<p>"What she did was dishonest and embarrasing for MIT, but it did not directly hurt anyone (to my knowledge)."</p>
<p>Getting a job as a result of a lie directly hurts the person who would have been hired, but for the lie.</p>
<p>It shows that no matter how hard you work for 28 years, what matters is where you went to college. Sad.</p>
<p>That's not true. Marilee Jones is in this situation because of her total lack of integrity. No one's evaluating her based on where she went to college - by the way, she never even earned a degree.</p>
<p>Stop making her out to be a victim - considering what she's done, she could have had it a lot worse. Some articles seem to portray her as some kind of fallen angel.</p>
<p>"What she did was dishonest and embarrasing for MIT, but it did not directly hurt anyone (to my knowledge)."</p>
<p>As a dean she would have a big say in who gets admitted and who doesn't (otherwise why have that powerful position?), especially for the mid-range applicants. Without college education herself, how do you know she didn't do a bad job of it and hurt deserving kids as well as her employer? You make her actions sound quite benign.</p>
<p>everyone has an opinion...hehe. none of us know the details of the situation except those individuals who are directly involved. why is everyone so opposed the phrase "i don't know" these days.</p>
<p>babar,
I liked your post 132, and agree with it.</p>
<p>holycow,
subjectivity comes with being a human being. Pretending to exterminate it is fraught with self-deception. Applicants to CalTech and MIT who present with numerically equal credentials (and there will be a number of them, as there have been in the past) have been evaluated subjectively and will be evaluated subjectively to determine who will be in the subset of the overly large meritorious set.</p>
<p>Here are some interesting excerpts from the Yahoo article noted in an earlier post:</p>
<p>
[quote]
A senior MIT official said that by claiming degrees she had never earned, Jones could no longer lead an admissions office that occasionally rescinds the acceptance letters sent to applicants who are untruthful about their own accomplishments.</p>
<p>"We have to uphold the integrity of the institution, because that's what we've been trying to sell and she's our chief spokesperson on that," MIT Chancellor Phil Clay said. It's "regrettable, ironic, sad, but that's where we are."</p>
<p>Jones was asked to resign because her actions go "against her being a model for integrity that an admissions director sets," Clay said. "It represents a very, very long deception, when there were opportunities to correct the record. This is not a mistake or an accident or an oversight."
[/quote]
</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>Again, she deserved to lose her job, but to be called a "bad person" for a lie is simply cruel and unfair.<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>Again, what makes her a bad person, or least a lot worse than simply a liar, is that she repeatedly, over a period of many years, rejected and rescinded many MIT applicants for lying about their qualifications. She punished others for doing exactly what she herself was doing. That makes her much worse than a liar. It makes her into an enormous hypcrite. You gotta be a pretty amoral person to carry on such a huge hypocracy for 28 years.</p>
<p>Calling her just what she is is neither cruel nor unfair.</p>
<p>I read that she was a torch singer in upstate New York in her younger days. She must been quite an actress, otherwise, how could she keep up the charade for so long. Didn't anyone close to her ever question the following:
- why she had no friends from her college days
- why she received no alumni publications, fundraising solicitations, etc.
- why she had no diplomas to display
- why she never attended reunions
- why she had no graduation photos, memoribilia from her college days</p>
<p>Must have required weaving a very tangled web with her family and friends...</p>
<p>Duckpond - I'll bet more people were "in" on this than you suspect. Certainly her husband was a party to the deception.</p>
<p>duckpond--- I know , I keep thinking about the diplomas as well- it is very weird that no one would have figured it out. also the schools she claimed to go to, one would think they would have at some point noticed that she had not in fact been a student there.</p>
<p>The problem is not that she needed her degrees to do the jobs she had while at MIT. After all, she was not a faculty member. It is also not that the admissions dean sometimes has to retract admissions offers for students who lied about their accomplishments. </p>
<p>It is much more basic. </p>
<p>Anyone at the level of Dean has a lot of responsibility and autonomy. She was one of the few people who were public faces of the institution. She was responsible for running a large and important part of the university. Such a person is entrusted with the ability to make decisions on behalf of MIT. Not many people can do that. She could make important commitments that bound the university. She has to be trust WORTHY. If she lied about her academic background, and kept that up for many years, they simply cannot trust her with such a responsible position. They had no choice but to fire her. The same would apply to any other senior administrative position. </p>
<p>I agree that the world was different, and women faced far more overt discrimination. Unfortunately, that is not only no excuse, but to offer it as such (which I am not sure Jones ever did) is an insult to people like Hockfield and Faust.</p>
<p>If she had revealed her deception years ago, before she was a senior administrator, she might have been able to keep her job of the time. She probably never would have been considered for a Dean position, once she was classified as someone too unreliable to trust, but she might still be employed in some back office job.</p>
<p>Academic and personal honesty and integrity are vital, and the fact that she could not practice what she preached, especially in a position like the one she had, is a tremendous slap to the face. However this is all technically an awful side-notion -- lying about your resume in such a position is awful, no matter what the job may be.</p>
<p>Afan is correct, I would say, that this is a much more basic issue -- she was a public face of the university, and she betrayed that vital component of trust necessary in such a position of responsibility. </p>
<p>Simply put, when someone has enormous responsibility, influence, power, and voice, you cannot afford to have them be untrustworthy underneath it all. The fact that she kept the charade up this long is indicative that her decision-making abilities are unacceptable for a position of this magnitude.</p>
<p>"I wonder if she told her husband he was the first."</p>
<p>Dude...that's pretty funny man. Harsh though...</p>
<p>Actually her husband is also a problem. It is almost inconceivable that he did not know her degree status so he (Bussolari at Lincoln Labs - part of MIT) participated in the deception. If a couple were married and both worked at a bank and one of the two was embezzling and both were spending the ill got funds, both would be fired. Do you think Bussolari should get a "pass" on this this?</p>
<p>QUOTE:
"If she had revealed her deception years ago, before she was a senior administrator, she might have been able to keep her job of the time. She probably never would have been considered for a Dean position, once she was classified as someone too unreliable to trust, but she might still be employed in some back office job."</p>
<p>My thoughts on her career options I posted earlier. I just want to reemphasize (while NOT excusing her actions) that suggestions like those above are simply unrealistic. Would you go to your boss, and "admit that you lied" (not when questioned, but voluntarily offering the info, unprompted)? Let me tell you, that, like other women who entered the workforce in the late '70's to early '80's, this woman was ambitious. Again, nothing wrong with that. But she did not put down 3 degrees on her resume for just no reason. She may have in fact felt very self-conscious about not finishing <em>one</em> degree, even, & therefore over-compensated. (I've seen that a lot.) But it is more likely that she had every intention of rising through the ranks, even if Dean in particular was not a specific goal at the time.</p>
<p>A realistic & possible scenario would have been to LEAVE the college at some point before '97/'98, finish one or more degrees (or do LTS' suggestion), work ELSEWHERE with such degree, then come fresh to MIT to apply for the Dean's job when the position became open. Now, it's possible that with a new (correct) resume, someone who remembered her previously & remembered her old resume might question the difference with the new resume, but it is doubtful that they would have made a federal case out of it, since she was only an admin. asst. at the time she originally applied. (Lots of admin. asst's out there with AA degrees from comm. colleges, or less.) And she could have answered, "It was wrong of me to misrepresent my education; I felt self-conscious entering such a prestigious academic setting without advanced degrees; I realized later it was important to earn honestly what I had claimed to have." No guarantee that would have gotten her the <em>Dean's</em> job, & I maintain that going to, & staying at, a diff. institution with honest credentials was preferable. But the suggestion that she would have been content to have "stayed in the back office" is not realistic, i.m.o.</p>
<p>My son applied ED, was deferred to RD and ultimately rejected this year. And if "doing something" means contact, no, nothing has been done. I'm sure MIT will stand firm by its admission decisions for this year.</p>
<p>moral of the story: Don't go to MIT for an undergraduate education.
1) Your GPA will suffer
2) Your wallet will suffer
3) Unless you plan on stopping after a BS/BA, employers will only consider where you completed your highest level of education, so go to MIT for grad. school
4) The administration is corrupt. Corruption is less likely at public institutions considering the administration has to be legit. to woo tax-payers to fund said institutions.
5) The campus is UGLY!!! DOES ANYONE ELSE NOTICE THIS????
6) Too many over-achievers makes for lame social opportunities (unless pulling an all nighter to finish a problem set is your idea of a good time)
7) stupid mascot ("go.......engineers?")
8) Too many suicides. People who kill themselves over academics have serious issues. There is more to life than academia.</p>
<p>"MIT tries to admit people who have the ability to succeed socially as well as academically. Achievement at MIT means participation in the community, membership in activities, and the ability to interact positively with one's peers."
"Here I thought MIT was supposed to be the province of nerds, of brilliant productive minds and their efforts, and to hell with all else."</p>
<p>MIT IS the province of brilliant and productive minds, and incredible people do amazing scientific things there for FUN (not just credit) all the time. The fact that MIT encourages these brilliant nerdy minds to be a little more well rounded is to their credit. If you are a scientist and you discover something incredible, what good does it do you or the rest of society if you can't communicate it to the rest of society.</p>
<p>There's a difference between not being able to adequately communicate (something even the most hardcore nerds are capable of), and being a person well read in the classics, multilingual, etc. Don't exaggerate - MIT is going for more than basic communication; whether or not that is good is another discussion.</p>
<p>As a reply to sanguine's post:
1) Your GPA will suffer.
- Most kids that go to MIT were the "smart kid" at their high school and come to MIT to find that there they may be just the "normal kid." One of the most amazing things that I learned going to MIT, is that while GPAs are important, there is more to life than your GPA. I learned who I was besides the "smart kid" and now that I'm out in the real world that lesson is just as important if not more so than the academic lessons I learned there.</p>
<p>2) Your wallet will suffer
- Top tier schools are expensive. I won't disagree with that, but MIT goes out of its way to provide need based financial aid to meet what it determines your family cannot pay. Don't avoid applying to MIT because you don't think you can afford it. You might just be suprized. Also, your education is an investment, so make it a good one.</p>
<p>4) The administration is corrupt.
- Don't base your assumptions about the administration on one person. People that were admitted to MIT were not only admitted by Marilee Jones but by an admissions committee. She was just one person.</p>
<p>5) The campus is ugly.
- I'll admit I never liked Simmons (the sponge building) and it took Stata (the building whose walls are not designed on right angles) a while to grow on me. But there are some amazing places on campus too. Killian court (that's the one in all the pictures with the big dome), the fact that most of the dorms have river views over looking Boston, being on the Charles River in general. Sure there may be one or two ugly buildings but that is by no means all of them.</p>
<p>6) Lame social opportunities
- Work hard, play hard. Dude you have no idea. The MIT frat parties are well known in Boston and people from other schools in Boston frequently attend. There are kids here doing every kind of extracirrcular activity possible. There is an outdoor club, and a juggling club, and incredible drama and music opportunities. If there is an activity that you do odds are at MIT there are other people that do it too. Most of the students at MIT play either varsity or IM sports (and sometimes both). MIT has a very healthy social scene. Yes there are all nighters too, but you don't necessarily have to completely sacrifice one for the other.</p>
<p>7)Mascot
- Um, the mascot is a beaver...nature's engineer and we are proud of our beaver thanks. </p>
<p>8) Suicide rate
- Actually the undergrad suicide rate has been quite low for the past couple of years. MIT has really stepped up to prevent suicides without lessening the academic side. They have done this by increasing mental health support and awareness, increasing academic support (tutoring and such), giving at least one holiday per month, and encouraging students to live healthy lifestyles and take part in extracirriculars to relieve stress.</p>