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Saturday, June 16, 2007

A Question of Trust

"Last month, he was named Hotelier of the Year at the Asia Pacific Hotel Investment Conference," reports The Age; this month, because he made up his university qualifications and then rose high enough for someone in his past to notice him and tell on him, the chief executive of InterContinental Hotels Group's Asia-Pacific unit, Patrick Imbardelli, is over:

Imbardelli, 46, who was due to be promoted to the IHG board next month, had invented three degrees: a bachelor of arts from Victoria University, and a bachelor of sciences and a masters in business administration from Cornell University in the US.

... A spokesman for IHG said Mr Imbardelli had attended classes at the universities but never graduated. Although there were no concerns over his ability to do the job, the spokesman reportedly said: "With something like this, the fundamental basis of trust is undermined."


This trust thing is the point I was making about MIT's dismissal of Marilee Jones a few weeks ago - she was the admissions person who lied about all of her degrees too. I argued against Barbara Ehrenreich's claim that MIT had to get rid of her because she undermined the sanctity of the almighty college degree ("She had claimed three degrees, although she had none," wrote Ehrenreich. "If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving, but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?"). As I wrote then, "Ehrenreich wrongly assumes MIT had something in mind about the inherent worth of a college degree when it dismissed Jones. There's no reason to assume this. MIT had the trustworthiness of highly responsible administrators in mind."
Posted at: 6/16/2007 05:24:00 AM