Free Pass for Disgraced MIT Dean of Admissions?

An op-ed in this morning's Boston Globe reminds me why I avoid reading that paper until I have some food in my stomach.

The Globe's take [1] on Marilee Jones's fall from grace?No doubt, Marilee Jones did the wrong thing. Decades ago, she claimed to have earned three academic degrees when she applied for a job as an administrative assistant at MIT. She rose through the ranks and became well known as an admissions dean with a heart.

This week, however, she was exposed. Someone questioned her
credentials. And an inquiry revealed that she held none of the degrees
on her resume.

Jones has resigned, leaving some MIT students and
colleagues in shock. Still, she deserves credit for her straightforward
apology.

"I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first
applied to MIT 28 years ago," she said in a statement, "and did not
have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job
or at any time since."

Admitting to that lack of courage means
being brave enough to be oneself, even if one is short on credentials
but long on potential.

This forthright admission stands in contrast to others who have denied, delayed, or justified.

Last year, David Edmondson, chief executive of RadioShack,
said he planned to stay in his job even after it was revealed that he
had not earned two college degrees listed on his resume. Days later he
resigned.

Lower on the career chain, some people argue that
applicants have to lie to get first jobs or to go back to work after
months or years of being unemployed. They say it's a matter of
financial survival. But a better solution would be an aggressive
national public policy that creates many more programs for working
adults to earn college degrees.

Although this is a sad final
chapter for Jones's MIT career, she leaves a positive legacy. It almost
seems she converted her uneasiness over her deceit into a useful public
tool. She pressed other admissions professionals and students to step
outside the hothouse of academic competitiveness, to see the person
behind the paperwork. In 2004, this page praised her for changing MIT's
undergraduate application by adding the request: "Tell us about
something you do for the pleasure of it." It's a worthy attempt to talk
about joy.

In a March 2006 blog on MIT's admissions website,
Jones posted an entry addressing students who were waiting to see if
they would be admitted to the school. She reminded them that they would
leave a mark on the world no matter which colleges did or did not admit
them.

"Hold faith that things always work out for you and that things always happen for a reason," she wrote.

Defending
student blog entries that were criticized as being too brutally honest
about campus life, she wrote, "I'm proud to represent a place where
truth is the whole point, messy or not."

Now, Jones  has had to face her own messy truth. She has done so  in a commendable way.My Lord, where to begin?

First: This op-ed reflects the strange moral relativism of a Watergate-scarred generation that believes no underlying crime could ever be as bad as the cover-up. In that world, making up three degrees while you are serving as gatekeeper for one of the world's great universities is bad, but not as bad as the cover-ups in the evil private sector.

Newsflash: Marilee Jones covered up her fraud for decades. Nor did she suddenly experience a crisis of conscience and fess up. She was busted following an anonymous tip and effectively fired. That's leaving a "positive legacy" and exiting in a "commendable way"? Only if you have some weird bias in favor of the non-profit world, which -- another newsflash -- is just as rife with human folly and hubris as the for-profit world.

Second: Only the Globe would have the chutzpah to turn this personal disgrace into a call for a big government program to help adults earn college degrees -- as if lack of money had caused, let alone excuses, Marilee Jones's fraud against MIT, hundreds of thousands of applicants and students, the admissions community, readers of her book, and the many people she's lectured over the years about the need for applicants to chill during the admissions process. Jones is a con artist and a fraud. Period.

That's some kind of kool-aid they're drinking over at the Globe to write this kind of puff piece.