Sridhar Vembu’s Blog

From today’s news (courtesy WSJ):

The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resigned after admitting she misrepresented her academic degrees, the university announced today.

The dean, Marilee Jones, had worked at the university since 1979 and served as dean of admissions since 1998. She has been an outspoken advocate of reducing the stress of university admissions and had served on the board of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

In a statement released by the university, Ms. Jones said, “I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.

“I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the MIT community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

I don’t condone lying on the resume. Some punishment is warranted for the lying. With that stated up front, let’s think this through a little bit. For 28 years, she was doing a fine job. Then they find out that she falisified her academic degree in her original resume 28 years ago, and so she is let go ( “resigned” but presumably not very voluntarily). Does that means she wasn’t doing a good job all these years? But then if they ignore the lie and let her continue, wouldn’t that mean they are condoning lying on the resume? What is the solution to this conundrum?

Clearly, when she applied for the job, she felt confident enough that she could do the job, faked her resume, got the job. 28 years is sufficient time to evaluate someone’s ability to do the job, I assume. So what would I do in this situation, if I were the President of MIT?

First, she should pay a price for lying on the resume. I think the public humiliation of this incident being exposed is good enough punishment. I would let her keep her job. That would be a lesson in human fraility and a lesson in forgiveness to students, a bigger lesson than any number of moral lectures. Jesus and casting that first stone come to mind. A contrite and humble Dean of Admissions is anyday preferable to a suitably-credentialed, moralistic one. She would have genuine empathy for students who have different backgrounds, and different abilities. MIT would get a richer student body as a result.

As a university, I would go beyond letting her keep her job. To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn’t feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn’t they? Didn’t she work out OK for 28 years? Then why pretend that the degree was actually needed in order for her to perform her job?

Here is the reason to maintain that pretence: the university is in the degree granting business, so if they come out and say they don’t need formal credentials from applicants for jobs, they would be sending the wrong signal to their “customers” i.e prospective students. Yet, if they are actually intellectually honest, that is what they would do. Instead, predictably, they will convert this into a morality tale for students.

If you are a really smart MIT student, I encourage you to ask your administration deeper questions: “If we didn’t find out all these years, based on her job performance, that she didn’t have the degree she claimed she had, why does the degree matter suddenly now? What was the impact of her not having a degree on her job performance? Why shouldn’t students draw the real lesson that the university really wants to protect the economic value, to itself, of degrees it grants, but disguise that self-interested action under the cloak of a morality tale for students?” And be suspicious of faculty and administration who moralize about this issue, because there is an inherent conflict of interest for them here, and the easiest way to handle that conflict is to moralize.

The smart MIT student should realize, of course, that there are countless numbers of pioneers in this industry, and others, who don’t have degrees. They should give thanks to the capitalistic system, that sorts out people’s real merit in the market place, based on real job performance, rather than based on paper certificates that capture a very narrow slice of a person’s ability. Bill Gates could never have been the Dean of Admissions at Stanford, but the Computer Science building at Stanford carries his name. There is a lesson there somewhere. Don’t let the faculty brainwash you otherwise.