Perils of Credentialism - MIT Example
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.
This comment is probably not directly related to this post but I think it is generally relevant to the theme of this post and the previous one on “no-asshole-rule”.
I have always wondered why in almost every “public situation of consequence” there always seems to be two sets of people involved - on one side, the person who tried doing something different and probably failed and another whole set of people with criticisms, witticisms, I-told-you-so blogs/speeches/analysis on the other.
The CEO who launches a radical new product that fails and a whole trove or experts, analysts, wall-street-commission-making varieties giving advice on why it failed and what could have been done to make it better. I am not trying to create heroes or villains here, in fact sometimes I think what the critics say are true and so obvious, and it painful to think why the otherwise smart CEO could not have seen it the same way.
I look at a great many companies, institutions, nations doing things that are slowly but surely heading for disaster but their otherwise capable leaders are not doing anything to stop that. Why… Why… Why…
This question has always troubled me, why does something seem so obviously wrong when it has been tried and failed not when it was being created.
On an unrelated note I got around to reading about computational complexity - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory
This is very interesting subject in itself. I must confess that I am very bad at math and hate anything math that has symbols in it (which pretty much leaves just addition and subtraction as my fields of expertise) but I try. So though I don’t understand everything about complexity theory I read it aloud many time in the fiant hope that somehting would stick. By now I think know enough to understand the classification of problems.
As I was learning this, somewhere a chord struck and I realized that “computational complexity” could have some relation to the problem that I was pondering about earlier - the problem of the “creator” and the “critic”.
Why is it so easy to “critique” that even laymen are able to do it but the “creators” (CEOs, presidents)who are obviously smarter not able anticipate the points that the critics use and avoid them in the first place (somtimes also called as the hindsight problem).
Here is what I think the reason is - all creation, anything - a great speech, drafting public policy, launching a new product are all NP problems. The creators are tasked with finding solutions while the critics have to just check if the solutions are right or wrong. If you know the nature of these problems you will understand why creators have a tough job and seem to fail for so many obvious reasons while critics are so easily able to almost always say “this is where it went wrong”.
By definition problem of this class do not have a set method in finite time to find a solution, but given a solution it is trivial to test and see if the solution is right or wrong.
So every creator when he dreams up something and set out to do it stands alone facing an unending sea of decision points - each choice takes he down a path from which he may not be able to return. He tries to do his best given the data available at that time, his intuition and sometimes sheer grit and determination and ends up with either a success or failure.
Then the critic has to just come in - retrace the path, go to each decision point and give one (obviously) better choice at each point and say “this decision was wrong”, “it should have been done this way”, secure in the knowledge that no one is going to try his suggestions and confront him with the consequences. Sad but true ….
I do sometimes look at real problems this way in my professional life to see who has the tougher challenge and try to lend some support to that side - because at the end of the day a world of creators without critic is still imaginable but the other way round cannot just exist.
- kinger
Here is what I think the reason is - all creation, anything - a great speech, drafting public policy, launching a new product are all NP problems. The creators are tasked with finding solutions while the critics have to just check if the solutions are right or wrong. If you know the nature of these problems you will understand why creators have a tough job and seem to fail for so many obvious reasons while critics are so easily able to almost always say “this is where it went wrong”.
kinger,
I think it is even harder than that. A lot of decision problems that human decision makers face are formally undecidable - which means there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to give an always-correct answer. In real life terms, what it means is that any fixed set of rules (i.e an algorithm) will fail to give the “correct” answer.
It is reasonably easy to understand why: a lot of decision problems involve “feedback loops” or “self-reference” in some way or other. As an example, consider the question: “Will I be happy if I marry this person”. Imagine a computer program or a human counselor who collects all manner of data about the person and the intended spouse, and tries to answer the question, presumably in an effort to help the person avoid making a “mistake”. It is easy to see why it won’t work: happiness in a marriage depends (in part) on the person’s own attidue, the way the two parties accommodate each other, and how they react to unforeseeable events and so on.
So it would be possible to take actions to “prove” an answer wrong, for example if the computer program said “You will not be happy if you marry this person”, take it as a challenge and prove the program wrong by living it. It may involve essentially changing oneself - becoming a more likeable person, for example - and that is the point of self-reference.
This made up example may sound far-fetched, but we all read about cases where a doctor pronounced a patient incurable, yet the patient recovered. There is a good deal of self-reference at work here as well.
Sridhar