The Massachusetts Institute of Technology dean of admissions resigned yesterday after the school received a tip that three degrees she claimed on her resume were fabricated.
Marilee Jones apologized to MIT leadership and her staff in a statement for “very regrettably” misleading the university about her academic credentials.
“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” she said in the statement, adding she did not want to comment further.
The three schools from which she claimed degrees are Albany Medical Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Union College. In a statement released by MIT upon her appointment to the position, it listed one of the fabricated degrees, an SB and SM in biology from RPI, among her credentials.
MIT named Stuart Schmill – formerly the senior associate director of admissions – as interim director of admissions, and will begin the search for a permanent dean shortly, according to a statement released yesterday.
“The integrity of the Institute is our highest priority, and we cannot tolerate this kind of behavior,” said Undergraduate Education Dean Daniel Hastings in the statement.
The revelation is reminiscent of an incident involving John Schulz, the former dean of the Boston University College of Communication, who came under fire from faculty members who accused him of embellishing his credentials.
Last May at BU, Schulz was accused of falsifying his resume by stating he was one of only two Ph.D. candidates at Oxford University’s social studies department to receive a doctorate in 1981, though the university’s website listed 18 such degrees awarded that year.
Mass communication professor and then-associate dean Tobe Berkovitz become the interim dean, and he vowed to preserve “collegiality” among the college’s faculty.
Schulz told The Daily Free Press that he stepped down from his post in late September 2006 to spare the college from further controversy after the investigation into his resume, attributing the mistake to sloppy recording on his part and a lack of specification in writing the resume, for which he apologized. The university ultimately cleared Schulz of fault.
Jones, however, admitted she fabricated the degrees.
In a December 1997 statement announcing Jones’s appointment to her former position, MIT Students and Undergraduate Education dean Rosalind Williams called the selection process “extremely thorough.” A search committee — comprised of the deans of the engineering and science schools, three professors and two students — chose Jones from a pool of 65 distinguished applicants.
Jones has received nationwide attention for speaking out against the pressures of the admissions process, appearing on CBS and National Public Radio, and was quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. She also co-authored a book on the subject, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond.
Jones posted regularly on an MIT Admissions office blog aimed at promoting transparency in the stressful admissions process. On the blog, she comforted students rejected from the school and sympathized with their parents by sharing her own account of sending her child away to college.
In a March 17, 2006 post, she defended the personal tone of the blog.
“I’m proud to represent a place where truth is the whole point, messy or not,” she wrote. “And proud that MIT Admissions is a community of wonderful people who love you guys, who really think about you and care so much that we want to tell you the truth no matter what.”
The admissions office will continue to celebrate what Jones brought to the office and field, according to a post from last night by Ben Jones, the office’s communications director. Ben Jones also stated MIT is making her recognition public to avoid the “rampant speculation” about the selection process he said would likely have come of a more secret decision.
“You need to know that this was a lie on a resume,” he said in the statement. “Frankly, this is what it is, and there’s nothing more to say about it that will be productive. We need to acknowledge what happened and move forward.”
Staff reporter Andrew FitzGerald contributed reporting for this article.