. While you may have demonstrated that they lacked the specific skills needed to do your job, what you really demonstrated is that you're not the kind of person anyone would want to work for.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Firethorn]

A college degree generally doesn't teach you the nitty gritty.

For example, with the intentially fubared compter I'd probably end up checking the motherboard settings against the manual(if available). STill, it'd be a while.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[honkycat]

I agree with you that a researcher/teacher who was caught with a fraudulent application 30 years later should be punished, but IMO it's a matter of ethics rather than qualifications. A PhD is evidence that you're capable of managing a research program, but it's not the only proof of it. Doing the job for 30 years would be ample evidence of that capability and it's kind of a joke to claim that a PhD program is the only way to obtain it. It happens to be the standard route and certainly, if you're not capable of doing one, you're probably not capable of being a successful professor. If you just happen not to have done one, that doesn't tell you anything except perhaps about that person's priorities.

No, the reason that you should be punished and probably fired is that it's simply not ok to use fraudulent materials to get a job. It's unfortunate if a good professor were to be fired in this way, but there really should be no tolerance for lying on an application like that, and there's no other way to reasonably punish a professor commensurate with the gravity of such an ethical lapse.

Also, I don't know that there are many degree-less professors, but I can give you an example of one -- google for the late James Westphal, formerly a professor at Caltech. He had only a BS in Physics but was a very successful professor here. He is evidence that it is possible to do the job without an advanced degree, but it's going to be hard to get anyone to take you seriously.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[martin-boundary]

It's worse than that. An academic degree implies trust. It means that when some professor tells you something you don't really understand, your first reaction is that he's probably right and you need to learn more things. It means he's the expert and you defer to his expertise, or at least respect it (if you're another academic).

If some random guy in the street tells you something you don't really understand, your first reaction is he's full of shit.

If that woman tells you she thinks you won't qualify for MIT, if she's got a degree then you can trust her statement more than if she's some lucky secretary (no offense to secretaries) who just played politics.

If that woman lied about her degree, she's been abusing people's trust, and all the little mistakes she made in the past were generally ignored by people who could have said something but respected her for her credentials.

The point is, we don't know that she's been doing her job well as you imply, because she might have been doing a bad job but nobody said anything because they respected her credentials. Happens all the time.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Dravik]

...The most tremendous failures I have personally seen in the classroom are people with lots of "life experience" but who are not lifelong academics. I have to disagree. All of the best professors I have had also had 20-30 years of experience managing real engineering and programming projects. They were the ones who always had the answer for why any particular piece of knowledge was important or useful. They would also point out the things in our text books that were really nice facts that the "academic" author thought were important but didn't work in practice.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[shimage]

Don't forget Freeman Dyson! I think he's a particularly relevant specimin, given his views on the PhD system. On the other hand, he's also the exception that proves the rule.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I always kept a pre-broken test rig for these cocky twits

If you consider cockiness a problem, I have some unfortunate news for you...

Re:Your're right on both counts

[quantaman]

As an academic, I'd be the first to tell you: (high-quality) academic degrees are worth a lot if you are going to do research in that field. They are of little value for "general education" and life experience. Attending a top college is good for your networking and your resume, but otherwise I'd say only go to college if you want the education.

In this case, she was clearly doing the job well. Since we are no longer trying to predict how good she'll be at the job, her lying is irrelevant on that count, and if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees).

Considering the huge scandal that occurs when a researcher is found to have committed academic fraud (sometimes they can escape detection for years) would you really want to be working with a researcher who already has a history of lying for selfish purposes? How much trust would you put in a paper if you have to constantly wonder if the author was tweaking the results.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[ceoyoyo]

It doesn't matter. She lied about her qualifications, so she deserved to be fired. She might be the best person in the world at her job, but she's willing to and has committed fraud. Or should the Enron execs get their jobs back because they were pretty good at it (minus that one little bobble)? How about that photographer who faked the pictures from Iraq? Or anybody who's ever embezzled funds?

Re:Your're right on both counts

[DFENS619]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you don't have a university degree...

Re:Your're right on both counts

[l2718]

I think you are making an unfair comparison. Suppose someone has been doing good genuine research for years. Then it turns out they didn't have the BA they claimed they did when applying to grad school. Who cares? The research is still there, and it's still good -- and that's the main job requirement, right? Whatever the person did 28 years ago is irrelevant. Should this professor sit on the graduate admissions committee? perhaps not. But why shouldn't they run a lab?

Re:Your're right on both counts

[quantaman]

I think you are making an unfair comparison. Suppose someone has been doing good genuine research for years. Then it turns out they didn't have the BA they claimed they did when applying to grad school. Who cares? The research is still there, and it's still good -- and that's the main job requirement, right? Whatever the person did 28 years ago is irrelevant. Should this professor sit on the graduate admissions committee? perhaps not. But why shouldn't they run a lab?

Now I should admit that unlike you that I'm not part of academia so I probably don't have as good an understanding as you. However, I have to ask how do you know the research is genuine? A quick examination of researchers who have committed academic fraud on wikipedia shows that once caught a closer examination frequenty reveals a long history of fabrication, all of which was undetected until they were caught. Now even if you could somehow make sure that all their past research was in fact genuine (I don't know how feasible that is) how effectively could they continue since there is now a cloud of doubt around their integrity. How confident would you be of citing a paper they were involved with?

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Anonymous Coward]

Great to know that you completely missed out on understanding what people holding a BS, MS, or PhD degree in CS are supposed to do. So you have effectively demonstrated that people holding such a degree are not always capable of repairing a PC by simply putting multiple failures into a test system and having someone with a CS degree try to fix it. Great job. Stand proud. Now try to understand that people holding a CS degree were not meant to perform such jobs and move on. (Your comment regarding the fact that you were capable of fixing a system in seconds after PUTTING THE FAILURES IN YOURSELF is priceless as well.)

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Moe1975]

You Jack, are not only an ASSHOLE, you are an ignorant SOB - and it shows.
Out of the total number of PC's that come in for repair to most PC repair shops, just how many of them have "a reversed floppy cable, incorrect jumpers on the hard drives, nonsense BIOS settings and a disconnected 4-pin ATX plug" - just how many? MOST Windows boxes have Windows problems (I will assume you do know what those are) and/or power supply problems. This is from experience, and I lasted more than a day, more than months, solved every problem brought before me - but this is back when I had to fix boxes for a living, not anymore.
I know your kind. You have no degree - and you will never have one. If you did, you would not be fixing boxes for a living. Having no degree, you automatically assume that folks who do are "cocky" about it - way you would be if you had one - and now you must "knock them off their high horse" . . . which is why you have gone to such great lengths to both set up your little "degrade others to boost my own failing self esteem" system, and post all about it - nauseatingly pathetic.
I would bet you have not given any of the victims more than a few minutes to work on your little bullshit test rig, standing there the whole time, glaring at them, running your mouth to where they can't hear themselves think - as if paying clients would be doing the exact same thing . . . boy, just where and how do they breed "people" like you?

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Omnifarious]

I would be able to pass your test, but not in 5 minutes. I've put together and repaired numerous PCs. But I don't think I'd like to work for you, even if I did pass your test in the time allotted. And if I had realized that you had put all the problems there yourself when you 'leapt in and fixed the problem', I would get hostile and leave.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[epine]

You raised a good point. When I read TFA a week ago, it said she lied to obtain a low-level secretarial job she probably knew was entirely capable of doing with or without the degree. From that point on, she was promoted on competence, until she had reached a level where the integrity question couldn't be sidestepped once it came to light.

But here's the question: is her breach of integrity on the original job application any worse than students who take out student loans and then fail to pay them back according to the terms of the loan, despite the capability to do so? Lying to the bank is OK, lying on your job application form isn't?

Why did MIT require that degree in the first place when it clearly didn't impact her ability to perform the work? Institutuional degree-ism is obnoxious enough to cause a lot of people to consider lying for justice. The problem is, any lie opens the integrity issue, and the most successful you become, the harder the boomerang smacks you upside the head.

I lie on web forms routinely. My income level? Blow goats. Some 'requirements' aren't worth honouring.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Sj0]

That's actually the thing though, isn't it? If you knew it was intentionally FUBAR'd by someone either stupidly or maliciously , then you'd start like that. However, when you're dealing with ACTUAL problems, you start with trying to fix ACTUAL solutions.

In a commercial setting, if someone's floppy cable was backwards, I'm positive I'd either take a long time and a lot of effort to diagnose the problem or fail entirely, because the context is "It just stopped working". Cables don't flip themselves. Depending on the nature of the problem with the drive jumpering, I'd probably get it wrong too, for the same reason. These are "This guy is an idiot who was playing with something he knew too little about" problems. In the real world, unless you know you've got idiot problems, they're the hardest to diagnose, because a good tech will try to test for the most common failures or causes for errors first.

I'm not some fresh faced CS grad with no experience, either. I've been plugging away at hardware issues on PCs since I was a kid with an 8088, ripping all the jumpers out and putting everything together again for my 256kB of RAM(With the memory card to up it to 640kB even!) with those wonky half-standard MFM drive controllers and Norton Calibrate. The issue is simply that the problems the grandparent mentions aren't problems that actually come up in the real world, they're manufactured -- either by idiots touching things they don't know about, or in this case, by an asshole making a point at the expense of the truth.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Sj0]

I never understand CS folks who want to work at that sort of job. I've got a friend, I helped him with his resume, and he was making like 10 bucks an hour at CompUSA with this awesome education, he was the top of his class taking a bachelor's degree in CS in 3 tough years, and he had tonnes of enterprise level networking experience using top vendors. Later, he got an actual job, and then the education made sense.

Because "Higher Education" is more about Politics

[Puls4r]

Than it really is about what you know.

It's more about fundraising and research than teaching.

It's more about the staff than the students.

And finally, it's far more about a University's reputation than their actual quality.

Let's investigate everyone, for the good of all.

[lancejjj]

Question is, why did it take 28 years?" I know that I want my employer to continuously investigate all of its employees to make sure that everything remains on the up-and-up, and to make sure that all potential oversights regarding personnel are rectified.

In fact, since every employer should want continual investigations of its employees, we should just let the government investigate all of us all the time. If new allegations arise, they can be added to a centralized file. It'd be very efficient, saving costs and benefiting from economies of scale. Also, a matrix of relationships can be built. Are you a graduate of MIT? Then you could be a questionable employee, since you may have been given a degree due to this deceptive LIAR admitting you into an MIT program. Did you, like many inside MIT and across the country, believe that she was one of the finest admissions deans in the country? Then you are a FOOL, because she LIED to get a job, didn't have a degree, let alone a Ph.D. And so you should be fired, or at least laughed at.

Oh, I know some will complain... "oh, but don't investigate me - I haven't done ANYthing wrong!" Well, if you think continual employee investigations are a bad idea, then you must have something to hide. And you must be kidding yourself if you don't think they're already here, even within all sorts of otherwise pedestrian organizations.

This means one of two things...Wikimaster.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe she can become a contributor to Wikipedia?

What's the true nature of her resignation?

[Dr. Network]

Is she sorry she lied, or just sorry she finally got caught?

You know

[DarkOx]

As a Medical Doctor, Practicing Criminal Lawyer, Professor of Cosmology, Licensed Elevator Inspector Life Guard, and offical Breast Examiner; I am truely shocked that someone would misrepresent themselves in such a fashion.

Re:You know

[Stormx2]

...Licensed Elevator Inspector Life Guard...

You got screwed over too? onlinedegrees.com promised so many job openings with this license, and yet I've yet to save a single elevator inspector's life!

What I don't get ...

[KC1P]

... is, why would anybody lie about going to RPI?! "The 'tute screw -- no matter which way you turn it, it goes in."

(JW / RPI '88 through '92 but for god's sake don't tell anyone)

Re:What I don't get ...

[LordRPI]

Obviously, they even misspelled Rensselaer as "Rensellaer" the article. I wonder if they checked the spelling on her resume.

Still flattered that she chose to "go" to my alma mater though.

Re:What I don't get ...

[Eli Gottlieb]

Dear old RPI! ...And the many bitter memories I shall never have of thee because I turned thee down.

It takes a crook to find a crook?

[mangu]

Isn't it ironic that someone managing the admissions department had a fake resume? Perhaps she was good at what she did because she knew how easy it is to fake credentials. Certainly she was at least a bit unsure of herself at times, maybe she had to work harder so that no one would suspect her.

So, yes, she's obviously better than average at the *details* of her job. But in a job where evaluating credentials is so important, it is inadmissible to have someone in charge who doesn't try to follow the highest moral standards.

One More Thing: Quotas Don't Work

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time, MIT had an astonishingly low percentage of women among the students, faculty, and staff. So, when MIT hired and later promoted Marilee Jones, there was considerable pressure to not investigate her background. An investigation would mean one of two things: (1) her getting the promotion or (2) her being fired. The latter choice runs counter to the political pressure to promote.

The idea of hiring or firing someone on the basis of her skin color runs counter to how free markets work. They foster excellence. Quotas work to the contrary.

At this point, some racist will say, "Hey! Let's hire the best." In theory, free markets foster hiring the best. However, periodically (even for long periods), the best is not hired even in a free market. Why? Determining the best is very subjective. Many racists use the slogan "hiring the best" as a way to justify using subjective criteria to exclude Asians, Hispanics, lesbians, etc.

Again, the case of Marilee Jones is an example of why the identification of the "best" is too subjective. Give the same pool of applicants to 3 different judges, and each judge would likely select a different person as the "best" choice. Even though Jones was not qualified for her job, her peers at MIT could not readily identify her as a poor candidate. She talked a good talk. To her peers, she seemed to be the "best", leading to her becoming the dean.

What I'm saying that we should not have quotas, that the free market works (in the long run) to typically select the better (not necessarily, the "best") candidates, but that periodically people like Marilee Jones slip through the cracks. No system is perfect. The free market is not perfect.

I'm also saying that there is no effective way to eliminate all racist hiring policies. Quotas should not be used to stop racism.

Why she needs to be fired...

[Jeian]

They have to be consistent about their HR practices. If they don't fire her for falsifying her qualifications, they don't have any grounds to do likewise in any other case.

Well ...

[ScrewMaster]

Good, bad, I dunno ... but her daughter is rather attractive.

Re:Because "Higher Education" is more about Politi

[DTemp]

As a matriculated student in MIT's class of 2008... I'd have to mostly agree.

28 years she should have gotten the digrees

[cpuffer_hammer]

In 28 years she could have taken all the courses to get the degrees she needed. She might have had to pull some slight of hand to keep people from asking why she was doing it all again. Then the only problem would be the name of the schools, and the dates. She could then just say it was a clever hack.

No statute of limitations?

[rs79]

It's interesting that if this were a court case, unless it was murder or a war crime it wouild have been moot because of the statute of limitations. While it varies in the US on a state by state basis it runs from 1 to 15 years. In Japan even murder has a 25 year statute of limitations. I think it's six years for breach of contract in Mass.

People exagerate. That's a bad thing. MIT didn't do it's job either. An dher track record was steller. Seems like no harm no foul to me.

It would surprise me if some good attorney could't play the statute of limitations angle and get her her job back.

I'd wager to say though thst she was probably good at crossing t's and dotting i's in the same way you hire a hacker to do your security. They know what to look for being experts in the field of what you don't want.

I'd take performance over paper any day.

Re:No statute of limitations?

[Viv]

Of course there isn't a statute of limitations on this sort of thing. The issue isn't as much that she lied 28 years ago, it's that she had 28 years of opportunities to come clean, and instead perpetuated the lie over that 28 years.

It's not just one incident of lying. It's 28 years of continuous lying.

Re:No statute of limitations?

[Catbeller]

It's lying once. The 28-year thing is sophistry. She's probably never referred to her degree in 28 years -- and never needed to. Because it wasn't an issue. Her job performance was.

Re:No statute of limitations?

[ceoyoyo]

Apparently she was a bit of a diva. Constantly making up various credentials to promote herself.

Besides, the statue of limitations is a red herring. Perhaps she can't be sent to jail. That's irrelevant. Nobody is calling for her to be prosecuted.

Re:No statute of limitations?

[Pendersempai]

The statute of limitations exists because evidence tends to degrade over time, not because we forgive people morally if they don't get caught right away. If you are forced to kill in self-defense, you don't want the prosecutor to carefully curate all of the evidence of your act for 28 years while all the witnesses who could explain that it was self-defense forget, fall out of contact, or die.

Whether you have a college degree is a cut-and-dry question with very, very strong and durable evidence. Twenty-eight years later -- hell, probably even a century later -- the evidence is still accessible and decisive. The statute of limitations is not analogous.

OT: College selection

[Anonymous Coward]

No question, UCSB. Bikinis in January.

Well she has a few options open to her.

[Shivetya]

She could go and work at Wikipedia!

Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason they would look into her record after 28 years is that the higher-ups wanted to get rid of her. Mis-representating her qualifications when applying for the job gave her employer a no-law-suite way to get rid her.

bitter rejected high schooler

[Anonymous Coward]

how much do you wanna bet that the "anonymous tip" was from a disgruntled student (or parent) who just got rejected from MIT?

i went there and had a username (mjones) that many people guessed was marilee's (hers was marilee). so i got some (unintended) email that was meant for her, and i can tell you first hand how upset people can be when they don't get in.

so sad that her career had to end this way.

Re:bitter rejected high schooler

[HarryCaul]

Well...

I'd say people who couldn't obtain the correct email for her probably shouldn't be admitted to MIT.

Re:bitter rejected high schooler

[mangastudent]

how much do you wanna bet that the "anonymous tip" was from a disgruntled student (or parent) who just got rejected from MIT?

Interesting idea, but upon reflection I think it's a lot more likely to be fallout from her book and the national prominence she gained in and around it. It's my guess someone probably was doing some general research for an article on her WRT to all that, and stumbled upon the ugly truth.

For example, it would be awfully ... restrained for a disgruntled applicant to merely send in an anonymous tip, although they could have followed up with public disclosure if MIT hadn't acted upon it, and of course the latter possibility was at minimum implicit in calling in a tip in the first place.

Still, with her office rejecting around 11,000 students per year, your theory would probably have become true someday, further underlining the lack of wisdom on her part in perpetuating the lies.

Then again, given that she lied when she didn't have to (her original position did not require any degrees (that's not MIT's style)), well, to me that's very telling. I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds like the right thing (eventually) happened, sad as it all may be.

In college, you learn about false dichotomies!

[Tim]

While I am unsurprised to see the obligatory, reactionary, anti-intellectual slashdot response, I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out your blatant logical fallacy.

Logical fallacies: yet another part of a balanced, high-quality edumacation.

Where are MIT's values?

[DanielMarkham]

In the _real_ world, you perform well, you get rewarded. College degrees are useful, just like technical certifications, as a way of introducing yourself. A degree means you were able to memorize certain facts that were deemed relevant and play whatever game your teachers set up for you. Smart people, whether in a college environment or not, get absorbed and make a difference in the world. For some stuff, like nuclear physics, you can't get absorbed by hanging out at the local 7-11. For most day-to-day stuff, however, you need to be connected to reality as much as theory. That's not saying theory isn't important, just that those folks who change our lives the most are the folks that are able to connect information from all over the place to the common guy. Higher education has gotten so compartmentalized that it's really tough for academics to do this. Don't get me wrong -- I love the theory wonks, and we absolutely must have an ability to reason at the abstract level that a university education gives most people. It's just that context is important.

Given that preface, I'm puzzled at MIT's response. Obviously this lady lied -- so fine her. Make her make a public apology. It seems, however, that her lie cuts to the core of the value of certificates of education: do they really reflect practical, real-world values to the organization and society? Or are they laudable records of achievement which do not directly correlate with future value to society? If MIT allowed her to keep her job, they would be admitting that there are very important jobs at the university that really don't require a college degree. This is obviously too much for them, so they'll trot out the honesty thing. As if lying on a resume 30 years ago is the same as knocking over a liquor store. It is painfully clear that a) a degree was not required to perform a high-level administrative role at the college, and b) the lady, by any measurements, was doing a great job.

MIT needs to get honest with itself.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Viv]

meh, since this question is repeated ad nauseum, so I'll just repeat my answer.

It's soley about her lying 28 years ago. It's that she had 28 years to correct the record and chose not to do so; in other words, she was continuously lying for 28 years.

You can't have someone in a position of public trust lying for 28 years. It's just not acceptable.

It might have been different if she had come clean on her own, but she didn't. She perpetuated the lie.

That's the problem.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[DanielMarkham]

We all know she lied. The question is whether the punishment fits the crime.

It does not, by any measurement. MIT should care more about having the best admissions office in the world, not the petty failure of one of its officers 30 years ago.

Values.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in agreement! Amen Brother!

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Captain DaFt]

"We all know she lied. The question is whether the punishment fits the crime."

Ask her real victim, if you can find him/her. Her lie put her just a tick ahead of someone that deserved the job honestly, on merit, not deceit. That person lost a job that should have been theirs due to her lie.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Viv]

But it's not a petty failure of one of its officers 30 years ago. It's a continuing failure and exercise in dishonesty over 28 years by one of its officers that lasted until it was exposed by a third party.

The situation would probably be different if she had come clean on her own at any point -- probably a reprimand, maybe she would have been offered the opportunity to retire with honor, etc. But you can't accept an officer who has perpetuated a lie for 28 years and only cleared the air when caught at it.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Oligonicella]

The best admissions office in the world would not headed by a fraud, you know.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[DanielMarkham]

Let's play a little game.

Just suppose, for a minute, that she lied about something else -- say her age.

Would we still be having this conversation?

How about her religion? Her High School?

Maybe her kids, or her criminal history. Is it still so serious? Would it be okay if, as a kid, she had robbed a store and never reported it?

To make the argument that she is a fraud, you are saying that her fake college history was the single most important thing that defined her, that defined what it takes to run an admissions office. I simply don't believe that. She's not a fraud, she's a person who showed how stupid the college degree requirement was in the first place. If you want to punish her for lying, fine. But don't cover your head and miss the thing that's glaring in your face -- her lying is such an academic crime exactly because it's about something that is not important. Something that has no impact on job performance, but puts the standards and values of the college up for closer inspection than they would like. Talk about the nameless people she cheated out of a job. What about all the other people who could have done just as well in many other college jobs that were discriminated because they lacked degrees? Who is really cheating whom here?

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Sqreater]

"You can't have someone in a position of public trust lying for 28 years. It's just not acceptable." Come on. I bet everybody at MIT has lied about something or other on their resume. She's just a threat to all of them, and the sooner she goes, the safer they'll all feel. The problem to them isn't lying, it is getting caught lying.

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[mangastudent]

Anyone who thinks MIT has the "best admissions office in the world" hasn't been paying attention since at least the 1970s (hey, they admitted me in the late 1970s :-)....

Re:Where are MIT's values?

[Viv]

Everyone, huh. I'll take that bet, what do you want to wager?

And a possible reason why it happened

[pikine]

I don't endorse the view of this guy, but the summary is asking the question "why did it take 28 years?" and this short blog entry attempts to offer an explanation.

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/27/the-real-reaso n-why-mit-dean-marilee-jones-was-fired/

The fact MIT was tipped off by an anonymous person (why wouldn't MIT simply say it was an internal audit, even simply refuse to comment?) makes the story ripe for conspiracy theory.

She was known as a lightweight

[deanc]

Many people on campus at MIT viewed her as a lightweight. She kept trying to portray herself as a "Den Mother."

The odd thing is that, unlike most other Deans of Admission, at MIT and elsewhere, she had a compulsion to turn herself into a public figure. First she became a public figure on campus, when the previous Dean of Admissions wasn't really known. Then she started becoming a presence among the community of Admissions officials and guidance conselors and universities at high schools. Finally she went on a very public book tour and would have frequent media appearances, making her one of the highest profile Admissions Deans in the country. It's almost as though she had a compulsion to publicly misrepresent herself to larger and larger audiences, as her fake academic would be repeated at all of these venues. She probably saw that she "got away with it" in 1978 and had a need to keep pushing the issue.

Re:She was known as a lightweight

[Duhavid]

Many people on campus at MIT viewed her as a lightweight. She kept trying to portray herself as a "Dean Mother."

There, fixed that for you.

Re:She was known as a lightweight

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron.

Re:She was known as a lightweight

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

The odd thing is that, unlike most other Deans of Admission, at MIT and elsewhere, she had a compulsion to turn herself into a public figure.

Maybe it's not 'cause she found she "got away with it" and wanted to see how far it could go -- maybe it's because she realized that she was capable and able to go far without a formal college degree and all the accoutrements of traditional education, and she wanted to make sure the next generation of the intellectual elite would be able to focus on actually bettering themselves instead of continuing to chace after the same accoutrements.

Glad she's gone

[Somnus]

As an MIT alum admitted prior to her regime, I'm pleased that she will be replaced. While her lies are a black eye for the institute, her admissions policies and personal philosophy had done more damage. In an attempt to admit "well-rounded" students and compete with the Harvards of the world, she chipped away at the identity that makes MIT unique: academic excellence, creativity and fun. If that makes MIT too "geeky," so be it.

Moreover, her outspokenness reduced the dignity of her position and the process. Admissions should serve the principles of the school -- period.

Re:Glad she's gone

[JelloJoe]

As an MIT alum myself recruite during her regime, I am sad she is leaving. Well-rounded people are necessary to keep the place sane! You know how tough it is, and without some amount of normality, the suicide rate would have kept increasing and increasing. Well-rounded is fine at MIT as long as they are mentally tough. Without that toughness you are bound to fail out. This whole thing smells like an inside job, as if someone was holding this information not only over marilee's head, but also over the Institue's head. She did quite a fine job in the admissions dept and I hope her strategy at recruiting lives on. Your comments sounds as if the students admitted during her regime weren't "qualified" enough to be at MIT. I'll tell you though, the quality of MIT student has been increasing every year. The talent pool just gets better and better. You being admitted pre-1997 doesn't show that you are any better than any mit student admitted post-1997. With her resignation, it also does not discredit the plethora of students who graduated during this period.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Somnus]

I don't think that post-1997 admittees are underqualified, only that it's a mistake for MIT to seek the same students as the Ivies. MIT is in a niche of its own that is incredibly important from a historical perspective;
"well-roundedness" is a good thing, but is not the last word in what is valuable to an institution or to the future success of an individual. Over the long-term, MIT risks becoming an also-ran by pursuing the same admissions strategies as Harvard and Princeton, because it can never achieve the same kind of cachet.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Anonymous Coward]

Somnus, you are in error. Are you an EC? Have you been talking to prospective students?

I am, and I have been.

The kids today are significantly better than they were just a short time ago. Perhaps you've heard of the "boomer echo" generation? You fell into the lull - and given your lack of sensitivity, I'd be shocked if you applied today you'd get in.

MJ had to go - because her integrity was blown.

But don't suggest that today's MIT kids are morons because she was Dean for a while - such a charge is vacuous.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how tough it is, and without some amount of normality, the suicide rate would have kept increasing and increasing. Well-rounded is fine at MIT as long as they are mentally tough. Without that toughness you are bound to fail out.

I'm also an MIT alum. I was pretty well acquainted with two students who committed suicide at MIT during the last ten years. And I really don't think you know what you're saying here.

Re:Glad she's gone

[belg4mit]

Mrs. Jones doesn't dictate policy to that degree. Alas, for sometime, the Institute has
felt that they needed to compete with Ivy leagues; in part because some people ignorant
schmucks outside are prone to. Not realizing that if the kids don't *want* to come to
MIT as one of their first choices, then you probably oughn't try to twist things around
to get them there because the results are not likely to be happy.

There's well-rounded (circular) and well-rounded (Pepto Bismol bottles), both roll, and nothing wrong with taking a few HASS-Ds or continuing to having a massive number of
sports teams. No sane person is pushing for Tech to convert to a liberal arts school,
though that may be the end result of siphoning off those students and babying all the
Millenials/post-Kruger reforms.

I think one of the more unfortunate aspects of this affair is that it's Yet Another top
administrator position cycling through, of which there have been many in the past few
years. It seems as though much instituional memory has been lost, and the place is
chugging along on inertia.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Somnus]

You're attacking a strawman; my response to a similarly confused individual here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232631&pid=189 15029

Re:Glad she's gone

[HPNpilot]

I agree. I, also, am an alum from before her reign. Her desire to set the male-female ratio at 1:1 was a de-facto quota system which resulted in 1 out of 4 females being admitted compared to 1 out of 12 males. This, plain and simple, reduced the academic quality of the student body. I saw this when I was there and professors I have kept in contact mention it all the time. Some have had to lighten up on the course material while others have been able to make do with adjusting the grading curve a bit.

This year's application looked more like a liberal arts college application than an engineering school's. I just hope MIT gets a hold of themselves and moves more in the direction of academic excellence over artificial quota systems. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against women going to top engineering schools, but the reality is that right now if you want the best students in that field it will be less then 50% female.

My donations ceased a while ago and will not resume until this situation is corrected.

Re:Glad she's gone

[JelloJoe]

You wouldn't notice the ratio being even! Hell, half the women looked more manly than me ;) All kidding aside, do you really think the quality of students has decreased? The quality over the past ten year of MIT has greatly increased. The students today, continuing to succeed are the reasons your degree looks better and better. If you're against evening the ratio, I bet you're also against afirmative action. At MIT though, we all know that without afirmative action, the makeup of the school would be 85% asian!

Re:Glad she's gone

[HPNpilot]

I certainly noticed, and appreciated, the women while I was there. Both for their strong femininity and their different viewpoint in many areas. It is an obvious jump to guess I am also against affirmative action as this quota is simply a form of that. And yes, students are getting better every year (although this comes with a price - increasing mental illness issues due to the incredible stress). But MIT is not in a vacuum, the question is: how does the MIT student body compare to other universities? And I think what is beginning to happen is that those that were on a par are now better than MIT and those lower are catching up. I see MIT as the ultimate, the place to train future scientists and engineers to solve the toughest problems, an education that teaches us to really reach. There are only a fixed number of slots for students and if you do anything but base admission on ability you are quite logically ending up with a student body that is less able than it could have been. If that means it will be 85% Asian as you mention, then so be it. Maybe if that happened it would serve as a wake-up call to our society and schools in America. Nothing else seems to.

Re:Glad she's gone

[jim_deane]

Admissions representatives and administrators should be serving the needs of the potential students first, and the University/College second.

The best way to attract, enroll, and retain students is to find those students who are the best match for the school, and for whom the school is the best match. The closer one approaches that ideal, the more likely that any given student is going to select the right school and have a successful academic career. So in that respect you are serving the needs of the university/college, but only by serving the needs of the students first.

Admissions representatives and administrators who simply exist to recruit students ("warm bodies") do not do the school or the students any favors.

Re:Glad she's gone

[jim_deane]

I agree. I, also, am an alum from before her reign.

I hate to be pedantic, but "alum" is an aluminum potassium sulfate (or a group of several similar aluminum based compounds).

Alumnus is the singular form for a male graduate or attendee. "I am an alumnus of XYZ University."

Alumna is the female singular form. "She is an alumna of XYZ university."

Alumni is the male plural, also used as mixed-group plural. "We are having a gathering of alumni during homecoming week."

Alumnae is the female plural, still used when referring to a group of exclusively female graduates or attendees. "There will be a gathering of Bryn Mawr alumnae after the ceremony."

I see the incorrect use of "alum" as a catch-all substitute, even in supposedly prestigious alumni magazines. It causes me to cringe every time. However, it is amusing to think of the "alums of Harvard," a field full of amorphous blobs of a translucent white substance wearing mortar boards.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Somnus]

I think we agree where the rubber meets the road -- the school and admittees should be suited to one another.

I had a problem with Marilee Jones having a far wider agenda than that.

Re:Glad she's gone

[John Newman]

If that means it will be 85% Asian as you mention, then so be it. Maybe if that happened it would serve as a wake-up call to our society and schools in America. Nothing else seems to.

Because all of those bright, Asian-American kids were educated on Mars, not in the same suburban prep schools as everyone else at MIT?

Everyone is missing the obvious possibility

[Anonymous Coward]

She is part of an elaborate Caltech prank.

She sounds like a bully and a blowhard

[gelfling]

Who shoved her way in based on a politically sensitive agenda and once she acquired enough power, could crush anyone in the system who might hurt her. But to be fair, it's Dean of Admissions. Is that Dean-worthy at all? Isn't a Dean of Admissions a glorified cool table in the high school lunchroom? As long as she was admitting an acceptable number of the appropriate demographic, geographic and economic dispersion, what possible value-add can the role bring? Probably none at all. It's like being the VP of Human Resources Diversity at a Fortune 500 company.

University

[olego]

My recommendation is University of Washington. UCSB has two major shortcomings:

* it is much too easy to be distracted by the closeness of the beach
* the prevalence of alhoholism in Santa Barbara is staggeringly high

But on the other hand, I know nothing of University of Washington. Good luck!

A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[DaFork]

You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.

Especially since you don't have to know anything about computers to get a PhD in Computer Science. I one worked with a person who had a PhD in CS from a Big 10 school and was absolutely clueless. After a while I got tired of him using his advanced degree as a club and decided to do a little investigation. I discovered that their undergrad and graduate degrees was in Mathematics and their PhD specialized in a very mathematical area of AI.

In other words, this Computer Scientist had never taken a CS class! He was just good at algorithms.

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[Anonymous Coward]

And he was an expert. The problem was, CS wasn't what you thought it was.

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, he *was* a Computer Scientist. What he wasn't, was an IT person.

Repeat after me, folks, Computer Science is math. Replacing a bad hard drive or setting up a network is not Computer Science. (I'll leave the categorization of perl programming up to the individual. ;))

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[Hikaru79]

It's exactly posts like this that really, really make me wish Slashdot had a -1 Uninformed mod option. Really, where can I sign a petition for this?

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[sydbarrett74]

Mod parent up! I have an undergraduate degree in CS, and have been in the IT field for 15 years. I have *yet* to use any of my CS education in any of the IT positions I've held...

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[nanosquid]

In other words, this Computer Scientist had never taken a CS class! He was just good at algorithms.

Algorithms, mathematics, and methodology is what a university degree in computer science is primarily about. Programming and practical skills may also be available as part of a CS program, but teaching those are not the goal of a university degree; there wouldn't be enough time anyway. People usually learn those on the job (or in trade schools).

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[Anonymous Coward]

SHE not HE.

Re:A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[Anonymous Coward]

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -Edsger Dijkstra

Shocking...

[Anonymous Coward]

What I find quite shocking is how many people have posted comments saying that her lying is irrelevant after so many years. Since when is integrity irrelevant? What about the other candidates for that admin assistant job 28 years ago that were turned down because of her lies? The job market is very competitive these days and many of us have bolstered our credentials by actually going to college to get bachelors and masters degrees. We have worked very hard and made sacrifices in order to be educated and competitive in the job market. What this woman did should be an insult to anyone who has ever worked hard to achieve a goal. She got ahead by lying and cheating the system. This is definitely not irrelevant.

I resent that misspelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

"At various times she claimed to have received degrees from Albany Medical College, Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute, and Union College and we confirmed that she had not graduated from any of these schools."

Rensselaer* Polytechnic Institute.

I wrote to her once

[mdsolar]

I wrote to her once. I made a special effort to find out who she was so that I could address her directly. I wanted to be sure that a student of mine got in to MIT because I thought he'd do very well there. He was working in my lab and had shown quite a lot of understanding and skill.

This news affects me but I'm not sure how. My student was accepted and perhaps my letter had an effect. If so, Jones showed good judgement according to my lights. The qualifications for college councilor, admissions officer or dean of admissions are pretty different from teacher or researcher. Basically you need skill in discerning where someone will be in four years, not where they think they'll be or where you hope they'll be. This is the sort of thing that probably can't be taught so all of her qualifications for her job were expereince.

But, when I went to the effort to address here personally, I thought that I was writing to a person of integrity and I feel strange to hear that this is now in question. Recommendations and such have to be based on trust and that pretty much has to be mutual among all parties. The story feels just a little more bizarre because of all this.

She will be missed

[Piedramente]

As a current MIT student, I am one among many who are sad to see her go. She did a great job, and has received numerous administrator awards. College admissions officers across the country appreciate all she has done to champion a more balanced admissions process. I for one am very glad we have a more balanced male/female ratio.

Those that she changed MIT admissions policy by herself are completely mistake. She was asked by the institute specifically before she became dean to find a way to increase female attendance at MIT. She acted in accordance with and with full backing by the MIT administration's wishes. She was very good at her job, which is why nobody even thought to question her credentials.

Re:She will be missed

[Anonymous Coward]

As a current MIT student, I am one among many who are sad to see her go. She did a great job, and has received numerous administrator awards. College admissions officers across the country appreciate all she has done to champion a more balanced admissions process. I for one am very glad we have a more balanced male/female ratio.

So you're apologizing for her dishonesty and for a policy of discrimination via affirmative action. Brilliant.

Stick with Stanford, people.

Re:She will be missed

[Piedramente]

Affirmative action is not discrimination. It is a well-established practice. I don't apologize for her dishonesty. Instead I am willing to acknowledge the good work she has done here despite the fact that she lied about her credentials.

Re:She will be missed

[Anonymous Coward]

> She was asked by the institute specifically before she became dean to find a way to increase female attendance at MIT. She acted in accordance with and with full backing by the MIT administration's wishes.

She was asked by the institute to degrade the quality of students admitted to MIT for political reasons. She acted out MIT's asinine political agenda in accordance with and with full backup by the MIT administration's wishes.

Fixed that for you.

It was recent lies, not 28-year-old lies

[kipb]

She has recently highlighted her "degrees" in speeches even in the past year. It was as if she were ASKING to be caught. The idea that "the only lie was 28 years ago and I just didn't have the courage to correct it" is misleading.

Re:It was recent lies, not 28-year-old lies

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I think she must have told at least a few other lies during those 28 years. I admit it sucks to tell a lie, but I also admit it's damn hard not to tell a lie in a time span of 28 years!!!

During my personal life (only 26 years) I have told many lies, committed several frauds, and made MANY mistakes, most of which I really regret doing because they made my present life miserable. So I think the best solution is not to make those mistakes in the first place, and not to make those mistakes in the future, which is the only thing I can do.

Does MIT accept only the perfect people to be its staff, so that it can uphold its reputation as an academic institution of highest intellectual and moral integrity? If so, they should have investigated into everything she did everyday in her daily life in the past 28 years, because everything we do in our lives, how we live our lives, every details, does have some influence in our desicion making in the future. MIT should also have a detailed investigation into how she drives her car, how she raises her children, how she spends money, and what she likes to think while sitting on a toilet. All these things are very important, as they all make a picture of who this person is, and her INTEGRITY. :D

By the way, from reading the article, I get the information that:
1. Lying about her academic credential to get the job is wrong.
2. She did a very good job for the past 28 years. (Otherwise she wouldn't have been there for 28 years, or the integrity of MIT truly sucked.)
3. The requirement of GETTING her job requires the diploma she doesn't have, but the requirement of DOING her job doesn't require the deploma she claims she had (a fact).
4. So apparently MIT's integrity as a school of highest intelligence isn't that high after all. Or perhaps MIT should change their policy of staff recruitment for the past 28 years so they can uphold their integrity of policy making, of keeping the requirement of getting the job the same as the requirement of doing the job? If MIT fires her because she endangers MIT's reputation, then MIT has already endangered its own reputation because it has shown its stupidity as an academic institution of high intellegence. Who will now trust the people who make policies in MIT? Are they intelligent enough? Are they trust worthy enough that we can always believe they can make their policies logical and consistent? Who will trust MIT now?

I think doing these boring and stupid investigations is really boring and stupid. She did a good job for 28 years, she has apologized for the mistake she has made, and there's no indication she did any big wrongs in her work. So I think MIT should keep her. If she feels she should follow her conscience to resign, that will be a good choice if she wants it to be, but if I were MIT I would still keep her, maybe no longer with the same title, but definitely with the same work. She is too valuable.

It's really much easier to pick a person's fault than to actually live and become a very good person for one's self, with no fault at all. (But a person with no fault at all is truly a great person indeed.) :)

By the way, I think the newspaper should interview her more, to get a more complete picture, so people can know the whole truth. Yes, interview her, make it public, then everyone will be happier. I believe she also wants other people to know the whole truth very much. Yes, GO INTERVIEW HER.

A loss to the community

[Zatchmort]

As someone who was just rejected from MIT, I think it's a shame she has to resign. I heard her speak, and her ideas and influence on the college admissions community have been amazing and wonderful. I think she's made some very good changes, and I can only hope that whoever they get next will continue in that direction. It's also obvious, as some others have said, that her job didn't really require a degree, only experience. That said, I think it's clear that, now that her lying has been exposed, she couldn't be allowed to keep her position.

obviously, the reference is..

[porkrind]

to the French institute of language.

And how do you think words change meaning over time, if not for a misunderstanding of the original meaning?

Re:obviously, the reference is..

[Anonymous Coward]

u r *SMART*

Re:obviously, the reference is..

[koreaman]

It's certainly not ironic that a babbling retard like yourself would fail to realize that it's called the "French Academy" (= Académie française) and not the "French i[sic]nstitute of l[sic]anguage".

uh... so what part was expected?

[Anonymous Coward]

was it expected that she be blabbering on about not needing degrees, even though she felt inadequate not having one? I understand what you're saying, but I think the dictionary backs me up on this one:

Main Entry: irony
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

Jones's Husband?

[crl620]

This article is a bit inaccurate; Jones first took a job as a secretary, not "to lead the recruitment of women at the university." What's more interesting is that her husband has strong ties to MIT, and runs part of the Lincoln Labs - MIT's defense research branch. [Source: MIT Student Newspaper]

I wonder how much he played into her hiring and promotion...

No: G.P. is WRONG on both counts

[ClickOnThis]

Sorry brejc8. The correct answer is "neither."

A degree is important. It acknowledges that one has followed a prescribed course of study and has fulfilled certain testing requirements. And as |2718 implies, it can offer some advance assurance of one's ability to do certain jobs before actually getting "world" experience. (This is not to say that "world" experience isn't valuable, even in lieu of education: of course it is.)

However, integrity is far more important than education. Someone who is in a position of trust must demonstrate that they deserve it, whether they're educated or not. And lying about their background in order to obtain such a position shows that they don't deserve it, irrespective of their performance on the job.

A companion subject is that of qualifications, and their value for those who acquire them legitimately. Should we allow putative engineers, medical doctors, attorneys, therapists, police officers, scientists, teachers, etc., continue to practice after a fraud is exposed in their resume, even if they're good at what they do? You can't just "pretend" to be what you're not and justify the lie later by doing the job well.

Re: Reputation

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need a degree to be dean of admissions for a safety school?

Licensed Elevator Inspector Life Guard

[Wilson_6500]

Perhaps you missed a comma, or perhaps you've invented the most thankless job ever: sitting on top of the elevator as it gently rises and falls, waiting to dive underneath it to save some hapless licensed elevator inspector who happens to slip and fall below.

Mod parent up

[metamatic]

I'm also dismayed by the number of people who seem to think it's unimportant if the Dean of Admissions at MIT lied to get a job at MIT.

Then again, this is Slashdot, where there are hundreds of people who don't have a degree, who have a massive chip on their shoulders about the way they think they are treated. In any discussion of computer science education, for example, you'll have hundreds of postings saying that CS is irrelevant to working in software. It's not altogether surprising that the same people see nothing wrong with lying about having a degree in order to get around some perceived unfairness.

Lying

[hackus]

My take on this is that she lied.

Misrepresentation is never a good idea.

It does call into question though degree requirements to obtain or do a particular job function.

Obviously, you do not need the degrees the university requires to do the job she was doing for the past 10 years, let alone 28.

i think this is a good thing, because University Degrees are increasingly only for the rich and well off.

How many can afford to go to a University school and take 5 years off and go to class every day and accept the "financial serfdom" that comes with graduation.

It would seem in most jobs that I have interviewed for in my past, University Degree requirements where mostly "justifying" well, the university or government institution I was applying for.

Some do not even consider my references or accomplishments for the job I am applying for.

I personally believe that University Degrees or any restrictions that come with job applications are simply a method by society to control a limited number of resources. (i.e. Jobs that we can provide for societies members that have decent health care and salaries.)

I am having ethical problems as well with these sorts of approaches to job and candidate selections because University Degrees are increasingly for those who can pay, and those who can't, well....sorry.

Universities are suppose to be institutions of learning for the spiritual and intellectual advancement of the human condition. When you start preventing people from pursuing those aspirations over cash, I find it ethically problematic.

So when you are looking at that college graduate keep in mind, your looking at someone who was selected partly by the fact he could pay the fees, probably not because he is outstanding or the brightest there is out there.

-Hack

Re:Lying

[bitserf]

So, I should feel guilty because I'm working full time to pay for my full time course load at university, thereby depriving some more outstanding or brighter kid of their education?

Get real.

Re:Lying

[Eli Gottlieb]

No, I think he's madder at rich kids who pay in full for 4 years of Art History or Basket Weaving, thus bidding up the price of 4 years of Mechanical Education for the son of immigrants who really needs it.

But of course, this only really deals with the very top schools. The top schools have gotten more and more expensive *and* more and more selective about admissions. At the same time, prospective students have started applying to more schools and enrolling in the top school they win acceptance to, sometimes without regard for whether they can afford it.

Screw college loans and scholarships. What we actually need to do is build a few more top-class universities (or promote existing schools to top-class via improvements in faculty and additional research funding) here and there to increase the educational supply, making the price go down.

Re:Lying

[Eli Gottlieb]

s/Mechanical Education/Mechanical Engineering/

It's 3 in the morning here, sorry.

Re:Lying

[JelloJoe]

Degrees are a way for an employer to narrow down the candidates. Do you honestly think employers have the time to measure the aptitude of every candidate that applies? Degrees are a way to prove you must have some credibility

Re:Lying

[Anonymous Coward]

And that credibility can be bought. $$$$$

Re:Lying

[hackus]

Actually I am sorta Jealous. :-)

I mean, looking back at my University Wisconsin Madison days, it became clear: If you could buy a computer to put in your room, you could spend a lot more time on that compiler project. Sorta makes it a cinch doesn't it for a decent grade in the class.

Did I happen too mention compilers are complicated and take lots of time to code, especially if you never wrote one before?

I was stuck with the mostly broken computers in the computer lab, and to make matters worse, they only functioned decently at around 2AM in the morning. Otherwise they were excrutiatingly slow to use during the middle of the day.

Not that it mattered, you couldn't get on a computer in the middle of the day anyway.

It was a frustrating experience.

But little did I realize that passing the entrance hoops to get into Madison was just one part of the intellectual game.

The money game was the one I had to win. Once you get in, you have to STAY in school and I lost that one, unforunately.

I think it is ironic I am 40 now and going back to finish my degree work. I got a ton of money now but time is the problem.

I think it is a MUCH easier problem to solve though.

-Hack

What's Worse, Lying or Stealing ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if you are on the candidate search board for a new Dean of Admissions at MIT, and you are thus spending other people's money in your search, and you bother to ask the prospective candidates what degree they have . . . aren't you stealing ?

fovnder

[Anonymous Coward]

"William Barton Rogers, 1804-1882, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was educated at the College of William and Mary but apparently did not receive a degree."

Re:fovnder

[belg4mit]

Umm, not to be nitpicky but that says he was a professor elsewhere and a president here.
There's nothing about him being granted a full-professorship.

Re:fovnder

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to apologize -- nitpicking can be a wonderful thing.

Anyway, here is another webpage for you for you to peruse: Emeritus Professor of Geology and Physics, MIT, 1878-1882.

Of course this was the early days. There were fewer places to get degrees, and although the basic system of degrees in the US (bachelors/masters/doctorate) had been worked out, there were more situations where a person might get recognition for important work done outside of a degree program. Nowadays if you are doing research that you plan to make public, you might as well be pursuing an advanced degree if you don't already have one, so that you can get more support for your work.

Re:fovnder

[6e7a]

How about an example of an actual professor, or more than one example that justifies the word "people"? Bonus if you can provide a recent example. Times have changed.

Re:fovnder

[belg4mit]

Right, still no indication of the originally stated full professorship though :-P Wikipedia's
not much help either. This indicates that he did continue to teach, as does this,
but not what his title was. There are full (tenured) professors, associate professors, assistant
professors, visiting scientists and lecturers. All may teach, but they are not equivalent. However
this book, poorly written though it may be, does seem to indicate he held some title
of professorship. Which I suppose will have to do, as it's not clear the same distinctions
were made then.

Re:fovnder

[Anonymous Coward]

At MIT you can only become professor emeritus if you are a tenured full professor.

And I must say, I am amazed at this attempt to diss The WBR. He's the freakin fovnder of the institvte.

Re:fovnder

[belg4mit]

>And I must say, I am amazed at this attempt to diss The WBR. He's the freakin fovnder of the institvte.
What are you smoking? Read the thread man, I'm not the OP.

Better question

[psykocrime]

Question is, why did it take 28 years?

I think the better question is: "Who cares? She was apparently doing a good job, or she would have already been fired; who gives a f%!# if she lied about paper credentials?"

I mean, really, what's more important... having paper credentials, or actually being able to "get the job done?"

Re:Better question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, who cares about honesty and integrity. Completely over-rated.

Should this really matter?

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'm more of a stickler for the rules than most of you, and even I say that if she's done an effective job for all this time, does this lying to get the job really matter?

And if she's been incompetent for all this time, then the people who supervised and reviewed her work for all this time should be FIRED IMMEDIATELY!

I know what CS

[DaFork]

I have a Masters in Computer Science; so I think I know what it is.

The person with the PhD didn't have a clue about topics such as Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, or Distributed Systems because they never took a class about it or bothered to learn on their own. How can you be an expert in Computer Science and think that only one client can communicate with a web server at a time!?!

This person was only an expert at mathematics and using AI techniques to solve math problems.

Re:I know what CS

[brandonY]

Conveniently, I also have an MSCS, so I think I also know what it is, and I suspect you may not. I suspect this from your line:

this Computer Scientist had never taken a CS class! He was just good at algorithms.

Algorithms are a fundamental part of computer science. They're so fundamental that computer science was a discipline before there actually were computers. I'll bet you Ada herself would be an awful programmer today (until she got the hang of it), but don't you dare say she didn't know computer science. Computer science is 50% automata theory, 20% algorithms, and 30% softer sciences, like HCI and cognitive science. What you're thinking of is software engineering, which is often what computer scientists end up doing, and because of that they usually offer many, many classes on it, but don't you dare say that you're not good at computer science just because you're not a software engineer.

That's as stupid as saying that Turing was a hack because he wasn't MSDN certified (and dude didn't even know C++!)

Re:I know what CS

[DaFork]

I don't think you see my point.

I don't think someone should consider themselves to be an expert in a field when they only understand a very specific area and are complete ignorant of the rest. Typically, someone starts studying broad fundamentals and narrows their focus as their education progresses. At the PhD level, you specialize. Someone who is a mathematician their entire academic career and switches to CS for a PhD misses out on the broad range of topics which make you an expert.

Re:I know what CS

[xenocide2]

You have to admit the line "this Computer Scientist had never taken a CS class! He was just good at algorithms" makes you sound retarded, since the only constant among the broad regions you've described is precisely algorithms.

Re:I know what CS

[EveLibertine]

Actually he doesn't have to admit that your opinion is valid, and you declaring that it must be so makes you sound retarded. What the poster was implying is that the position that the gentleman held required little to no knowledge of algorithms, and apparently that is about the _only_ thing that the CS expert was knowledgeable in. A lot of people that I know whom have doctorates are strange fellows, several of them requiring a healthy daily dose of petting their egos. On the other hand, a few of the other doctorate students I know that are without these issues are the most entertaining folk to be around. It appears that either getting your doctorate makes you crazy, or one has to be crazy in the first place to want one, even after becoming fully aware of the torment that is required to obtain one. I'll tell you this little secret though. I think he sounded retarded too, but for different reasons. I think it mostly has to do with whining about having a job.

Re:I know what CS

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing general CS knowledge with specialized knowledge in one area of the field. He is probably an expert on the one area of algorithms/math/AI his thesis was on. That's what a PhD is. I know a few of CS profs who don't know thing one about web servers, document formats (such as PDFs), or even Microsoft Windows (they pretty much stay in the Unix world). Does this make them bad at IT? Yes. Does this mean they are not experts in the field of CS? Absolutely not, they are experts just in their own little corner of CS.

Re:I know what CS

[IamTheRealMike]

For what it's worth, I agree with you 100%. The problem is that "computer science" is so vaguely defined it's not even a useful term. There are only a few jobs for computer scientists, and even then, those jobs usually require you to be both a talented software engineer AND a computer scientist. We have a few of those types at Google and I have mad respect for their skillz, but they would never have been hired if they didn't know C++ or Java - it's that simple.

Unfortunately, there is a small but not insignificant part of the software development population who always had a greater love for the mathematical side of computing - in which there aren't many jobs - and were never that keen on the gritty details of how computers actually work. So they end up bitter and take every opportunity to "remind" people that computer science isn't about programming or systems architecture, it's just maths (ie, the part they like). They conveniently ignore that the popular definition of computer science is what's taught on computer science courses, which should be a whole mix of things.

Re:I know what CS

[abradsn]

I agree with your destinction between computer science and computer engineering. I just wanted to add a little more emphasis to the Computer Science end of things being more useless.

It's kind of like all that Math that you learned in HighSchool and College. Yep, I've used that like 10 times since then. And I bet that most people fit into that category too.

On rare occasion, I get to design a new algorythm. Mostly it is just compositing, or some small tweak to an existing idea. It's the sum of the parts that makes the application interesting. After the design is complete, it's mostly mechanical labour and work.

In my opinion, it's just sad that more people don't have the education to perform that skill well. It's not that hard of a skill. It's just not reinforced during school very much.

Let's analyze that with an anology. I think it is akin to a mechanice who reads about engines in a book, changes some parts around for a few months in great big hurry, and then reads some more about engines for 3 more years without touching an engine again during that whole time.

I think it's sad. What do you think?

Re:I know what CS

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'll bet you Ada herself would be an awful programmer today (until she got the hang of it), but don't you dare say she didn't know computer science.

Saying that Ada Lovelace knew "computer science" is ridiculous. At the time Ada was alive, there /was/ no computer science.

Ada's continued place in the history of CS is a result of the current political climate in which OMG IT'S HORRIBLE THAT THERE AREN'T WOMEN IN CS!

Ada had a second-year-algebra grasp of mathematics, and her only contribution to the field is that she performed what were little more than secretarial duties for Charles Babbage, because she thought she was brilliant and thought this would show everyone. She had a very shallow understanding of what the Difference Engine would do if built, and it's unfortunate for computer historians that some of the best records of Babbage's work were written down by a person with her lack of knowledge and overinflated ego.

Saying Ada Lovelace knew computer science is an insult to computer science.

Re:I know what CS

[linuxrocks123]

> Computer science is 50% automata theory, 20% algorithms, and 30% softer sciences, like HCI and cognitive science.

Maybe at your college. There's a lot of debate as to what's CS and what's in other fields.

I think that software engineering should probably be considered part of CS, and you don't. I think HCI is its own field, which incidentally is mostly BS anyway, and doesn't even overlap much with CS. You don't. The (top 10) college I'm attending has exactly one required class on Automata Theory, called "Automata Theory". If AT was 50% of CS, I think they'd require more classes in it.

Don't act like you /know/ what CS is. It's unfortunately a very vague term. About the only thing we should do is shout to people who aren't in it that "it's NOT JUST PROGRAMMING!", because we all agree on that.

Re:I know what CS

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Computer Science is a perfectly well defined term. The problem is that many people throw that term around so much, when what they really mean is something along the lines of a Computer Programmer, or similar to that effect. Personally, when I think of Computer Science, I think of Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Algorithms, all that good stuff. These areas require the application of the scientific method, and a GREAT deal of mathematical knowledge.

People going into Computer Science solely looking to learn C++ or, even worse, some incredibly high level language thats going to automatically allow them to get a job at some datacenter scripting perl and making six figures for a living would be better suited going to a technical school and getting their associates degree in Information Technology or some similar field. What Computer Science needs right now is people who put their heads to the grindstone and do the research that pioneers and leads to way for new technology to be created. They should know that that is a very very difficult job to do, and unless you like research, you probably shouldn't get into CS. Or at least thats how it WAS. Nowadays, though, I think the Universities are catering more to the programmer who wants a couple courses in C++, then maybe something in php or perl. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but I think that this isn't really in the spirit of what Computer Science is about.

Re:I know what CS

[Sj0]

I dunno, it seems to me you're attacking an argument he isn't making. You have to know something about programming languages, operating systems, computer hardware, to be able to create effective algorithms, because algorithms almost never exist in a vacuum. I do instrumentation, automation, and control, but they made sure to teach me about digital logic, electronics, and other things that aren't directly related to instrumentation, automation, or control, but are essential to being able to actually apply your skills.

Sure, if you wanted to spend your entire career tinkering with the worlds most complicated LOGO program it's practical, but otherwise, you're just building a brain with no arms, legs, eyes, or ears.

Re:I know what CS

[Sj0]

Computer Engineering is a third discipline. You're in for a hard time if you hire a guy trained to design computer hardware to do Software Engineering. The guy I know is a god in his world, but doesn't know how to make anything happen in Windows.

Who cares.

[JackMeyhoff]

If she was good at her job, she should continue doing it.

Re:Who cares.

[ToriaUru]

This is complacency at it's best. You have a duty to tell the truth, not matter if it hurts you, or helps you. Did she tell the truth? No. And it's come back to bite her, hasn't it? Well, serves her right. You can't "fudge the truth" and then expect others to live up to standards that you set, and don't keep. I don't care if she's been doing an okay job. She lied, and she should lose the job, period.

Re:Who cares.

[JackMeyhoff]

Come back to us when America's finest representative tells the truth. (the president)

Bigger question

[ThoreauHD]

If she did a good job for 30 years, then are College degrees not worth the paper they're printed on? The irony is thick at ole MIT. Maybe Hawking can deconstruct that chicken and egg scenario while still maintaining MIT's credibility.

Oh, and let's not forget really successful people. The richest man in existence, perhaps? Yea, let's not go there. The jist is, from what I've seen is this. People who don't get to sit on their sheepskin, work harder because of it. Quite the conundrum.

Maybe they can make a degree for people who don't have degrees and yet are more successful because of it. Or maybe we should judge people by what they do, rather than what their parents could afford when they're college age. Just a thought. But cattle branding is so much easier when you hire someone- isn't it.

And just a look back a few year, it's a good thing Abe Lincoln formed his own opinions in a log cabin, and that Edgar Allen Poe was kicked out of the University of Virginia for crappy grades. What unconsumer-like idiots these legends are. They would have gotten their work done properly if they had a degree from a certified/set curriculum.

Re:Bigger question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I agree with you. I think MIT should give her an Honorary Degree.

Re:Bigger question

[belg4mit]

We don't give honorary degrees.

In Soviet Russia ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Putin has been accused of plagiarism by fellows at the Brookings Institution who allege that large chunks of Putin's economics dissertation on planning in the natural resources sector were lifted from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics nearly 20 years earlier.

OT: In college, you learn about false dichotomies!

[Bishop]

It is pretty sad that a site that claims to be news for nerds is so rabidly anti-intellectual.

the secret of ivy league staffing

[mshurpik]

This points to a larger issue. People from good schools, become professors at bad ones. People who graduate from bad schools become staff at good ones like MIT.

How is this important? Because all the best psychology graduates went into private practice. The failures became school counselors at Virginia Tech.

Why did it take 28 years?

[_Shad0w_]

Why did it take 28 years? My guess would be that she was good at her job, so no-one felt the need to verify her qualifications.

Which just goes to show that the presence of, or absence of, qualifications tells you diddly-squat about someone's actual abilities.

oblig. car analogy

[TapeCutter]

Far too many years ago I left school at 16, one of the first jobs I had was picking tulip bulbs, a mind numbingly boring job. One day the guy who drove the truck that picked up the crates from the field suddenly quit. The farmer came down to field I was working and asked the pickers if anyone could drive a truck, I shot upright and started lying through my teeth and walking towards him. He walked me over to the truck and got in with me in the drivers seat. After I had spent a few minutes bunny hoping the truck and failing to actually to get it mobile, he said something like - "If your man enough to fess up now, I will teach you to drive the truck", I did and he kept his promise.

The fact that MIT has an excellent global reputation is evidence enough she can not only do the "driving", but can do it well enough that nobody thought to double-check her claims. /oblig. car (truck) analogy

Getting fired is a pretty minimal punishment. Lots of people who commit fraud go to jail.

I belive she "fell on her sword", and that is the "proper" thing to do in such embarassing circumstances ( Wolfowitz would do the same if he had an honorable bone in his body ). It would be a different matter had she knowingly put poeple or assets in danger (eg: doctor, accountant, pilot), but AFAIK she did the opposite. Insinuating that someone should go to jail for demonstratably harmless bullshit they wrote on a resume 30-fucking-years ago is so outrageous that some might wonder what similar deed you may be hiding? As for ethics - if you take them out of context they become dogma. Society itself does not use the same set of mores they did 30yrs ago, back then I was "living in sin", worse still I was freinds with an openly gay guy.

BTW: The woman I was living with became my wife for 20yrs, the gay guy got into hard drugs and died of a heroine overdose, the tulip bulb season ended and I got a "respectable" job hacking down 350yr old trees in a temperate rainforest.

Re:oblig. car analogy

[ceoyoyo]

She didn't tell an innocuous lie once thirty years ago on her resume and then forget she'd told that lie. That could be forgiven. She lied, at least by omission, EVERY DAY since that day. Well, maybe not on some weekends.

When she started her new job and they first painted "Dr. M Jones PhD" on her door, she lied (or she lied when she told them she was modest and didn't want anything but her name painted on the door). Every time she came into her office PAST that sign, she lied. When her book came out, she lied. Whenever a bio like this (http://www.mitadmissions.org/Marilee.shtml) talking about her having been "trained as a scientist" came out, she lied. And from accounts of people who've posted here these weren't few and far between. The linked article itself says she made up three different degrees, "at various times." Not to mention she was a dean at an institution where you get expelled for copying an essay. She made up her entire academic career!

Here's a fun article where she says parents shouldn't help their children with the applications process, certainly not writing their essays for them: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/20 03-01-05-jones_x.htm

Tag this "Irony"

[The_mad_linguist]

Someone should tag this as irony.

Once again...

[Sqreater]

...we see "Emperor Credentials" has no clothes. I wonder how many brilliant men and women have been denied access to an MIT education based on the delusion that they actually can identify the excellent from paper?

Re:Once again...

[mangastudent]

I wonder how many brilliant men and women have been denied access to an MIT education based on the delusion that they actually can identify the excellent from paper?

A very large number; I would guess at least a thousand a year. If the figures someone quoted on the quota for women were correct---1 in 4 admitted vs. 1 in 12 for men---rather a lot of men.

The fundamental problem, however, is that MIT just can't admit all the students who are qualified and who would benefit from an MIT education. The people who are involved in admissions (I have a good friend who is, although not in the office) know full well this, and it breaks their hearts, but they only have about a thousand slots.

Ignoring the issue of maintaining quality, MIT simply doesn't have the space or money to significantly bulk up, plus it would be unwise for those who realize its true mission, it's not like science and engineering degrees are rising in perceived value (MIT's decades long hesitation to bulk up EECS is now looking very wise), so this problem will persist.

Shit leopards

[Anonymous Coward]

..can't change their shit spots..

There has been much rotten at MIT, from the suicide rate, to historical under promotion/payment of women, to the low gift rate from grad students, to their lack of policies to protect fucked over students.

So it's not about whether this woman can do the job. The same idiots that hired her were responsible for her rewards. Instead this fraud has made the final decision on thousands of students, staining their degree with the shit of her lies.

She should have been fired

[pacalis]

She should not have been given the opportunity to resign. She should have been fired, her pension stripped. Unfortunaetly, MIT hardly has any specific policies to police corrupt faculty so they are probably lucky she resigned.

The students of MIT are it's great resource, but MIT doesn't protect them at all. Apparently that now applies to applicant pool.

Re: Reputation

[mangastudent]

Why would you need a degree to be dean of admissions for a safety school? [Caltech]

Very funny, but while Caltech is generally considered to be the superior science school (although check out the current USNews ratings of graduate science programs, rather surprising!), it's nothing compared to MIT in engineering, and I don't think either schools even pretend to compete against each other in the latter.

When was the last time you heard of something interesting in the general area of CS come out of Caltech? Only thing I can think of is Wolfram's first mathematics program (SMP, although that came from their Physics department), and Caltech screwed up the licensing of that (in the early '80s) so badly he decamped and eventually rewrote it from scratch.

Sounds a bit like how the U. of Pennsylvania in 1946 destroyed their chance to become a world leader in computer design and development. While a lot of professors don't like MIT's technology licensing program (especially before it got reformed from its total incompetence for all parties concerned) it is at least well established and understood by all parties concerned.

I think it matters if faculty lie

[supercrisp]

I don't care if they're good at their job. If they lie about credentials, research, or anything else that matters, they should be canned. This is quite simply so that people with qualifications who aren't liars can get the job. There are people beating the doors down for these jobs. And such lying might well be the tip of the iceberg. At any rate, such a lack of integrity should be punished, not winked at, especially given the cynicism in industry, politics, the media, you name the spot, about lying.

Those degrees are worth something. I dont' think it's right for someone to lie about their work and have the lie accepted, effectively peeing in the face of everyone who actually DID the work.

I also think hysterics like Gilcrhist here the UI should be canned. I think faculty who abuse grad students should be canned. The list goes on. I'll summarize it: there are a lot of incompetent, lazy, cruel, idiotic, arrogant, dishonest, or greedy faculty who should be canned. There are simply too many good young people in these fields. Good lord, tenure is great for protecting Frankenstein from the torch-bearing mob, but I wish there were a way to clean up all the dead wood in our universities.

IIT Diploma

[HungWeiLo]

One time, I happened upon the resume of our top honcho at our Bangalore office. It says that he graduated from "IIT". I found it strange that a person who graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology would simply abbreviate the school's name. Most would think to write down the name in its entirety to milk it for all it's worth.

A google search or two later, I saw that "IIT" meant online degree from "Illinois Institute of Technology". Quite different than the other IIT.

Technically, he didn't lie. :-)

Therefore

[Grindalf]

If one US acedemic is lying about their qualifications, and a high profile one at that, it is wise to assume potentially ALL US acedemic personnel are lying about their qualifications as there is clearly no valid vetting process to prove otherwise. Is this a job for the NSA? hmmmm...

If bill gates were to teach ...

[tomhudson]

Would someone like Bill Gates, who has three honorary doctorates cause an educational institution to lose their accreditation if he were to teach there?

If he were to be teaching computer security or safe coding practices, what do YOU think?

On the other hand, if he were to be teaching Propaganda 101 ...

grounds for a lawsuit?

[nugas]

I'm suing for wrongful admission. Someone with valid credentials would have sent me packing.

It needs to be said ...

[tomhudson]

It has to be said

1. Richard Stallman said that this won't happen again if MIT licenses their degrees under the new GPLv3.

2. In Soviet MIT, resume terminates YOU!

3. When asked to comment, the former Dean said "Only old Koreans need resumes."

4. Then Netcraft confirmed it - "MIT Dean of Admissions dying ..."

5. SCO announced they'll sue both the former dean and MIT for violation of their "Intellectual Property" - specifically, "method and procedure to obtain money you don't have the paperwork for", citing their lawsuits against Novell and IBM even though SCO doesn't have the copyrights to Unix, or any documented proof. BF&S took the lawsuit - fees are capped at $2.47 or SCO's net worth, whichever is greater.

6. Fox is making a movie of the week about the whole scandal - they're trying to get Nathalie Portman to do the "younger Dean of Admissions" with hot grits

7. When told the news, Steve Ballmer misunderstood, and thought that MIT had been bought by Google. "I'll f*cking bury them! I've buried better schools than MIT!" New chairs have been ordered.

8. The Department of Homeland Security raised the threat level to red, and sent Immigration to arrest the former Dean. "We heard she's an undocumented worker; she's obviously a long-term mole, probably from the former Soviet Union, if she's been there for 28 years. We're working now to see which terrorist organisation she's currently aligned with."

9. Steve Jobs announced his new product at MacWorld - the iDegree. It will allow you to download your favourite transcripts, grades, courses, and graduate degrees into your own iResume.

10. [x] "I have a Cowboyneal Degree" said the Dean.

Better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I say she starts a company with Doctor Robert "a new fact has now become painfully clear to me: you don't say you have the Ph.D unless you REALLY have the Ph.D" Cringely.

Let's not forget...

[gillbates]

What a college degree shows:

• It doesn't show that you are smart. Rather, just that you are not dumb.
• It shows that you can tolerate BS for a considerable length of time.
• It shows you can work with eccentric and sometimes assinine people.
• It shows you can learn how to work the system.
• It shows you have the perseverance to stick with something long enough to finish it.
• It shows you have the capability to learn new things. So what if your classes don't apply to the real world - at least you've demonstrated the capability to learn how the real world works.
• It shows that you take initiative to get things done, and can tackle challenges beyond your immediate ability to solve.
• It shows you can work independently, without immediate supervision.

The reason employers like college degrees is not merely because it shows the candidate's intellectual ability. The college experience happens to filter out those people who would not be well-suited to a desk job, where you have to take initiative to get things done, to work without supervision, and keep yourself current in the discipline.

degree holder handed out promotions like candy?

[walterbyrd]

"managers hand out promotions like candy to a degree holder"

Not from what I've seen in my 27 years of professional experience in IT.

I have a friend who started out in IT the time as I did. He never even graduated high-school, I went on to complete 8 years of post-secondary education, completing a degree in business, and a degree in math with a concentration in comp. sci. Then I took enough extra units for a degree in comp. sci. and completed graduate work in project management, and about half a dozen certs. And I worked in IT while I completed my education.

My friend earns twice as much as I do. While I was wasting my time, effort, and money, on formal educatiion - which is useless for IT - my friend could concentrate on getting valuable experience. For me, trying to study, and work, made both suffer.

Look at the job boards - they want experience in several specializations, they don't care about formal education.

I have worked in a lot of places, I have never seen "managers hand out promotions like candy to a degree holder." Usually, I see degree and non-degree working shoulder to shoulder, getting the same pay. Only the guy with degree is older, and poorer - if he had to put himself though.

The thing that leaps out at me in comments is

[Catbeller]

Where is the compassion, mercy, a sense of humor? Her life is destroyed. For a rule. Her performance wasn't an issue.

Rules are made to serve people. We don't live to serve the rules. You all seem take a deep pleasure in hurting people.

Re:The thing that leaps out at me in comments is

[Anonymous Coward]

In descending order of importance as to why I feel no sympathy for her:

1. I hate the liberal idiocy in college admissions that prioritizes being a minority or (for tech schools) woman over the qualifications of the applicant.

2. She's a liar and a fraud. I don't like liars and frauds. I like it when bad things happen to them. They deserve it. She deserved it.

3. I was denied admission to MIT as an undergraduate, and while my experience at the college I'm attending has since convinced me that going to MIT would have given me an inferior education anyway, it still gives me a little personal schadenfreude to see someone at least partially responsible for insulting me go down.

Re:The thing that leaps out at me in comments is

[belg4mit]

You need a fucking clue.

1. Affirmative action in general, but especially at MIT, is not about selecting for non-standard groups except when the candidates are otherwise the same.

2. Not eloquent, but fine.

3. See opening sentence.

Mod parent up

[SwingGeek]

Seriously, this should be rated 5.

I should point out though, that according to the headline, she wasn't fired. She resigned.
So it may not be a question of justice in this case as much as her own embarrassment.

Still, nicely said.

Dean of admissions admits wrongdoing

[KingKaneOfNod]

Just doing her job.

This is what you get with exclusivism.

[sethstorm]

Given the games with admissions, maybe it is time to start thinking about removing exclusivity from higher education versus adding more? The only good thing out of this would be to get a replacement who could work towards this goal by discouraging "class building". At this point, it'd be better to take a hit in ratings, and turn the focus on the academic part(not the financial or exclusivist part) - where one has only the focus to learn.

The other option would just be that one would be only able to declare that one has obtained a degree, but cannot declare where. If there are any concerns of someone's reputation, have them take it up with the relevant authorities who could provide the yes/no answer (and nothing more).