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DISHONORABLE DEGREES.(inaccuracy of information presented on resumes)

The New Yorker

| November 04, 2002 | Parker, Ian | COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

Twice a year, Jude M. Werra, of Jude M. Werra & Associates, a headhunting firm in Brookfield, Wisconsin, reviews the hundreds of resumes he has seen in the previous six months--the elegant, triumphant C.V.s of C.E.O.s and V.P.s--and he condenses them into a single statistic. "It's the number of people who've misrepresented their education divided by the number of people whose education we checked," Werra explained last week: in short, the percentage of people who invented a degree. Werra calls it the Liars Index. The index, which has been published since 1995, was at its highest in the first half of 2000: 23.3 per cent. It now stands at 11.2 per cent.

If there is a case for regarding all resumes as adventures in narrative, it is one that should not be made to Mr. Werra. In his view, a lie is a lie, whether it is propagated by Ronald Zarrella, the chief executive of Bausch & Lomb, who confirmed two weeks ago that he did not, after all, have an M.B.A. from N.Y.U.--or by Quincy Troupe, California's newly appointed poet laureate, who, shortly after Zarrella's announcement, acknowledged that he had never received a degree from Grambling College, in Louisiana, despite making that claim on his resume. (Mr. Zarrella remains at his desk, backed by the Bausch & Lomb board; Mr. Troupe's resignation has been accepted by the California senate, presumably on the ground that the last thing a state needs is a poet who makes things up.) These embellished resumes, testing our taste for the legend of the self-made man (as well as Sir Philip Sidney's claim that "the poet . . . never lieth"), can now be filed alongside those of Kenneth Lonchar, the former chief financial officer of Veritas Software (who gave himself a Stanford M.B.A.), Sandy Baldwin, the former president of the U.S. Olympic Committee (doctorate in American ...

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