By Ezra
As folks have probably heard, MIT has fired Marilee Jones, who's been Dean of Admissions at the university for 28 years and, by all accounts, done a superlative job. Her sin? Not job performance, nor insubordination, but lying about a college degree 28 years ago. Kevin Carey gets this right:
This demonstrates how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis. The knew that forcing him to go through a formal course of study to earn a credential would be absurd. They were acting in their role as certifiers of learning, which is (see the post below) not necessarily the same thing as being a provider of learning.
At the modern university, that distinction doesn't exist--you have to be certified by the institution that taught you. Indeed, since degrees aren't based on any objective, verifiable evidence of learning, that's all they're certifying--that you've been taught. So I wonder if in addition to deterring future resume-fudgers, M.I.T. wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of employing someone who is living proof that you don't need a university degree to be really good at a complex, challenging, difficult job--particularly one at a university.
But I don't think that's exactly why they fired her. Rather, I don't think MIT was comfortable with the idea of employing someone who is not only proof that complex jobs can be handled by someone without a university degree, but that a degree is a counterfeit prone piece of paper.
As it is, we've gone a ways towards prioritizing credentialism over skills in the economy. The college kid will beat out the high school grad almost irregardless of their relative talents. But that system is built on the legitimacy of the credentialing process -- if diplomas can be faked -- and as a technical matter, they most certainly can be -- then it will make very little sense for any applicant not to have a slip of embossed parchment that looks like a diploma. So one of the very few ways to discourage that behavior is to ensure a zero-tolerance policy for those who would attempt it, even to the point of terminating them decades and decades after the fact.
This is all bass-ackwards, and I largely second Atlantic Matt's point that "the habit of disqualifying perfectly competent people from jobs based on a lack of degrees has become yet another brick in the American wall of inegalitarianism," but if you want your economy to run off the power of diplomas, and MIT is certainly invested in such a world, then there's really nothing to do but viciously protect the process's integrity.
