DISHONORABLE DEGREES.(inaccuracy of information presented on resumes)

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 ...