The Rise and Fall of the Dean
Posted by
KTK
Some buzz developing over the story of the Dean of Admissions at MIT, forced to resign today when someone secretly informed the Institute that she did not have the academic credentials she had listed on her resume when she was hired 28 years previously. She was widely recognized as a leader in the movement to make college admissions less stressful and hyper-competitive (ironically, she had made major efforts to downplay the emphasis on formal credentials; more ironically, her new book stresses that attitude as a means to maintaining integrity in your life), and was popular with the students, but the Institute felt it had no choice.
Ms. [Marilee] Jones, 55, originally from Albany, had on various occasions represented herself as having degrees from three upstate New York institutions: Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, M.I.T. officials said. . . .
Phillip L. Clay, M.I.T.’s chancellor, said in an interview that a college degree was probably not required for Ms. Jones’s entry-level job in the admissions office when she arrived in 1979. And by the time she was appointed admissions dean in 1997, Professor Clay said, she had already been in the admissions office for many years, and apparently little effort was made to check what she had earlier presented as her credentials.
“In the future,” he said, “we will take a big lesson from this experience.”
Since last fall, Ms. Jones had been making speeches around the country to promote her book, “Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,” written with a pediatrician, Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsburg. The book had added to her reputation as a kind of guru of the movement to tame the college admissions frenzy.
“Less Stress, More Success” addresses not only the pressure to be perfect but also a need to live with integrity.
“Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners,” it says. “But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.”
Professor Clay said the dean for undergraduate education, Daniel Hastings, received information 10 days ago questioning Ms. Jones’s academic background. M.I.T. officials would not say who had provided the information.
“There are some mistakes people can make for which ‘I’m sorry’ can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself,” Professor Clay said. “This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her.”
On the campus, where Ms. Jones was widely admired, almost revered, for her humor, outspokenness and common sense, students and faculty members alike seemed both saddened and shocked.
“It’s like a Thomas Hardy tragedy, because she did so much good, but something she did long ago came back and trumped it,” said one friend, Leslie C. Perelman, director of the M.I.T. program in writing and humanistic studies.
I’m tempted to be sympathetic; there is a common-sense kind of intuition that says since she was obviously good at her job the missing degrees don’t matter, and the fact that she painted herself into a corner 28 years ago (more than half her life!) shouldn’t be allowed to ruin her career. But as a part-time academic (one who failed a student for plagiarism just last week), I understand as well why MIT acted as they did. Clay’s statement says it perfectly: misrepresentation of one’s credentials is one aspect (arguably the least important aspect, but it still matters) of scholarly integrity, and that is the central value in a scholarly enterprise. There simply is no second chance for scholarly dishonesty. (One might possibly argue that since she was not in the “academic” - meaning teaching - division of the Institute, but was on the non-scholarly staff, the same standards may not apply, but I don’t think the Institute can afford to make such fine distinctions, certainly not for a Dean and especially not in the Admissions department. If one of the maintenance staff fudged their resume I might be willing to overlook it, but this gets to the heart of the Institute’s own ethos in admitting, training, and credentialing students in a scholarly environment.)
So the situation is sad and frustrating, but there it is.
I’m not surprised that not everyone feels that way, but I am a little surprised to see - usually from the kind of people who are always carping about how academia is “not the real world” - the issue being discussed as an example of “credentialism”, which I take to mean treating academic credentials as more meaningful than they are, or more meaningful than actual work, or perhaps as treating credentials as equivalent to the worth of the person. For instance, that’s a repeated theme at “Political Animal“:
[from the comments:]
“Kevin [Drum] is only confused because he isn’t familiar with professions where the paper qualifications are more important than the quality of the work. Academia runs on credentials only because those are the easiest things to evaluate. The other stuff takes work to understand, and who needs that?” - grumpy and unqualified
“Maybe a college education isn’t really necessary to do a high level job like Dean of Admissions, but MIT isn’t going to admit that. Why would anyone pay $120,000 for a college education if they figure out that it isn’t that all useful?” - ex-liberal
“The whole story raises a pretty good question: What is the value of a college degree if someone without it was able to rise so high in a competitive school like MIT? The story certainly lends credence to the theory that college doesn’t actually add much academic value (for a lot of careers, not all) and is nothing more than a way to vet for intelligence and perseverance.” - parentalcation
“If those fools in academia care so much about what the ‘credential’ means, then how bad does it look for them to go 28 years(!) completely unable to tell the difference between someone who has it and someone who doesn’t.” - Ben
“Her real crime was that she pulled back the curtain and demonstrated that degrees don’t mean shit. This is a capital offense, especially at MIT. She had to be fired. However, in the real world we reward competence and punish incompetence. I would have fired whomever hired her without checking her credentials.” - Disputo
And so on . . .
To be fair, most of the commenters at Political Animal support the decision to fire her and seem to understand why the issue is important. And the minority who do not, judging from their screen names, seems to include a lot of disgruntleds with chips on their shoulders. But it still puzzles me to see how far the question of “credentials” is, it seems obvious to me, simply misunderstood.
“Paper” credentials are not a measure of the worth of the individual or of the quality of their work, nor a determinant of distinction between the work of those who have one and those who don’t. It is true that selection and hiring processes often rely on them as easier to evaluate than practical output (and for very good reasons), but that’s a separate issue. Complaining that people take credentials seriously when they “don’t mean shit” is just a sign that you don’t know what they mean (and are probably a defensive, insecure wanker, but that also is another issue).
Credentials are simply records of part of one’s personal history. They record that one has participated in, and successfully completed, education and training in a given field to a stipulated level of attainment. And that is relevant to many future endeavors, including obviously jobs and ongoing academic training. The map is not the territory - credentials are not the same as training (they are a record of training) and training is not the same as ability (training prepares and provides ability, but it can degrade over time) - but everyone who doesn’t think “they don’t mean shit” already knows that. Thinking credentials don’t mean shit presumably means you thought the map was the territory, and are blaming the mapmaker when you discover that isn’t true. Maps are very valuable even if they are not the territory.
It’s obvious why credentials matter, even if they are only stand-ins for the real issue in question (one’s ability). As already noted, you often can’t test for ability in a practical way. You certainly can’t test for the kinds of ability or preparation represented by most academic credentials.
Do you need someone with 4 years’ full-time study across the range of human knowledge, tested critical thinking, writing, and analytical skills, and a beginning level of expertise in a particular field? There’s no reasonable way to test for that. Luckily, you don’t have to, because other people already spent 4 years providing the applicant with that knowledge and testing them on it; all you have to do is ask whether they have the credential that says so. Do you need someone with 7-10 years’ advanced study at the cutting edge of a professional discipline, years of original research experience, and tested knowledge and proficiency at the expert level? Odds are that not only can you not devise a test for that, but no one in your organization has the knowledge to grade such a test. Luckily, you can just ask “Do you have a PhD from an accredited university?” and it’s done for you.
It’s certainly possible that people can acquire knowledge on their on. It’s certainly true that many people, even in technical fields, have been very successful with limited academic training. But if what you want is a BA, or MA, or PhD level of preparation, it’s not just easier, it’s vastly more reliable to find such a person by checking their credentials than by asking them “Do you think your self-taught reading is the equivalent of 4 or 10 years of full-time study supervised by research-level experts?” A credential isn’t “a piece of paper”. It’s the product of years of advanced education. The diploma is a piece of paper. Your education is much more than that, and it’s worth having; if it’s worth having, it’s worth having a believable testament that says you have it.
Finally, it’s certainly true that many jobs can be done without benefit of advanced education. Obviously, Jones was capable of doing jobs that normally require a degree as qualification, even when she advanced far beyond the entry level. But that still doesn’t mean that requiring credentials as qualifications is a bad idea. Some people without any college education could function as the Dean of Admissions at MIT. Virtually everyone without such education could not do so (especially if they also lacked the 18 years of experience in the same office that Jones had before she became Dean). Of course, some people with appropriate degrees also could not do so, but given the choice wouldn’t you at least want to start your search among people with a certified relevant knowledge base? (I once sat on a hiring committee for an academic deanship. It was amazing what kind of weird CVs and resumes came over the transom. Everybody thinks they’re qualified. The first task of any selection process is to weed out the no-hopers, and there’s really only one way that makes any sense.)
The only argument I can see that makes any sense is that there is a false assumption of the relationship between formal education and job requirements (including the general job requirement of intelligence and critical thinking) for most jobs. I suspect that’s probably true. This overvaluing of formal education also contributes to the “degree inflation” whereby everyone is assumed to need a college degree, thus degrees become available to almost everyone through relatively undemanding programs, whereby the Master’s degree becomes the real test of an advanced education, thus MA programs then begin to proliferate . . . until you get to the point we’re at today, where fully 3% of the population have PhDs. I think the general experience of college-level education is good for everyone in terms of broadening their knowledge, liberalizing their outlook, and raising their intellectual horizons, but I also think not everyone is suited for education at a meaningfully advanced level, and I think most companies have no business demanding college degrees for jobs that do not directly require high-level knowledge of a specific field of study. But this is an argument directed at the aggrandizement of formal education, particularly by employers, not at the question whether “credentials” actually play the role that is asked of them.
KTK,
Your final paragraph is correct, but I think you make the same mistake as those you criticize. The credential is not the education, but it is the proxy for it. Employers demand inappropriate degrees, not because they care about the piece of paper, but because they have misevaluated the needs of their jobs.
Secondly, the problem here is that where education is needed in order to be capable of some work, experience at that very work completely obviates any education. Even in the most scholarly field, ten years’ successful experience dwarfs anything gained from education. Checking the degrees of those with experience is a waste and an insult. It additionally has the effect of precluding anything like a statute of limitations for the crime of boot-strapping past unneeded credentials.
Finally, regardless of the need to fire this particular woman for dishonesty (a dishonesty that it was impossible to correct once committed, for the above reason), this event exactly proves the point that the degree that was asked of her at her hiring was unnecessary for her and that degree was unnecessary for anyone with her experience.
I see two cultural changes that would fix these problems. The first would be an assumption that a fair amount of experience (10-15 years) subsumed the requirements of most degrees in related fields. The second would be a greater willingness for employers to give a chance to honest applicants who didn’t claim to have the wanted degree. Even without the second of these, the first would allow the naturally capable to boot-strap past degrees through deceit with a limited time-frame.
Comment 4/28/2007
Dan M.:
Employers demand inappropriate degrees, not because they care about the piece of paper, but because they have misevaluated the needs of their jobs.
I think that’s what I said.
dishonesty that it was impossible to correct once committed, for the above reason
That’s a very important point.
Kevin Drum, at Political Animal, keeps emphasizing that she lied not just once, on her original resume, but at every step of the way as she was promoted over a 28-year career. But, given that you did lie once, there’s no real way to undo it. If you’re not going to confess and essentially forfeit your job, then you have to buttress your own lie, if only by not changing your resume after the fact. And I think a basically honest person can make that mistake once, later regret it, and still not come clean by confessing - but that means that person, unless they never get promoted or change jobs again, still has to keep up the original lie. I don’t see the subsequent repetitions as exactly the same as the original lie (presumably the person who regrets the original lie would not keep repeating if they weren’t hemmed in, and would not commit other lies; someone who was truly committed to lying would continue to lie whenever necessary); they’re just the logically necessary consequence of lying once and not confessing.
But as for your solution: I think you’re right that experience trumps formal education alone in many cases, but that may not lead to any very practical answers. For one thing, experience plus formal education probably trumps experience alone. And formal education trumps a lack of experience. So at the entry level, you would still want to hire the educated person over the inexperienced, and you would prefer that your experienced people also have the education even if they have the experience. It may be that lack of education is not always a disadvantage, but there is no circumstance in which it is an advantage. The only place in which it is not a decisive advantage is where you are comparing education alone with experience alone; even there education may be better, in the sense that an educated but inexperienced person becomes an educated but experienced one in a few years, while the uneducated but experienced one may already have hit their peak. At any rate, many employers take that into account by asking for qualifications of a formal degree “or equivalent experience”. For New York City agency jobs that I’ve looked at, they publish an explicit list of degrees-plus-years of experience equivalents, such that a BA with 5 years’ experience is the equivalent of an MA with 2 years’ experience, or what have you. That seems reasonable and realistic.
Employers’ hiring more people without formal credentials is probably a good idea, but it founders on simple practicality. Every hiring or selection procedure is a process of winnowing usually ridiculously large numbers of applications down to a single one - and when you get to the short list, or even earlier, probably any of the applicants on the list is equally likely to succeed in the position. So it’s a lot of work to get a result that doesn’t really require fine distinctions; making it more complicated doesn’t give you a better result. In fact, you could throw out half the pile of applicants sight-unseen and still get 5 finalists that were all just as good. Given that, spending lots of time carefully reviewing oddball applicants to pick out subtle clues to hidden potential is a waste of time - the obvious first step is to start with the ones who have a formal credential demonstrating that they have non-hidden potential.
In addition, there are other benefits to formal education. It gives people a base of common knowledge to start from, for one thing. Not everybody with a degree in computer science is going to be a good programmer, but you can reasonably assume they know certain basic things, and you don’t have to teach or explain those things. (Whether universities ought to be spending their time doing corporations’ job training for them is another question.) So, yes, I feel for people who haven’t gone through the college sausage machine, and I admire the ones who have educated themselves in doing so. But having knowledge is always better than the alternative, and formal education is a good way to get it, even if not the only way.
Comment 4/29/2007
I think that’s what I said.
Okay, sorry. The distinction is fine enough that it’s easy to misread or misspeak. *Shrug.*
Largely, we’re agreeing with each other. Let me make a particular counter-claim, though: The degree to which formal education adds to substantial experience is de minus. I.e. the equivalence tables you mention should exactly equate 15yrs+degree and 15yrs w/o degree. (By the way, while I believe that large employers with such tables do treat experience as covering a degree, I’m very suspicious that smaller employers that just say “degree or equiv. experience” are just blowing smoke and will not seriously consider any non-degree-holder.)
Now, I’m not sure if a degree is de minus after only 10yrs, and of course the experience must be pertinent. But I propose this not only as a matter of fairness, but as a solution to the repeated-lie problem. It’d be a policy decision, one that I think would benefit the workforce.
Then again, I see no way of promulgating such a policy decision.
Comment 4/29/2007
The issue is not credentialism. It is deception and honesty. When Jones knew she was able to deceive so easily 28 years ago, does anyone really believe that she didn’t continue to deceive people as a method of gaining what she desired? Does anyone think she was deceptive just once? My guess is that a careful review of her professional, public life over the past 28 years will be replete with deception, as she had every reason to think lying was a path to success. She is a fraud, and we can only surmise what the consequences have been of 28 years of lying as an admissions officer at MIT.
Comment 5/2/2007