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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, April 26, 2007

UD Thanks Her Reader, Charles,

...for sending this Harvard Crimson article her way. She had no idea about this one. She's usually up on these things.



'The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's dean of admissions, Marilee Jones, resigned today and admitted to the ultimate sin of her profession: lying on an application. [Not sure I'd call this the ultimate sin... ]

Jones, a 28-year veteran of the admissions office, listed degrees on her resume from three schools in upstate New York but did not earn any of them, an MIT spokeswoman said. [Ouch. That's a biggie. Often in these cases the person has all the degrees except for the final one... futzed with the Ph.D. too long and never quite earned it, but claims it on the cv... To have graduated from none of the schools you list -- that's a new one on UD.]


... In a prepared statement, Jones said she had "misled the Institute about my academic credentials" in applying for her first job at the school in 1979, and "did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since." [This is the sort of straightforward honesty UD missed in the last I Fucked Up statement she analyzed.] She was appointed to lead the admissions office in 1998. [This aspect of the story is all too typical: She rose too high. UD has said repeatedly on this blog that if you're going to fudge, go ahead and fudge, but lie low.]


... The resignation was announced at 11:00 a.m. in a brief e-mail to the MIT community. "This is a sad and unfortunate event," Daniel E. Hastings, the dean for undergraduate education, said in a statement. "But the integrity of the Institute is our highest priority, and we cannot tolerate this kind of behavior." [Again, well said. Short, simple, and stressing what needs to be stressed.]


[The Crimson reporter, Zachary M. Seward, ends with this bit of irony:]

Imparting advice to high-school students in her 2006 book [about college admissions], Jones warned against "making up information to present yourself as something you are not." She wrote, "You must always be completely honest about who you are." '