Pad That Resume!

Two weeks back the story of Marilee Jones, the MIT Dean of Admissions who punched up her resume with degrees she hadn’t really earned, brought the issue of embellishing your background back into the spotlight. This week there’s a neat article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how a search committee discovered that their #1 candidate was not what he seemed:

The vetting of the vitae, which fell to me, was one of the most surprising experiences of my career.

The candidate had fabricated much of his scholarship. Book reviews that appeared on the vitae did not exist, or worse, had been written by others. He had invented conference presentations out of whole cloth, in subdisciplines specific enough that only a specialist would have known they were bogus at first glance. Articles that appeared to be in refereed journals (Studies in X or The Journal of Y) turned out to be merely titles composed for periodicals that had never existed.

There was a scattering of legitimate items on the CV—just enough to suggest an underperforming scholar who made the occasional effort—but most of it was fiction.

Hopefully my district never goes back to see if I actually mentored Harry Wong and did my student teaching with Rafe Esquith. It's not my fault, though, because George O'Leary did it first.

One of my summer projects is going to be to update my own resume, then hopefully morph that into the world’s shortest CV. I’ve gotten some grants and done some union work in the last year, and with my conference presentations coming up it’ll be good to have it ready to go so I can add to it right away instead of trying to think it out months later.