MIT Dean Marilee Jones Flunks Out

By Michael Kinsley

Warren Buffet us looking around for someone to succeed him, eventually, as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Since that company's main asset is Warren Buffett, it's an important choice. But Buffett told the Wall Street Journal recently that he doesn't care if the person in question is a college graduate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not feel the same way. It has abruptly accepted the resignation of its dean of admissions after she confessed that she didn't have the undergraduate or graduate degrees she had added to her resume over the 28 years since she joined the M.I.T. admissions office. (It came out later that she did have a bachelor's degree--but not from the college she listed.) A fake resume destroyed Marilee Jones' career. But she feared, with some reason, that her true resume might have torpedoed it from the beginning. And it's hard to believe that someone who "has done a great job" (in the words of M.I.T.'s chancellor, Phillip Clay) would have been terminated over ancient lies on any other subject.

Actually, until the last chapter, M.I.T. looked pretty good in the way it handled Jones' career. Even the academic degrees she faked were fairly modest by the standards of America's most prestigious technical university, but M.I.T. didn't care. She began there in a clerical job, rose through the ranks on talent and loyalty and established a national reputation (and even co-wrote a book) deploring the destructive stress of college admissions.

The process by which Jones became dean of admissions at M.I.T. looks from afar, at least, like American meritocracy working the way it is supposed to work. Once she was in the door and proving her competence, nobody gave a hoot about her resume, which is why her fabrication was not caught for 28 years. What ultimately did Jones in was a different kind of meritocracy, the kind that trades in what might be called paper merit. Degrees, test scores, recommendation letters: these are all artificial substitutes for real merit. Sometimes the artificial substitute is unavoidable. When many thousands of top students are applying for a few hundred places at a top school like M.I.T., admissions officers can't plumb the depths of each applicant's soul. So they use test scores. Employers looking to hire young people for their first full-time job can't stop to gather and judge all the information they might want in deciding who is likely to be a disciplined and skillful employee. So they take a shortcut and go for college graduates. Buffett doesn't need to require a college degree because what he is looking for can be measured in ways that are even more concrete and downright mathematical: an ability to generate large returns on investments. Why would any potential employer care if a gifted stock picker had gone to college?

When Jones applied for a job at M.I.T. in 1979, it would have been perfectly reasonable for the university to pay attention to her academic record. School officials had little else to judge her by. Twenty-eight years later, the situation is different. They know she's good at her job. She has demonstrated real merit. Why should her employer care about the paper stuff? But, of course, they did care, and she did lie. And she maintained the lie for 28 years until she was outed by anonymous sources. And this wasn't just any lie. It was a lie in the very area in which Jones' job requires her to expect the truth. The dean of admissions, of all people at a university, has to be pretty firm on the question of resume padding.

What a pity, though. M.I.T. has lost an apparently great dean at a time when you don't read a lot about successful university administrators. And, it turns out, she is one who had a personal as well as professional understanding of the stresses of our resume culture. It would be a useful lesson for M.I.T.'s students if the gatekeeper who gets to award the golden credential of a degree from the world's most prestigious technical institution is someone who lacks that kind of credential. It would say, "Don't let it go to your head. An M.I.T. diploma isn't necessary. In fact, it isn't sufficient either. There are qualities that M.I.T.'s admissions office can't sort for and its distinguished professors can't teach. And as you go off to face the world with your M.I.T. degree, you may or may not have them."

Instead of dumping her, M.I.T. might want to consider giving Jones an honorary degree. We're coming up on the season when universities hand out these things with abandon, often to people who never saw the inside of a classroom at this, or sometimes at any, university. These folks get honorary degrees because they gave the university a million or two from piles so large you can't even see the dent. Then she could go to the university health services and get another piece of paper stating that the resume fib was the result of stress. She's the expert on resume stress, after all. And then let her go back to the work she apparently does so well. *