Merrily, Merriy, Merrily....

The Marilee Jones story is getting more ink than the death of Reagan it seems. It is a big story but its lessons seem quite simple.
1. Don't lie on your resume and expect to get away with it. The short term gains probably aren't worth it.
2. You don't seem to need a college degree or advanced education to work in admissions. I hate to write this, I suspect it is wrong. But that is the predominant message. It also seems that you don't actually have to have a degree in the sciences to sound like a scientist, although having a scientist spouse might help. That is a snide interpretation of facts but Ms. Jones was a successful administrator, even a gifted one. And she didn't have any degrees.

However, maybe if she had finished an undergraduate degree she might have ended up taking a course in ethics, psychology, or probability. One thing is clear: Marilee had an enemy, either in her office or outside. But somebody figured something out or knew something and used it against her when the time was right. Maybe someone noticed she had added Ph.D to her credentials on the website of a professional organization and figured out she never earned one. Earning a doctorate takes time and they don't suddenly appear. There are mistakes in third-party biographical information all the time. Had the Ph.D been attributed to her by mistake, she could have fixed that, had the Dr. in front of her name or the Ph.D after it removed. We will never know if that was the smoking gun or not. Despite all the news coverage, there is much about this story that we don't know.

MIT behaved cleanly and appropriately in this matter. And, by the way, it had no choice. For people who feel that Marilee's service should have persuaded the MIT administration to be lenient with her, I would suggest that they were. They allowed her to resign, write her statement, and have protected her from a story that was full of detail regarding who told what. It is unlikely that Ms. Jones hurt MITadmissions during her tenure. It is unlikely that inferior candidates were admitted. Ms. Jones, after all, had a staff—all of whom are required to have appropriate credentials. Her message, which was essentially that parents and their college-bound children should chill, is wise irrespective of why or how she came to this conclusion.

Did the search committee that hired her fail? Only in hindsight, in rigor perhaps. But she was not a candidate whose credentials were new to the institution. It would be entirely human for the search committee to assume that their predecesors were rigorous in their judgment when she was first hired. What they did not know at the time was that Ms. Jones was first hired for an administrative position that did not require a college degree. Since it was irrelevant to her first hiring officer, the facts were not checked. Once hired, she became part of the MIT family. A zealous human resources manager might have gone back to check her college information but she had been with the school for more than ten years. They knew her! But, the betrayal, is most keenly felt by these colleagues who indeed did not know her at all.

This is the saddest part of the story. She didn't have to fictionalize her original application to be hired at MIT. She could have been promoted. She would have been given the opportunity to obtain her bachelor of science degree, probably at MIT. Or she could have done it with less stress at another lesser, local institution to fulfill the requirement. Over the course of 28 years she could have also knocked back a one-year M.Ed at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard or taken an executive MBA of some kind at MIT's Sloan School. All with the approval and support of her managers. If only, if only.

For those of us with college and graduate degrees obtained years ago, this seems like a no brainer. She had everything to gain and nothing to lose by simply being who she was. And those of use who put in the time, who sacrificed, who pay back loans, who got those rejection letters, who faced our strengths and our weaknesses, who went the distance to graduate: we get to say so.

The fact that she was fabricated her degrees and didn't correct her resume as time went on was indeed a failure of courage. Had she revealed her indiscretion earlier it is possible, although unlikely, that she would have been allowed to stay in admissions even if she had finished an undergraduate course of study. MIT explained it all very well: admissions staff are the gatekeepers for maintaining the integrity of the institution for the future. They must model, at the very, very least, the basic qualities expected of all candidates: an honest report of their credentials.

Does Marilee Jones' error of judgment fall into the same category as Dr. Joesph Ellis's fabrications about his service in Vietnam to his students at Mount Holyoke College or the controversies surrounding the reliability of scholarship? Psychologically they are in the same family. Joe Ellis lost his chair, took a leave, kept his job, got some therapy, apologized and went back to work. His fate was decided upon by faculty, however, and he had tenure: a tougher nut to crack. He was still qualified for his position. Marilee Jones, without any college degrees, did not have the basic requirements for a deanship at MIT—or anywhere else for that matter—even if one completely discounts the fabrication.

I don't know if she is finished professionally or not. She is co-author of book that will not be summarily removed from the shelves. Her co-author and publisher are standing behind its content. You don't need a degree to write a book. I suspect some therapy is in her future. But I think now she should hunker down, fill out those damn forms, take that SAT or ACT, and get her degree. Its time.