MIT: Where are your Values?

From the CBS story:

Marilee Jones, a prominent crusader against the pressure on students to build their resumes for elite colleges, resigned Thursday as dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after acknowledging she had misrepresented her own academic credentials.

Jones has been a popular speaker on the college admissions circuit, where she urged parents not to press their kids too hard and told students there are more important things than getting into the most prestigious colleges. She rewrote MIT's application, trying to get students to reveal more about their personalities and passions while de-emphasizing lists of their accomplishments.

But Jones, dean since 1997, 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.

Newspapers broke the story, and already people are piling on. From some internet boards:

[regarding whether the punishment fits the crime] "Ask her real victim, if you can find him/her. Her lie put her just a tick ahead of someone that deserved the job honestly, on merit, not deceit. That person lost a job that should have been theirs due to her lie."

"[in regards to the seriousness] it's not a petty failure of one of its officers 30 years ago. It's a continuing failure and exercise in dishonesty over 28 years by one of its officers that lasted until it was exposed by a third party."

In the _real_ world, you perform well, you get rewarded. College degrees are useful, just like technical certifications, as a way of introducing yourself. A degree means you were able to memorize certain facts that were deemed relevant and play whatever game your teachers set up for you. Smart people, whether in a college environment or not, get absorbed and make a difference in the world. For some stuff, like nuclear physics, you can't get absorbed by hanging out at the local 7-11. For most day-to-day stuff, however, you need to be connected to reality as much as theory. That's not saying theory isn't important, just that those folks who change our lives the most are the folks that are able to connect information from all over the place to the common guy. Higher education has gotten so compartmentalized that it's really tough for academics to do this. Don't get me wrong -- I love the theory wonks, and we absolutely must have an ability to reason at the abstract level that a university education gives most people. It's just that context is important.

Given that preface, I'm puzzled at MIT's response. Obviously this lady lied -- so fine her. Make her make a public apology. It seems, however, that her lie cuts to the core of the value of certificates of education: do they really reflect practical, real-world values to the organization and society? Or are they laudable records of achievement which do not directly correlate with future value to society? If MIT allowed her to keep her job, they would be admitting that there are very important jobs at the university that really don't require a college degree. This is obviously too much for them, so they'll trot out the honesty thing. As if lying on a resume 30 years ago is the same as knocking over a liquor store. It is painfully clear that a) a degree was not required to perform a high-level administrative role at the college, and b) the lady, by any measurements, was doing a great job.

Let's play a little game.

Just suppose, for a minute, that she lied about something else -- say her age.

Would this still be a news story? Would she still be expected to resign?

How about her religion? Her High School? Her favorite color?

Maybe her kids, or her criminal history. Is it still so serious? Would it be okay if, as a kid, she had robbed a store and never reported it?

People lie and omit things on resumes. Get over it. Did she lie about something important? Was she performing medicine without training? Practicing law?

To make the argument that she was being fraudulent in a significant way, you have to say that her fake college history was the single most important thing that defined her -- that having a degree was what it takes to run an admissions office. I simply don't believe that. She's not a fraud, she's a person who showed how stupid MIT's college degree requirement was in the first place for those jobs. If you want to punish her for lying, fine. But don't cover your head and miss the thing that's glaring in your face -- her lying is such an academic crime exactly because it's about something that is not important. Something that has no impact on job performance, but puts the standards and values of the college up for closer inspection than they would like. Talk about the nameless people she cheated out of a job! What about all the other people who could have done just as well in many other college jobs that were discriminated because they lacked degrees? Who is really cheating whom here?

MIT should concern itself with benig the best college in the world, not petty political backstabbing based on irrelevant crap from a resume from years ago. This lady deserved better than that, the institution deserved better than that, and the taxpayers and other funders definitely deserved better than that. Academic integrity had better be about results first. Other considerations, such as witch hunts based on lies decades ago that people never fixed, come in a long way down from the top of the list.