Propaganda of the higher learning
The worst cultural and economic damage UC Merced has done to the north San Joaquin Valley is reflected in this article, by Barbara Ehrenreich, about an incident at MIT. The enormous amount of UC propaganda for this land boondoggle --from UC, politicians, finance, insurance and real estate special interests -- endlessly dinned into the minds of our communities, has accelerated the destruction of one of the best Valley traditions: honest, hard-working people working their way up on a farm, in a company or local government without educational credentials. People's employment possibilities are being maimed by lack of a college degree for jobs that don't need a college education to do them.
The great promise of "universal higher education" corresponded with a prolonged attack on American workers in the early 1970s including mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, plant closings and off-shoring -- deliberate, conscious policies committed by American government, corporations and investment interests to role back gains made by American workers since World War II. Today's American labor policy, if one can speak of it with a straight face, is corrupt, exploitive, and reactionary, an open corporate declaration of class war against labor. Universal higher education has become a sad, savage arena of competition for a shrinking lot of workplaces subject to sudden disappearance. It has also become a place of cultivation of class pretention. Beneath the level of the university credentialed community, chaos is growing. Above it, the whispering of money moving here and there.
Whenever I hear the blather about "making the working force more competitive," it reminds me of a electrical engineer in management telling me how he would always hire an engineer from Bombay over one from UC Berkeley because the Indian would be a better engineer. Both came with high debt. He would not admit that the import was willing to work cheaper.
Bill Hatch
--------------
04.30.2007
Huffington Post
The Higher Education Scam
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Barbara Ehrenreich
Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials 28 years ago.
She had claimed three degrees, although she had none. 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?
Jones is hardly the only academic fraud. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimates that 10-30 percent of resumes include distortions if not outright lies. In the last couple of weeks, for example, "Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D." -- as he is redundantly listed in the bestselling self-help book The Secret, where he appears as a spiritual teacher -- has confessed to not having his claimed master's degree, and the multi-level vitamin marketing firm he worked for admits that it can't confirm the Ph.D. either.
All right, lying is a grievous sin, as everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows. And we wouldn't want a lot of fake MIT engineering graduates designing our bridges. But there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.
The pundits keep chanting that we need a more highly skilled workforce, by which they mean more college graduates, although the connection between college and skills is not always crystal clear. Jones, for example, was performing a complex job requiring considerable judgment, experience and sensitivity without the benefit of any college degree. And how about all those business majors -- business being the most popular undergraduate major in America? It seems to me that a two-year course in math and writing skills should be more than sufficient to prepare someone for a career in banking, marketing, or management. Most of what you need to know you're going to learn on the job anyway.
But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications. Why? Certainly it's not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the "academic stench" that can sink a career: That master's degree in English? Better not mention it.
My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.
Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.
College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism. But we need a distinguished blue ribbon commission to investigate its role as a toll booth on the road to employment, and the obvious person to head up this commission is Marilee Jones.
May 5 / 6, 2007
A Political Cast of Hacks, Bums, Liars and Non-Stop Self-Aggrandizers
The American Moral Meltdown Accelerates
By LAWRENCE R. VELVEL
Counterpunch.com
...Moral meltdown also has been displayed at one of our great academic institutions, MIT, though here there definitely were sad aspects to it, aspects that speak poorly for America. MIT had to fire the head of its admissions staff, Merilee Jones, because, nearly thirty years ago, she lied on her resume in order to get a job at the university -- a job for which she did not need a college degree. She falsely said she had degrees she most certainly did not have. At first it was reported that she had then said she had three such degrees. Later it was reported that she had only claimed two, but later added a third, apparently in connection with seeking a higher job at MIT. At first it was not reported that, but later it was reported that, in fact, when she applied for her first job at MIT, she had a degree from a small college in Albany, NY named Saint Rose. At the time, Saint Rose was little known, to put it mildly. Today it is a better known school of 5,000 which graduates a large proportion of New York state's teachers.
During her decades at MIT, Jones apparently had performed very well in a number of jobs -- including ones for which a college degree was required by MIT, which did not, however, check her credentials since she already was a high performing employee. Being highly regarded, she rose to the top of her professional field. For some unknown reason, though, a few weeks ago someone who knew the truth dropped a dime on her -- ah, the pleasures of making enemies for one reason or another. MIT investigated and fired her despite her years of excellent service.
MIT did what it should have done when it fired her -- we simply will continue to have a morally lousy country if people can lie their ways into jobs, get away with it, and later plead that the original lie should be ignored because of one reason or another, e.g., because of years of excellent service. Culprits must be punished -- this is the only way we will ever put a stop to misconduct, and it is for that reason that war criminals like Kissinger and McNamara should be put in the dock now, even thirty and forty years after their horrid misconduct and despite their age. (It has been done to German Nazis you know, and the same principle should apply to our homegrown Nazis or, in one case, at least home schooled Nazi.) It is for the same reason that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wofowitz and a few others of our highest ranking Iraq war criminals should also be put in the dock. As I say, MIT was right to fire the woman for lying on her resume.
There is also a sadder side to the story, however. It is not primarily that she performed so well for so many years yet had to come to no good professional end, although that is a part of it. But the even sadder part is that the American mania for a college degree -- and for a degree from a prestigious elite school, not a no name school however fine its quality -- is so pronounced that Jones felt it desirable or necessary to invent false degrees when applying for her first job at MIT, and to hide the degree she did have, and felt as she did even though a degree was not a requisite for the job. This is symptomatic of the credentials mania that has infested American society, and that is now often more important than competence, even previously demonstrated competence. This mania, particularly because it substitutes credentials for competence, stifles good people lacking the credential, and makes a joke of the claim of social mobility that has always been so much a part of purported America. It is itself a form of moral meltdown...