The Devil in Ms. Jones
The big story in higher ed today is, of course, the resignation of MIT dean of admissions Marilee Jones, who apparently did not go to the colleges that, for 28 years, she said she did.
(A shout-out to the Crimson: You guys had a piece about the resignation posted hours before the MIT Tech.)
Jones' lies have obviously given her some psychological issues, and it's interesting to consider how her own lack of degrees have caused her to argue that we need to ease the vicious competition in college admissions.
As Zach Seward writes in the Crimson, in her book "Less Stress, More Success," Jones...
....
warned students against “making up information to present yourself as something you are not.” She wrote, “You must always be completely honest about who you are.”
I know I should be outraged at Ms. Jones' deceit—and MIT certainly had no choice but to fire her—but I find myself feeling bad for her.
For one thing, her apology is pretty straight-up.
“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since.... I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”
I can think of various Harvard evildoers—plagiarists, Russian rip-off-ers, manure-stealers, and so on—whose mea culpas were considerably less forthright than that.
Second, Ms. Jones was right about the insanity of college admissions, and this is not, frankly, the note one hears from Harvard, which uses students' mad desire to get into Harvard as a way to promote the brand.
Releasing the number of people who apply every year, for example, seems designed to show the world what a desirable place Harvard is....and attract ever greater numbers of moths to the flame.
Third, Ms. Jones did help increase the number of women at MIT from 17% of the student body to about half. That's a substantial achievement.
Fourth, Ms. Jones showed that, in fact, you don't always need a college degree to be a skilled, gifted, and hard-working person. As a result, she showed our society's obsession with the appearance of qualifications, rather than the reality of them.
Of course, you can't have a dean of admissions faking her resume. But doesn't the fact that she faked her curriculars and was still successful suggest the inherent absurdity of the whole college admissions game?
