The downfall of doctors or lawyers who never went to medical or law school only to be unmasked after years of practice is standard fare in the news. This time it’s an official at M.I.T.
Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.
And once again nobody asks the right question, which is not how such a frightful thing could possibly happen in a properly-regulated world.
The right question is why time-consuming and enormously expensive academic degrees should be required for jobs which, on the clear evidence of these recurring stories, can be done perfectly well without benefit of credentials.
A staple of these stories is that the professional colleagues of the impostor never suspected a thing. Discovery is usually accidental, and seldom results from incompetence. Dean Jones, in fact, is a leader in her field.
Once I asked my students at Harvard if they could imagine any way other than medical school by which competent doctors could be produced. They couldn’t, and the very idea struck them as preposterous.
Yet competent doctors and lawyers — and deans of admission, as it turns out — seem to be produced pretty regularly without benefit of formal training. For every “impostor” caught, after all, many more must have escaped detection.
Virtually every résumé and every job application in America is to some extent — often to a very great extent — a work of fiction. Ask Dean Jones, or any personnel manager. And so what. If the game is crooked, why not game it?
Only the very naïve would think that lying is a firing offense in Bush’s America, or indeed anywhere else. Dean Jones wasn’t fired for lack of integrity. She was fired to protect the very lucrative credentialing racket run by our universities
She lied for 30 years. She lied first, if I understand this correctly, in her application for a job for which a degree was not necessary.
When is enough enough? You may disagree about the *need* for a degree for such a position (and as a multi degree holder I know how little a degree is often worth), but I will not excuse lying and fraud under such circumstances.
In any academic field the credential matters more than almost anything else. This is partly due to the savagery of academic life; little else can withstand the brutally partisan and often petty attacks that are so much part of the “life of the mind.” The credential is objective (you may argue) and not subject to later change or revocation.
One may disagree about the methods for certifying doctors, lawyers, teachers, and dieticians, but it is important to remember what happened when there were none: the layman had no means at all to distinguish the expert from the quack. Do the “learned professions” protect themselves at our expense? This is, I think, beyond dispute, but the answer is not to abandon any qualification process at all.
Posted by: JHD on April 28, 2007 5:54 AM