Dean Christakos

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April 27, 2007

Dean for MIT College Admissions has Madeup College Degrees

I can't even think of some kind of entertaining lead-in for this: The MIT Dean of Admissions, Marilee Jones, who made a public career of telling teenagers how they shouldn't pad their resume for their college applications, lied on her resume, claiming she had 3 science degrees when she didn't. She had based an MIT career lasting 30 years on an invented academic background.

Now, this is all over the news, in part because she made herself into such a high-profile college-admissions evangelist, garnering speaking engagements and media interviews across the country. Her story of her academic degrees kept changing:

Various biographies for Jones give different accounts of her credentials. When she became dean, MIT said she had a bachelor of science degree and a master of science in biology from Rensselaer . In her blog on the admissions office website, Jones did not list her degrees but described herself as a scientist.

Her biography on the website of the National Association for College Admission Counseling annual conference, where she was scheduled to speak in September, said she had a doctorate but did not specify from where, and said she had studied biology and chemistry.

It all seems to have started when she applied to be an administrative assistant at MIT back in 1979. It didn't require a degree, but somehow she saw fit to list multiple science degrees on her resume. Perhaps MIT should have been tipped off to the fact that someone who could have gotten a job as a researcher was applying to be an administrative assistant.

Jones became Dean of Admissions in 1997, after I finished undergrad at MIT in 1996. I didn't really have any memories or dealings with her. It was while I was a graduate student, after I returned to MIT in 1999, that I became aware of her presence on campus.

There was something about her that repeatedly demonstrated that she never quite "fit in" at MIT. Part of her claims were that MIT was confronting a changing generation of students who were much different than previous generations, and MIT had to learn how to deal with this. However, this always seemed like a cover story for her patronizing attitude towards the undergraduates and applicants. At a time when external pressures threatened to turn MIT into a place where students could make fewer choices and the campus worried about becoming a less dynamic place, Jones attempted to wave-away these concerns by explaining that these were exactly the things that the new generation of undergraduates wanted. When admitted students came to campus to visit on weekend, Jones came up with a system of requirements that students never leave campus, always wear a purple wristband, and introduced herself as "Mom away from Mom" which caused such an uproar from the undergraduates that these requirements were eventually dropped. My personal favorite was when the MIT Coop displayed an MIT tshirt with the letters "IHTFP" (alternately standing for "I Have Truly Found Paradise" / "I Hate This [Darn] Place") in the window, and Jones asked that it be removed because this "represented a different image of MIT than they wanted to put forth to prospective students."

She seemed like a someone who wanted to be a den mother, and it struck me that she didn't just not understand MIT, she didn't understand university life, and she didn't seem to have much of an understanding about the mindset of aspiring scientists. It's now clear why that was-- she really never had the personal connection to those things that she would have had her claims been true.

The MIT campus is not going to be in mourning over this. A lot of people who saw her as what they "wanted" an admissions Dean of an elite university to be -- patronizing, telling kids not to stress out, and the person that would tell parents she was going to take care of their kids on campus -- are going to miss a familiar media face.

UPDATE: You know, another issue I've heard brought up was "how did she get away with it for so long?" I don't even know that myself-- you can't really "pretend" to be a biologist or chemist, even a former biologist or former chemist. As I said, her mindset never quite fit in to MIT either. What I think happened was the following-- first, she probably didn't "talk up" her academic credentials in front of other professors for fear that they might try to talk shop with her. Next, within academic administration, once someone is trusted, that person isn't going to really be questioned. Everyone knew Jones because she had been there since the 1970s, and within the administration, she was considered part of the crowd. Finally, and I think this is really important, she told a lot of people what they wanted to hear, and her invented background made that credible. I think a lot of people wouldn't have taken her ideas seriously if she were portrayed as a mid-level administrator who rose up from an entry-level assistant's position. Instead, her supposed academic background gave her the credibility to claim that she knew what she was talking about when it came to the needs of aspiring scientists and engineers. People wanted someone who could speak with authority about having a scientific professional background and saying things like, "I want to be the students' mom away from mom," and talking about a desire to take care of the "kids." Science professors have a habit of iinsisting that all students suffer just like they suffered. Jones was able to evangelize for a more nuturing, more carefully controlled, less chaotic campus that a lot of people wanted to hear her advocate for while at the same time bringing a false scientific credibility along with her.

Posted by Dean at 8:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 25, 2007

My Last Bit of Commentary on 300

Ok, I will stop writing about this movie as a means of having stuff to post about. Really. But here's my last extended commentary on 300...while I was home in NJ for Easter, a lot of us talked about having seen 300, given that my father's side of the family is Spartan. Of course almost all of us had seen it, and for those that didn't, my brother downloaded a bootleg and made copies. We also played some of the scenes at home, and I distinctly remember the ending scene where the narrator of the story turns out to be the 1-eyed survivor of the conflict leading a combined Greek army against the Persian troops for a final battle to keep Greece free of foreign domination (the Battle of Salamis got skipped over).

There's a line there that gets the entire Greek mindset of the time completely wrong. In his big speech, he declares that the battle is about saving Greece from "mysticism and tyranny." Forget about the tyranny thing for a second. And forget about the fact that being a "tyrant" wasn't a "bad word" in ancient Greek. I'm referring to the "mysticism" part.

There's a reference to Xerxes' "hubris" in 300. You know what hubris is? It's thinking you are as powerful as the gods, and I think that Frank Miller and the other script writers for the movie missed out on that aspect. The first things you have to remember in ancient Greek history and mythology is you don't go against the gods and the oracle is always right.

On the former issue, think about The Odyssey. Along Odysseus's journey, all of his crew are killed by Zeus. Why? Because at one point, the crew is instructed not to eat the cattle on the island of Thrinakia because they belong to the god Helios. Impiously, they do anyway, and they all get killed. The Greeks were big on piety.

On oracles, really, I can't stress enough how the oracle was so completely the final authority on everything for the Greeks. My personal favorite story about this is related by Herodotus who tells that Croesus, king of the Lydians in southwest Asia Minor went to the Oracle at Delphi for advice about whether he should attack Persia. The reply he received: "If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire." The empire he destroyed turned out to be his own.

Contrast this with 300... the oracle is controlled by some inbred devious men who try to tell Leonidas that he shouldn't confront the Persians. No Greek story (and remember that 300 is a depicted as a story narrated by one of Leonidas's soldiers at Thermopylae who returned to Sparta before their last stand) would ever portray the oracle as giving bad advice. The story of Xerxes is a story of hubris-- defying the gods. The Greeks would never tell their own story as one in which they themselves defied the gods and won.

I'm going to lay some of this at the feet of Frank Miller, who's becoming progressively creepier over the years. His heyday was really in the 80s when he resurrected a moribund Batman with The Dark Knight Returns. Now, however, he's gotten older and more curmudgeonly and weirder. This has expressed itself in his increasingly hackish comic book projects as well as his wacky cranky bedwetting over the terrorist threat (I might note that that last link goes to a blogger who thinks this is just dandy, but you can check out another take on those sentiments elsewhere).

Incidently, another comics giant from Frank Miller's era, Alan Moore, who really showed that themes in comics could be modern in mindset and themes when he did Miracleman, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen, has declined into creepy porny comic experiments. The people who I think are doing the best comic writing these days are J. Michael Straczynski and Robert Kirkman.

Posted by Dean at 8:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 24, 2007

Birthday Parties Gone Wrong

A young woman by the name of Leia celebrates her 22nd birthday, and things go terribly awry. You know how young partygoers can be hotheads...

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April 14, 2007

Commenting Problems on the Weblog

Some of you may have noticed that you're having trouble commenting (yes, I actually have readers who occasionally comment). I've been trying to install some anti-spam features over the past couple of days, and it has been causing people's comments to get outright rejected (that's a great anti-spam strategy, but it keeps people from contributing). Hopefully this will all be fixed soon.

UPDATE: Ok, things seem to be working well. Comment away!

Posted by Dean at 4:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2007

On Imus

Don Imus was fired yesterday from his WFAN show. This has been churning for a while ever since he used racist and misogynistic remarks to describe the Rutgers Women's Basketball team. I'm not going to get into all of that here, and it's not like his remarks were out of the ordinary but rather I'm going to talk about my indirect experiences with Imus.

What most surprises me is the claim that Imus's audience leans heavily in the 18-34 advertising demographic. I find this difficult to believe. My experience with Don Imus is this: back in January of '06, when I still lived in Cambridge, I heard that Ana Marie Cox (former editor of Wonkette) was coming to Brookline Booksmith to promote her book Dog Days. That very morning, she appeared on Imus to talk about her book. As a consequence, a bunch of Imus's fans appeared that evening to hear what all the hype was about. As Jason of Happy Scrappy wrote about that evening:

My friend Berto and I sat down about 15 minutes before showtime. Near us were two older men -- I’d say late 50’s to mid 60’s -- who began quizzing us on what a blog is. They had never heard of Wonkette; one didn’t even own a computer. It turns out both just heard Cox on the radio that day, and decided to come check it out. After they said this, I looked around the room and guessed at least half the crowd was the same as them. I expected a young, hip, blogging crowd, but it looked more like an NPR event.

It was this crowd that turned out to be extremely disruptive and kind of ignorant about what Cox was all about and what her book was all about. I touched on this briefly when I wrote about my experience at the reading. There were some questioners asking long, rambling, off-topic questions, along with one questioner who, for no reason, got downright hostile. Why? I think the attendees had stuff about politics that they wanted to get off their chests, and Cox, representing "politics" was a convenient target.

So if you had to ask me who I thought Imus's audience was, I'd have said, "cranky old people." Maybe his demographics were actually a better crowd than that-- I actually can't seem to find any firm data on the issue. However, I can't say that my direct experience with his listeners has been particularly positive.

Posted by Dean at 7:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

The No Retreat, No Surrender Cliché

This is related to 300, which I've been talking a lot about, lately, but not directly. There's a scene in 300 where King Leonidas, inspiring his troops, reminds them that the Spartans live by a code of "Never Retreat, Never Surrender." Yes, it sounds moving, except that those of us who remember the movie Galaxy Quest can't help but picture Tim Allen, playing a washed up science fiction TV actor, starting to take seriously his own character's parody of a motto "Never Give Up, Never Surrender!" That sort of declaration is so cliché that it's pretty much a punchline. It's the perfect thing you would expect a bad actor in a cheesy adventure show/movie to say. And yet-- they put very similar words in King Leonidas's mouth! Apparently the words "Never Give Up, Never Surrender!" hit their nadir when Sean Connery said them in the movie First Knight, described by one of my brother's friends as "the worst King Arthur film (ever, in the history of filmmaking)." (Given the existence of 2004's King Arthur, starring Clive Owen, I find this difficult to believe, but there it is).

But wait! There's more! I grew up in New Jersey, so obviously, as far as I was concerned, Bruce Springsteen is one of the most famous rock stars ever. Yet, at the same time, he's ingrained into the public culture and consciousness enough that you cannot actually quote Springsteen lyrics without a certain amount of irony. Or rather, Springsteen songs are to be enjoyed by completely forgetting about the fact that you're a jaded hipster. The song "No Retreat, No Surrender" is great, but in 2007 you can only enjoy it as a nostalgia piece. It reminds you, "oh yeah, I used to listen to stuff like that. Good times." Just to remind you, in case you forgot, the lyrics went:

We busted out of class had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school
Tonight I heart the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say youre tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

We made a promise we swore wed always remember
No retreat, believe me, no surrender

As Cary Tennis said about Springsteen:

all those beefcake butt shots and that precious Telecaster that seem to say that Foucault and Derrida never really existed, and even if they did exist he could blow them away in a blast of burned rubber on hot asphalt

So, yeah, it's something to be enjoyed, and he really was a great pop culture giant of the 80s, but, seriously, I would advise anyone trying to be a "tough guy" not to entitle one's book No Retreat, No Surrender as indicted Republican Congressman Tom Delay seems to have done. He's a middle aged politician. He comes across as someone's out-of-touch father trying to act cool. Or, at the very least, a washed up guy spouting clichés that are at least 15 years out of date... kind of like Tim Allen's character in Galaxy Quest.

Posted by Dean at 9:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 8, 2007

Happy Easter

Christ is Risen, as we Orthodox say.

That's me on the right in mid-genuflection as the deacon does a celebratory tossing of flowers and basil on Holy Saturday morning.

See more at St. Mary's Pascha 2007 photo archive.

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April 5, 2007

Easter Preparations

I am getting ready for Easter, which I will be spending in part in Boston and in part in New Jersey. In preparation for Easter celebrations, I've been making some lamb chili, based on a couple other beef chili recipes I've use in the past.

I start off with 6 pounds of lamb meat right on the bone (on sale at Giant, this week!) :

Before I get into details, these are some other ingredients I used:

4 slices of bacon
3 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons mild chili powder
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons cumin
1 large yellow onion
1oz bittersweet (baking) chocolate
1 tablespoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 cans beef broth

Details after the jump...

Continue reading "Easter Preparations"

Posted by Dean at 7:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

On Boston Winters

Via fellow-former-Cantabridgian-turned-DCer Matthew Yglesias, we have this take on winters in my former home of Boston:

I don't know if any of you have ever had the pleasure of experiencing a Boston winter, but if not let me awaken your senses. It's basically an 8 month-long night of sitting in your bathtub tearlessly crying while listening to Townes Van Zandt/Joy Division mashups, half-heartedly trying to cut your wrists with the Lady Bic of some jawn you were hot for that you just found out gave brain to Mr. Len in the bathroom during some poetry slam in Central Square. No. It's really like that. For everyone. 8 months.

All true. You know, when you get to the peak of Boston winters, it's not that bad. When winter is in full swing, around January or February, you start thinking, "blizzards are awesome! I love how everything is all white! It's great walking through the middle of the street when the entire city is completely shut down!" Then by around March you start looking forward to spring. But it doesn't come. And it doesn't come. And it's late April and it's still cold and you haven't seen much of the sun. And you start wondering whether it is worthwhile to keep going until May. Then May arrives and it's still cold and overcast.

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April 2, 2007

"My Humps," ironic-style

Ok, I had more to say about 300, but I can't ignore this video of Alanis Morissette doing a cover of "My Humps":

(via Best Week Ever)

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