Posted on 04/26/2007 10:25:33 AM PDT by SmithL
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Thursday that admissions dean Marilee Jones — a crusader for reducing the anxiety around college admissions — has resigned for misrepresenting her academic credentials to the university.
Jones, dean since 1997, has been a highly visible campaigner for reforming the college admissions process. She issued a statement saying she had misrepresented her credentials when she first came to work at 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
LOL.
fwiw, from this article it appears that she definitely did not hold any college level degree:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/04/mit_dean_of_adm.html
Jones listed on her resume that she had degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but she had no degrees from any of those schools, said MIT chancellor Phillip Clay.
.....
Jones started at MIT as an administrative assistant. School officials reviewed her qualifications last week when Daniel E. Hastings, dean for undergraduate education, received a phone call from a person who questioned her credentials. The school did not say who placed the call.
Uh, okay. First, the article did not say she did the job satisfactorily. You are assuming that, unless of course you work at MIT and have supervised her. Second, even if she did do a “satisfactorily” job for 10 years that does not qualify her.
If you discovered the doctor or dentist you had been going to for the last 10 years did, in your opinion, a satisfactory job, but later you discovered they were not board certified or proper trained, would you continue to visit them?
From the article:
She rewrote MIT's application, trying to get students to reveal more about their personalities and passions, and de-emphasizing lists of their accomplishments.
Sounds like she has damaged the admission standards of MIT to me.
“he”
The PhD is like a union card. You need it to get an academic job, but it doesn’t buy you one. The 3-6 years spent earning the degree is like an apprenticeship.
What do you want? did I mention it was Bunker Hill?
at least she didn’t say “it was an oversight on my part,” or “So and so prepared it and it escaped my attention.”
Exactly.
To repeat myself; She rewrote MIT's application, trying to get students to reveal more about their personalities and passions, and de-emphasizing lists of their accomplishments.
Isn't that about the most polically correct BS you've read in awhile?? Worring about personalities & passions to get into MIT.
*sigh*
What’s the most dangerous thing on the highway? A Mississippi redneck in a pulpwood truck!
I see the irony as being the fact that our greatest scientific institution of higher learning, with some of the most rigorous admission standards in the world, hired a Dean of Admissions who claimed to be a scientist and have degrees from three other prestigious institutions, when in fact she had none. Not even one from a local community college. So this Dean not only preached her mantra of less pressure in admissions, she lived it by eliminating from her life the pressure of even showing up for enough classes to get an associate degree.
I’m sure the only reason she put fake stuff on her resume is that, no matter how well-qualified she may have been for her initial job, she wouldn’t have even gotten and interview, much less hired, if her resume didn’t carry the credential of a college degree. All our institutions — academic, government, private business — should focus on people’s real ability, skills, and willingness to do a job, rather than paper credentials. I’m afraid the main reason this is hardly ever the case anymore, is the insane body of law that has built up to ban “discrimination”. Only specific credentials can reliably be used to defend against discrimination suits, e.g. “We didn’t hire applicant A over applicant B because applicant A was white, but because applicant A had a master’s degree and applicant B only had a bachelor’s degree.” Explaining that a less/non-degreed applicant just seemed more energetic and more enthusiastic about the specifics of the job, is a ticket to losing in court and facing a huge damage award.
I'm sure the only reason she faked her stuff was that she had absolutely no qualifications and would have been shown the door if she had told the truth. Though I have to hand it to her, she deserves a Masters in hutzpa and a PhD as a fabulist.
As someone who attended MIT, this is not PC BS. Thousands of very accomplished people apply to MIT every year but MIT is not right for all of them. Granted there are some that clearly stand out, but there isn’t really all that much difference between thousands of applicants. The school can only take a small portion of that and should take the students of this group that will get the most out of the school and fit in with MIT’s culture and people and choose MIT over somewhere like Harvaaahd. This is one way to differentiate between the thousands of straight A, perfect or near perfect tests schools who all have scores of activities and take the same dizzying array of classes. All schools do this.
It is a very unique school that has a unique personality. MIT is nothing like the Ivies and the other schools that high-achieving students apply or go to. The people and culture are not like any you will find anywhere else (with the exception of Caltech). For example only MIT students go to robotics competitions instead of football games. As for passion, if you don’t have it for math/science/engineering, I’m sorry but you won’t survive this place. And if you aren’t the MIT type, you won’t learn as much or do as well either.
I heard Marilee Jones speak once about her recruitment policy. It made sense, but she had some controversial views about student life that upset the student body (myself included). So i suspect a good number of students will be happy to see her gone.
She had enough qulaifications to last 28 years there, and keep getting promoted until she was at a level where she was deciding what students got in. I imagine it would have been discovered a long time ago, if she did have the necessary qualifications to perform the various jobs she’s held there. My point is that our society has become obsessed with “credentials”, in many cases dumping actual qualifications out of the selection process completely. The federal and most state governments are among the most egregious examples of this. Nearly all positions require one or more “degrees”, but there are tens of thousands of lazy and/or incompetent government workers who have the requisite degrees but lack the qualifications. And many applicants for the same jobs who DID have the qualifications were turned away for lack of the requisite degrees. Public school teachers are probably the most destructive example of this process. State governments, in collusion with unions, have passed laws and regulations requiring degrees in “education” or at least “teaching certification”. Acquiring either involves spending huge amounts of time doing truly idiotic things and listening to truly idiotic lectures, so many brilliant people who would make excellent teachers are excluded from jobs teaching in public schools, while all sorts of barely literate people get these jobs on the basis of their “credentials”. I’d have a lot of trouble getting worked up about it, if some well-educated, highly motivated person got a public school teaching job by falsely claiming to have a degree from one of our nation’s teacher’s colleges, and proceeded to move up the ranks and make a real positive difference in the schools.
For 28 years, people at MIT thought she was doing just fine, and that she even warranted promotions. It’s not really plausible to claim that she lacked the necessary knowledge and skills to perform her job functions there. Came up short in the integrity department to be sure, but I think all institutions should be taking a long hard look at why they’re requiring “degrees” for specific positions.
The primary reason that universities today are so focused on “degrees”, as opposed to just encouraging students to take whatever courses provide the information they want or need, is to create employment for otherwise unemployable academics. In most schools, the only difference between a “degree” in a serious subject (like physical sciences, math, finance, etc.) and just taking the courses in the major subject, is that while both involve taking a lot of rigorous courses that require the acquisition of real knowledge, to get a “degree” involves also taking a bunch of politically correct distribution requirements — i.e. endless hours sitting through “English” lectures about garbage like “deconstructing gender”, and poli sci courses about how evil capitalism is and how oppressed the Palestinians are, and history courses about how evil ethic Europeans are, etc. etc. Most of the people who teach this crap wouldn’t have jobs if “degrees” weren’t required for practically any non-manual labor position, because very few people would be will to shell out thousands of dollars per course to listen to all this nonsense.
She could have been the best darn admissions administrator in the whole wide world and they still would have been justified in canning her.
She’s a blatant liar. There's no need to review that.
No.
She is a “woman.” Although the fact is open to dispute due to the photos. Maybe when she applied she told the interviewer she was a lesbian.
When the applicant is a lesbian you have to hire. It’s like when you’re at a Chinese restaurant and they ask you if you want egg rolls.
Yeah, that’s where [UMass] her bud got hers, too. I have a friend who had two kids who went to UMass, a son and a daughter. The son graduated with some run of the mill degree (not EE or Comp. Sci.), started working as a database designer OJT and is making a very nice living. The daughter, who was a very cheerful little girl has grown into a bitter, unemployed adult. (This was a separate Womyn’s studies UMass grad.) Really a shame.
Being Dean of Admissions at such schools is a daunting task. One year at Stanford there were 7000 applicants and only 1000 were to be admitted. That means that the Dean must say "no" to six people for every time they say "yes".
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