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

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...

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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

[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

[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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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

[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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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.