Your exactly correct. She committed material fraud on her application. She had to be fired. I served on a Ivy League admission committee for years, and let me assure everyone that the Dean of Admissions has profound power over the entire admission process. Committee members that rocked the boat too far were removed by various means.
Another post alluded to her having a law suit against MIT. Wrong with fraud, she doesn’t have a hope.
However, how about the thousands of applicants her committee turned turn that were extremely qualified. I wonder if any of them will file a suit against MIT implying they were not accepted due to MIT’s errors and omissions in their admissions office. If they were turned down due to PC rather than other justified reason, they may have a case. I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone come forward with that argument fairly soon. Our lawyers are aways looks for cases.
I don’t know what the statute of limitations might be on bringing such suits, but given that MIT rejects more than 10,000 applicants each year (they accept around 1500 out of 12,000 applicants) there must be some potential litigants out there (if anyone cares enough to bother at this point).
There must be some former applicants with top-flight numbers and credentials who were rejected from their first choice MIT and ended up “stuck” at an Ivy or Stanford, Berkeley, CalTech, etc....... they could argue that such an obviously well-qualified app was passed over by a ditzy fraudulent dean who chose to undermine the objectivity of the process .... but it wouldn’t fit into any of the politically correct categories for the Mass. judiciary, since it would be someone who was either not an “approved minority” or else someone who was judged “too narrow” in their personality and character, etc.
Marilee Jones seems to have been the leading edge of changing MIT’s admissions criteria somewhat to de-emphasize their traditional hard-core “nerd” profile in favor of more “well-rounded” and “diverse” applicants, but as you well know, there is enough variability in debates about admissions criteria for “elite” institutions that any litigation would probably have much less of a chance of success than a rejected applicant suing because their high scores and grades were passed over for some “minority” applicants.
It would be interesting to find out (as though they would ever tell the public) how far MIT has pushed affirmative action in recent years, since there are probably some really stellar students rejected when they are white or Asian-American males and don’t strike the admissions committee as “interesting” enough. I don’t expect that there will be any successful suits, or even that anyone will bother to try, unless they really just want to generate some publicity for the issue of rejecting more highly ranked students in order to pursue “diversity” in the entering class.