Speaker 1: Pushkin, and the Emmy goes too, and the Oscar goes
Speaker 1: to and the People's Choice Award goes to.
Speaker 2: Thank you to the Academy for this incredible recognition. I'm
Speaker 2: so honored.
Speaker 3: I'm so honored. Everybody wants to know what I would
Speaker 3: do if I didn't win. I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 2: Everybody gets a prize in modern America, actors, writers, musicians.
Speaker 2: But you know who doesn't get a fancy prize the
Speaker 2: hardworking administrators of America's elite colleges and universities. For years,
Speaker 2: I've observed this oversight with what can only be described
Speaker 2: as dismay, until I decided, damn it, if this country
Speaker 2: wasn't gonna honor the beleaguered giants of the Ivy League,
Speaker 2: then I would. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 2: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 2: In this episode, we are pleased to inaugurate the first
Speaker 2: annual Revisionist History Higher Education Award in honor of our
Speaker 2: company's namesake. We're gonna call them the Pushkin Process. Folks,
Speaker 2: these prizes are super prestigious. You can't see this because
Speaker 2: this is audio, But we have little gold statuettes of
Speaker 2: Alexander Pushkin himself. You're gonna walk into the lobby of
Speaker 2: your favorite eighteenth century ivy colored marble and granite University
Speaker 2: Administration building, and they are in a glass case. Below
Speaker 2: the tiffany chandelier is going to be a Pushkin. That is,
Speaker 2: if you're lucky. I promise that over the next few years,
Speaker 2: the giants of American academia will be graced with a
Speaker 2: Pushkin statuette in recognition of one stupendous achievement or another.
Speaker 2: And in this episode we begin our awards program with
Speaker 2: the mac Daddy of Pushkin Prizes, the George Santos Memorial
Speaker 2: Pushkin Prize for egregiously Deceptive Self Promotion.
Speaker 4: My parents came to this country in search of the
Speaker 4: American dream. Today I live that American dream, only in
Speaker 4: this country, only in this country. And the little boy
Speaker 4: born in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens in
Speaker 4: New York City, become a United States Congressman at thirty four.
Speaker 4: It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit as
Speaker 4: we like to call it.
Speaker 2: Actually it's not a story of survival, tenacity and grit
Speaker 2: as we like to call it. The story of George Santos,
Speaker 2: Congressman from Long Island, is the story of someone who
Speaker 2: made up basically everything on his resume. And it is
Speaker 2: that shamelessness that we seek to reward with the first
Speaker 2: of the coveted Pushkin Prizes.
Speaker 4: Good morning, chabatchalom to everybody. Thank you for being here,
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me. We're no stranger to persecution.
Speaker 4: My grandfather fleeing Ukraine in nineteen twenties to Belgium.
Speaker 2: Turns out he's not Jewish. Santos said his mom was
Speaker 2: a nine to eleven survivor. Turns out she wasn't even
Speaker 2: in New York City during nine to eleven. He said
Speaker 2: he worked at Goldman Sachs. Turns out he never set
Speaker 2: foot in Golden Sex. And then there was this tallest
Speaker 2: of tall tales, which I love so much.
Speaker 3: Hey, you know what's funny, George. You go right to
Speaker 3: the heart here of me, Sid and Bernie.
Speaker 2: This is Santos on a local New York radio show
Speaker 2: Sit and Friends in the Morning during his first congressional
Speaker 2: run in twenty twenty, and the host Sid Rosenberg starts
Speaker 2: talking about sports.
Speaker 3: At the very end of your Biography, it says in
Speaker 3: his spare time, George Anthony enjoys volleyball and tennis.
Speaker 2: Rosenberg says, that's funny because both his daughter and his
Speaker 2: co host daughter are avid volleyball and tennis players. Then
Speaker 2: Santo's response.
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny. I actually went to school on
Speaker 5: a volleyball scholarship and did what I did. Yeah, when
Speaker 5: I was in Beru, we were the number one volleyball.
Speaker 3: Did you graduate from Baruk? Did you graduate from there?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So did I did?
Speaker 5: I did so?
Speaker 3: Did I?
Speaker 5: Oh? Very cool, great institutions. But it's funny that we
Speaker 5: went to play against Harvard Yale and we lay them.
Speaker 5: We were champions across the entire Northeast corridor. Every school
Speaker 5: that came up against us, they were shaking at the time.
Speaker 5: And it's funny. I was the smallest guy and I'm
Speaker 5: six two. We had on our block, on our on
Speaker 5: our on our block alone, there were six seven, six eight.
Speaker 5: These guys weren't jumping, they were just stretching their arms up.
Speaker 5: We were, we were and all of us could have
Speaker 5: been playing basketball, but we chose volleyball because it was easier.
Speaker 5: So it was a great time I look, I sacrificed
Speaker 5: both my knees and got very nice replacements, knee replacements
Speaker 5: from playing volleyball. That's how serious I took the game.
Speaker 3: Well, that's how serious it's taking politics as well. Remember
Speaker 3: this name, folks, George Santos out in the third district.
Speaker 2: This is, to my mind, the gold standard George Santos fabrication,
Speaker 2: a wedding cake of prevarication. The Washington posted a breakdown
Speaker 2: to the tape and here's what they found. Has start
Speaker 2: with the smallest lies and work backwards. Bruke didn't be
Speaker 2: Yale at volleyball because Yale doesn't have a varsity volleyball team.
Speaker 2: Santels later said he played the position of striker. Volleyball
Speaker 2: teams don't have strikers.
Speaker 6: That sucker.
Speaker 2: Nor did Santos have a volleyball scholarship at Baruque because
Speaker 2: Baruch doesn't give out volleyball scholarships. And at six '
Speaker 2: to two, he would not have been the shortest player
Speaker 2: in the team even if he had been on the team,
Speaker 2: but he wasn't. He never played volleyball at Baruk, maybe
Speaker 2: because he never attended Baruk at all, which means his
Speaker 2: knees are perfectly fine, unless that is, he blew them
Speaker 2: out playing some other imaginary sport. That's seven lies in
Speaker 2: a row, and if you listen to the tape, it's
Speaker 2: clear that he made up the whole string on the fly.
Speaker 2: The man is an icon. And with our first Pushkin Prize,
Speaker 2: we ask what American college came closest in the past
Speaker 2: year to this lofty standard. Believe me, they were many nominees,
Speaker 2: all of them worthy. Envelope please, and the winner is
Speaker 2: Columbia University. The big beginning when you heard when you said,
Speaker 2: I want to investigate Columbia's rise to number two, did you,
Speaker 2: in the back of your mind think there might be
Speaker 2: something questionable going on?
Speaker 7: Yes, not even no, not in the back of my mind.
Speaker 7: At the front of my mind.
Speaker 2: You're listening to a math professor at Columbia named Michael
Speaker 2: Thaddius fifties long hair. I went to see him in
Speaker 2: his office on the Columbia campus, full of books and strange,
Speaker 2: captivating jottings on the wall. My father was a mathematician.
Speaker 2: I have great affection for the species. If you google Thaddius,
Speaker 2: you'll find papers that begin with things like we discuss
Speaker 2: simpletic cutting for Hamiltonian actions of non Abelian compact groups.
Speaker 2: By using a degeneration based on the Vinburg monoid, we
Speaker 2: give in good cases a global quotient description of a
Speaker 2: surgery construction introduced by Woodward n mind ranking, and show
Speaker 2: it can be interpreted in algebra geometric terms. I have
Speaker 2: no idea what that means, but Michael Thaddius does, which
Speaker 2: is to say that when it comes to numbers and
Speaker 2: statistics and things, he's someone to take very seriously. So
Speaker 2: one day, not long ago, he hears something that doesn't
Speaker 2: seem right.
Speaker 7: So I saw that Columbia had risen to number two.
Speaker 7: I think in fact, this was even mentioned by our
Speaker 7: own dean at a faculty meeting. I think that's how
Speaker 7: I found out about it.
Speaker 2: The dean announces to everyone, I have amazing news. Columbia
Speaker 2: has just risen to number two in the US News
Speaker 2: College rankings, just a hair behind Princeton. Everyone basks in
Speaker 2: the glow of the school's extraordinary achievement, because you know
Speaker 2: what a high US News rankings means, more alumni dollars,
Speaker 2: more prestige, more applications, more excitement and desire from neurotic
Speaker 2: upper middle class suburban parents, for anyone with Ivy League dreams,
Speaker 2: it's the holy grail. I mean, if you have a
Speaker 2: kid in high school and your kids said, Mom, I
Speaker 2: just got into Columbia, you will be over the moon.
Speaker 2: And why would you be over the moon Because Columbia
Speaker 2: is number two in the US News rankings. So the
Speaker 2: Dean makes her big announcement, but Michael Thaddeus, the numbers guy,
Speaker 2: isn't buying.
Speaker 7: And that just piqued my curiosity. Two is pretty high ranking.
Speaker 7: You know, In particular, we were tied with Harvard and MIT,
Speaker 7: which are institutions that objectively have certain big advantages over us.
Speaker 7: They have much larger endowments, they have much more space
Speaker 7: than we do. And I just you know, I've also
Speaker 7: over the years, I've taken a greater and greater, perhaps
Speaker 7: almost obsessive interest in facts and figures about the university.
Speaker 7: I look at a lot of websites where the numbers appear,
Speaker 7: and I just wondered, how could Columbia have performed so
Speaker 7: well on this ranking as to be tied with institutions
Speaker 7: that have these objective advantages over it. How do the
Speaker 7: numbers break down?
Speaker 2: Columbia started in these rankings at eighteenth, then began a steady,
Speaker 2: dramatic climb past Cornell, Washington, w Rice, Vanderbilt, Brown, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, Caltech,
Speaker 2: Penn Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Yale, Stanford. In the
Speaker 2: past five years alone, they've gone from fifth to third
Speaker 2: to second, shooting like a shiny asteroid past their glittering peers.
Speaker 3: I'm a runner.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: In the running world, the tell for whether someone is
Speaker 2: doping is in an unexpected improvement. You know, when the
Speaker 2: twenty seven year old miler suddenly lops three seconds off
Speaker 2: their personal best. I see you say, sudden improvement is
Speaker 2: the tell sudden out of context improvement. Oh my. The
Speaker 2: first thing Thadius did after the faculty meeting is by
Speaker 2: a subscription to the US News Rankings. He downloaded the
Speaker 2: data Columbia submitted for his application, and his eye falls
Speaker 2: on class size. Columbia reported to US News that eighty
Speaker 2: two point five percent of its classes had less than
Speaker 2: twenty students. Thaddius looked at that number and thought, huh.
Speaker 7: Anyone who was taught here as I have for the
Speaker 7: last twenty five years, knows that our class sizes are
Speaker 7: not particularly small for an elite university, and that they
Speaker 7: have been steadily growing. I'm teaching calculus or I have
Speaker 7: just finished teaching a calculus course that had about seventy
Speaker 7: six students, and that's typical for a course of that nature.
Speaker 7: T us News said that what was it again? I
Speaker 7: think eighty two point five percent of all classes enrolled
Speaker 7: below twenty students, and that just did not square with
Speaker 7: my experience at all.
Speaker 2: So he decided to fact check Columbia's claim. He went
Speaker 2: to the university's class catalog and pulled out the data
Speaker 2: on all thirty thousand of the school's classes.
Speaker 7: I took the HTML code of those pages, downloaded the
Speaker 7: source code, concatenated all the files. Then I used a
Speaker 7: text editor, Emacs to edit the resulting gigantic file in
Speaker 7: such a way that I turned it into a database
Speaker 7: comma separated database with the course names, numbers, and enrollments,
Speaker 7: and then I opened it up in Excel.
Speaker 2: He analyzed the data, double checked his math, and realized
Speaker 2: his pokey feeling was justified.
Speaker 7: I was able to arrive at an estimate it was
Speaker 7: more like sixty two to sixty eight percent, a far
Speaker 7: cry from eighty three percent.
Speaker 2: Now he's getting suspicious. He picks another number. The US
Speaker 2: News rankings penalizes the school if it has too many
Speaker 2: part time faculty. Columbia told US News that it only
Speaker 2: had one hundred and thirty seven part timers, but that
Speaker 2: has found that the school also had to report the
Speaker 2: statistic to the Department of Education.
Speaker 7: The number report of the government was over one thousand,
Speaker 7: and I think that that's the more accurate number. To me,
Speaker 7: this is a really important figure that the balance between
Speaker 7: full time and part time faculty is a crucial matter
Speaker 7: for the future of intellectual life and the future of
Speaker 7: American universities. If we just casualize our faculty, we switch
Speaker 7: to the sort of gig economy model where most people
Speaker 7: are working contingally at part time. That's going to be
Speaker 7: disastrous for the quality of education. It's going to be
Speaker 7: disastrous for the quality of intellectual life. And so we
Speaker 7: need to have honest, reliable figures about this. And yet
Speaker 7: we have these two figures from Columbia that differ by
Speaker 7: a factor of eight.
Speaker 2: He kept going, US News wants to know what percentage
Speaker 2: of your faculty has a terminal degree in their field. Basically,
Speaker 2: do they have a PhD?
Speaker 8: Or not.
Speaker 2: Columbia reported the highest terminal degree number of any college
Speaker 2: in the entire country, ninety nine point five percent, which
Speaker 2: US News rounded up two one hundred percent. That's everyone.
Speaker 2: So Thadeus goes through the faculty directory and looks to
Speaker 2: see if there's anyone teaching at Columbia who only has
Speaker 2: a bachelor's degree and finds dozens and dozens of faculty
Speaker 2: with no more than a BA to their name, And.
Speaker 7: That was enough that there was no way that the
Speaker 7: percentage could have been ninety nine point five.
Speaker 2: Columbia says it's student faculty ratio is six to one.
Speaker 2: It's not. It's more like eleven to one.
Speaker 7: On and on every single figure that where I could
Speaker 7: check it independently, I found a significant discrepancy between what
Speaker 7: was reported to US News and what I could confirm elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Then he sat down and wrote up a massive analysis
Speaker 2: of his findings, charts, grafts, computer analyzes pages upon pages.
Speaker 2: He puts it up on his faculty web page, and
Speaker 2: there it sits for weeks and weeks until, for some
Speaker 2: strange reason, someone posts a link to Thaddeus's manifesto on
Speaker 2: the message board of the running website Let's run dot com.
Speaker 2: If you are unfamiliar with the message boards of Let's Run,
Speaker 2: here are some typical threads. Twoey runs Crazy four to
Speaker 2: twenty three anchor leg for NC State, but still not
Speaker 2: enough for DMR or At twenty seven, I finally realized
Speaker 2: every tattoo anyone has is for attracting a mate or
Speaker 2: rip Spencer, the official dog of the Boston Marathon, has died.
Speaker 2: Now how do I know about this? Because Let's Run
Speaker 2: is one of my favorite websites. I am one of
Speaker 2: those people dutifully reading the Let's Run message boards. So
Speaker 2: I see a link and click on it. Because you
Speaker 2: know how I feel about the US News rankings. I'm
Speaker 2: obsessed with them. I've lost track of how many revisionist
Speaker 2: history episodes have been devoted to testifying to their stupidity.
Speaker 2: I don't understand why college administrators care so much about them,
Speaker 2: why parents and their college bound teenagers go nuts about them.
Speaker 2: When law schools and medical schools began dropping out of
Speaker 2: the US rankings, I walked around the streets of New
Speaker 2: York pounding on my chest like I was personally responsible.
Speaker 2: Do you see what I'm saying? I was the target
Speaker 2: audience for the Thaddeus expose.
Speaker 7: Again, I salute you. You were sort of the tipping point,
Speaker 7: as I said, I mean, but when you started tweeting
Speaker 7: about it, that was when the rest of the world
Speaker 7: started to take notice. So I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 2: Oh, the first nice thing anyone has ever said about
Speaker 2: my Twitter. So the story goes everywhere. Colombia goes into
Speaker 2: a defensive crouch, and the US News reanalyzes situation and
Speaker 2: downgrades Columbia back to eighteen. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Speaker 2: I know what you're thinking. The Pushkin Prize is a
Speaker 2: highly prestigious award. Those statuettes are coveted. So how can
Speaker 2: we be sure that Columbia meets the elevated standard set
Speaker 2: by our namesake George Santos? Very good question. Please join
Speaker 2: me as we break it down. To my mind, there
Speaker 2: are three criteria Columbia needs to meet to rise to
Speaker 2: Santo's level deception. The first is gratuitousness. That's the power
Speaker 2: of the Santos bit about his volleyball career at Baruk.
Speaker 2: This was a lie fundamentally different from his claims to
Speaker 2: being Jewish, working at Golden Sachs and running a charity
Speaker 2: for un wanted pets. Sorry I left that one out before.
Speaker 2: Those were all lies that helped his case with the
Speaker 2: voters of Long Island. A Jewish investment banker who loves
Speaker 2: domestic animals is pretty much the Long Island equivalent of
Speaker 2: George Clooney. But no one was going to vote for
Speaker 2: him because he blew out two knees battling as the
Speaker 2: shortest man on the barof volleyball squad. He had them
Speaker 2: a Jewish goldman Sachs and abandoned kittens. The volleyball lie
Speaker 2: was pure gilding the lily, and that's what makes it
Speaker 2: so heroic. Santoslied when it wasn't even in his interest
Speaker 2: to lie. Now does Columbia meet this standard? Was their
Speaker 2: deception gratuitous? In order to answer this question, I turned
Speaker 2: to Revisionist History's resident data scientist, Lauren Lavelle. Lauren Lauren Lauren, Hey, Malcolm,
Speaker 2: we ride again. Some of you may remember Lauren from
Speaker 2: the Project dillardpisode of Revision's History. A group of undergraduates
Speaker 2: at Read College hacked their way into the US News algorithm,
Speaker 2: which gave them a computer model that can test any
Speaker 2: hypothesis about a school's rankings. So I asked Lauren, who
Speaker 2: studied statistics at Read, to use the model to figure
Speaker 2: out how a historically black college could rise in the
Speaker 2: US News rankings. You may recall her answer. It was
Speaker 2: the best way for a college full of black students
Speaker 2: to rise in the US News rankings was to let
Speaker 2: in lots of white students.
Speaker 8: And I can't emphasize enough that this model was built
Speaker 8: by undergraduate students for a class project. They did a
Speaker 8: great job, and this model works amazingly. You know, it
Speaker 8: wasn't some super prestigious data scientists getting paid millions of
Speaker 8: dollars to do this for some super prestigious university like
Speaker 8: it's students.
Speaker 2: In other words, the barriers to manipulation are low. Yes,
Speaker 2: So I said to Lauren, let's use the trusted Read
Speaker 2: college model to get at this question of gratuitousness. I
Speaker 2: send her a list of questions starting with tell me
Speaker 2: which of Columbia's whoppers mattered the most, and her conclusion
Speaker 2: was a shocker.
Speaker 8: The thing that really making the biggest difference is the
Speaker 8: faculty resources category. So for faculty resources, we have our
Speaker 8: class size r percent of our faculty that are full
Speaker 8: time and our student of faculty ratio.
Speaker 2: US newsgrades all universities on a scale of zero to
Speaker 2: one hundred, so Princeton at number one is one hundred.
Speaker 2: Columbia is a close second at ninety six. According to
Speaker 2: Lauren's analysis, fiddling with just those three variables gave Columbia
Speaker 2: an eight point boost. And the reason that's unexpected is
Speaker 2: because faculty resources only count for a tiny amount in
Speaker 2: the overall US News ranking algorithm. You tinker with those variables,
Speaker 2: you get a massive payoff.
Speaker 8: Exactly when you change just one or two of them, again,
Speaker 8: it's only like a one or two point, But when
Speaker 8: you put all three of them together, it's the synergies
Speaker 8: between these variables that create these big jumps.
Speaker 2: Wait, so on apausitives. Yeah, this is really interesting because
Speaker 2: this supports the notion that this was not an accidental
Speaker 2: happening at Columbia. This this suggests there was some significant
Speaker 2: thought behind this, because what you told me is something
Speaker 2: that's not intuitive.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: I would have thought that you could identify one whiz
Speaker 2: bank that would have given us a massive payoff. We
Speaker 2: wouldn't have had to do anything else. But what you're
Speaker 2: saying is no, you actually it's an unexpected area gives
Speaker 2: you a huge payoff. And also if you want to
Speaker 2: get a twelve point swing, you have to tinker with
Speaker 2: a lot of variables. Absolutely, absolutely, And there's some kind
Speaker 2: of thing greater than the some of its parts that's
Speaker 2: that work here that you could only stumble on if
Speaker 2: you went behind the scenes and sort of tried to
Speaker 2: figure out the murky black box that is US news.
Speaker 8: Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. So can we
Speaker 8: do screen share on here? Is that a thing? Can
Speaker 8: I show you my code?
Speaker 2: Can you? Can you tilt your camera to just showing
Speaker 2: me the thing in I see? Oh oh it's on
Speaker 2: your screen? Can you screenshare an emo? Lauren, I'm fifty
Speaker 2: nine years old. I barely know how to work a computer. Sorry,
Speaker 2: this went on for a bit. This is what happens
Speaker 2: when a data scientist tries to communicate with a boomer
Speaker 2: over zoom. Lauren lapsed into geek mode for like twenty minutes,
Speaker 2: talking about unexpected nonlinearities. Her point was that the way
Speaker 2: to climb the rankings is not obvious. It's a laundry
Speaker 2: list of nips and tucks that an unexpected combination give
Speaker 2: you a facelift. If you tried to do it just
Speaker 2: by eyeballing the criteria that US News makes public, you'd
Speaker 2: fail to go back to the point I was saying,
Speaker 2: so for to my mind, this argues powerfully for some
Speaker 2: kind of premeditation on the part of Columbia. I mean,
Speaker 2: we have no idea what they did, so it is
Speaker 2: all in the realm of speculation. But they basically manufactured
Speaker 2: a twelve point swing. And it's very hard to imagine
Speaker 2: how you could manufacture a twelve point swing by the
Speaker 2: seat of your pants, because it's not intuitive.
Speaker 8: I agree, there's probably some dirty play happening somewhere, Lauren.
Speaker 2: They hired someone like you, that's what they did. Somewhere
Speaker 2: out there, there is some brainy twenty six year old
Speaker 2: with blood on their hands.
Speaker 8: I mean, maybe, to.
Speaker 2: Be clear, I don't know that they hired someone like
Speaker 2: Lauren to coordinate this. But here's the crucial fact that
Speaker 2: puts Columbia in George Santo's territory. Lots of Columbia's inventions
Speaker 2: don't have much of a payoff, like, for instance, their
Speaker 2: most spectacular nonsense of all the Big Kahuna concerns something
Speaker 2: called instructional resources the more money you spend on teaching,
Speaker 2: the more US News rewards you. And the number of
Speaker 2: Columbia claim to spend on teaching was hilariously large, just
Speaker 2: over three billion dollars. That he has spent a huge
Speaker 2: amount of time trying to figure out just where that
Speaker 2: preposterous number came from, before he realized they just added
Speaker 2: in the one point two billion they spend every year
Speaker 2: on patient care at Columbia's medical center. They're pretending that
Speaker 2: the person getting an appendect Toby is a student, which
Speaker 2: is completely and utterly bananas. Now what difference did this
Speaker 2: particular outrageous bit of Shenanigan make.
Speaker 8: Let's see, I have a graph somewhere. Okay, So Columbia
Speaker 8: reported that it spends about three billion dollars on an instruction.
Speaker 8: This is for fiscal year twenty twenty two, and it's
Speaker 8: consolidated financial statements. They report for instruction and educational administration
Speaker 8: about two billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Oh. The reason we know this is a lie is
Speaker 2: that on its official financial statements, which are audited by
Speaker 2: actual professionals, the school doesn't pull the same stunt.
Speaker 8: So that's a billion dollars extra that they're reporting to US.
Speaker 8: News basically, and when that works out on a per
Speaker 8: student basis, you know, it's a lot of money that
Speaker 8: they're kind of you feel a billion around.
Speaker 2: With their Are you telling me long that a billion
Speaker 2: dollars is a lot of money in your book?
Speaker 8: Yeah, imagine that, Like this number that's so large the
Speaker 8: human brain literally can't even understand. Imagine. And yet when
Speaker 8: we drop that three billion down to two billion dollars,
Speaker 8: we're still only seeing like a three point drop in
Speaker 8: the score, two or three points. So from about ninety
Speaker 8: six to about a ninety four or ninety three three points.
Speaker 2: That's it. If they were only going to cheat by
Speaker 2: inflating their student instructional expenditures by a billion, they only
Speaker 2: get a three point jump exactly. Okay, Right, it's good to.
Speaker 8: Know, which sounds crazy, right, Like that's a lot of
Speaker 8: money to not really make a big difference in your score.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you're the president of Columbia and I
Speaker 2: come to you and I say we can drop an
Speaker 2: imaginary billion into this and we're only getting three points,
Speaker 2: you're saying, Okay, but I'm not. It's not floating your boat.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it doesn't seem like a very high return, right,
Speaker 8: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: It's gratuitous. It's just like George Santos and Baruke volleyball
Speaker 2: in retrospect. That was their error, wasn't it. They shouldn't
Speaker 2: have done the bill done. The billion dollar thing was
Speaker 2: so obvious and egregious, and it gave them such a
Speaker 2: small payoff. Yeah, why if you're trying to get away
Speaker 2: with some shenanigans, would.
Speaker 8: You It's a ridiculous overstatement, like it's more than it's
Speaker 8: larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.
Speaker 2: I know it bananas, Like it's so bananas. Here's my
Speaker 2: you know what my interpretation is. So there's like some
Speaker 2: dude man or woman is charged with coming up with
Speaker 2: a strategy and that that's the one they do last.
Speaker 2: So it's like it's it's Monday morning at three am.
Speaker 2: They got a hand in their proposal for hacking the
Speaker 2: US News. By nine am, they've been up for forty
Speaker 2: eight hours. They've done all the hard stuff, and they're like,
Speaker 2: f let's just throw it an extra bill on this.
Speaker 8: Why not just throw in a few extra zeros?
Speaker 2: The bar set by George Santos was very high. The
Speaker 2: Pushkin Prize committee believes Columbia met it okay criteria number two.
Speaker 2: The second thing our namesake, George Santos teaches us is
Speaker 2: that you have to show as little remorse as possible.
Speaker 2: When the furer over his lies was at its peak,
Speaker 2: he was unruffled.
Speaker 6: I don't understand where these allegations come from. Oh, George
Speaker 6: Santels lives in a fantasy world or whatever it is
Speaker 6: that they're trying to elude there, because it's just people
Speaker 6: who know me know that that's just not the case.
Speaker 2: People who know me, which is hilarious, right, because the
Speaker 2: whole reason there was a controversy over George Santos is
Speaker 2: that he wouldn't tell us who he was. At some point,
Speaker 2: some enterprising journalists counted seven different names that Santos has
Speaker 2: used over the years for Pushkin Prize consideration. We need
Speaker 2: that kind of remorselessness. Let me give you what I
Speaker 2: think is a relevant counter example. It concerns Temple University's
Speaker 2: online Business School. The story goes the dean of the
Speaker 2: b school there, a man named Mosha Pora, was upset
Speaker 2: about his school's low US News ranking, so he sends
Speaker 2: several of his underlings to Washington, d C. To complain
Speaker 2: to the US News rankings team, and in the course
Speaker 2: of that meeting, US News let slip that they don't
Speaker 2: actually check any of the data that schools send them.
Speaker 2: So the underlings report this back to Mosha, and Mosha's like, great,
Speaker 2: I guess there's no state troopers on this stretch of
Speaker 2: the university prestige Highway. So he hires a data scientist.
Speaker 2: They figure out that what really matters for online business
Speaker 2: schools is what percentage of the school's incoming class has
Speaker 2: taken the GMAT. In Temple's case, it's something like nineteen percent.
Speaker 2: So Mosha changes that number to one hundred percent, and
Speaker 2: Wall Temple's online business school faults to number one in
Speaker 2: the US News Online b School rankings. Now you hear
Speaker 2: that story and you say to yourself, why wasn't Mosha
Speaker 2: up for a pushkin price? And believe me, we thought
Speaker 2: long and hard about his nomination. I mean, Mosha was
Speaker 2: convicted of fraud and sentenced to fourteen months. He committed
Speaker 2: a crime.
Speaker 9: The charges against Parat were not just simply that he
Speaker 9: defrauded US News Rankings, but that he defrauded applicants to
Speaker 9: the school, students at the school, and donors, all of
Speaker 9: whom look at the rankings and making their decision about
Speaker 9: where to direct their money.
Speaker 2: That's Jennifer Williams, who was in the US Attorney's office
Speaker 2: in Philadelphia at the time of the Temple case.
Speaker 9: And in fact, the scheme, as charged in the indictment,
Speaker 9: was very successful. Not only did the rankings improve dramatically,
Speaker 9: but the enrollment went way up and the total amount
Speaker 9: of tuition that Temple was able to get due to
Speaker 9: the increased enrollment was almost forty million dollars over the
Speaker 9: course of several years. So that is the goal of
Speaker 9: the fraud. That's what made this a crime.
Speaker 2: So why doesn't Temple get the Sentos Award Because, and
Speaker 2: this is crucial, the school has too much remorse When
Speaker 2: word leaks out about Moshes shedanigans. The school hires a
Speaker 2: big name outside law firm, Jones Day to investigate. The
Speaker 2: university pays out millions of dollars in damages to the
Speaker 2: students who enrolled thinking they were getting a degree from
Speaker 2: the number one rank school in the country. It was
Speaker 2: Temple who turned in Mosha to the authorities. This is
Speaker 2: not how Columbia behaved at all. Thaddius releases his report
Speaker 2: on February twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, and Columbia responds
Speaker 2: with a press release from the school's provost on June thirtieth,
Speaker 2: months later. I'm quoting. Columbia has long conducted what we
Speaker 2: believe to be a thorough process for gathering and reporting
Speaker 2: institutional data, but we are now closely reviewing our processes
Speaker 2: in light of the questions raised. The ongoing review is
Speaker 2: a matter of integrity. We will take no shortcuts in
Speaker 2: getting it right. Temple Hired, one of the world's biggest
Speaker 2: law firms. Colombia launched a review.
Speaker 7: The approach has been just to say as little as possible,
Speaker 7: try to attract as little attention, and wait for the
Speaker 7: storm to blow over.
Speaker 2: You're saying that no member of the administration has reached
Speaker 2: out to you since you published that article.
Speaker 5: Good God.
Speaker 2: No, wait, that's nuts.
Speaker 7: That's nuts. I'm glad you think so. I asked the
Speaker 7: question at a faculty meeting. Did the review that Columbia
Speaker 7: conducted explore the question of intent about whether you know
Speaker 7: these falsehoods were provided intentionally? Did anyone know that they
Speaker 7: were false? And if so, who and the answer was, well, no,
Speaker 7: our review did not look into that question. So it's
Speaker 7: clear to me that the review was not seriously intended
Speaker 7: to get to the bottom of the matter.
Speaker 2: Well's not a review because the Santos criteria are so rigorous.
Speaker 2: I realized I needed to take further steps to see
Speaker 2: if Columbia's remorselessness remained in place. First, I waited to
Speaker 2: see whether they would update the June thirtieth press release.
Speaker 2: I waited, waited six months past, so then I decided
Speaker 2: I needed to contact them directly. I sent an email,
Speaker 2: asked for an interview with the provost. Waited, waited, waited,
Speaker 2: until finally someone in the media relations department emailed me
Speaker 2: back with a link to the press release of June thirtieth.
Speaker 2: We are not commenting beyond the statements issued, I was told.
Speaker 2: So I respond because I don't want some blogger down
Speaker 2: the line saying I rush to judgment on the remorselessness criteria.
Speaker 2: Are you sure? I write back. I talk about Michael Thaddeus,
Speaker 2: I tell him about Lauren and her computer model. I
Speaker 2: tell him about Jennifer Williams talking about the Temple case.
Speaker 2: Are you sure for the university not to comment under
Speaker 2: these circumstances, will, from your perspective, be problematic. Don't you
Speaker 2: think A week passes, I get an email back, We're
Speaker 2: working on it. A month passes. Finally get another email,
Speaker 2: essentially restating the original press release. I print at the
Speaker 2: statement and run around the office holding it high.
Speaker 3: I can't believe it.
Speaker 2: We have met the formal standard for remorselessness. One last
Speaker 2: part of me. You have to be reckless to win
Speaker 2: a Pushkin prize. Your lines have to put you in
Speaker 2: potential jeopardy if you want to win one of our
Speaker 2: coveted gold statuettes. We have gratuitousness, we have remorselessness, But
Speaker 2: do we have recklessness? We do? And to say how,
Speaker 2: I need to be serious for a second. I actually
Speaker 2: love Columbia. I think it's an extraordinary place full of
Speaker 2: extraordinary people. I can't tell you how many times I've
Speaker 2: sat in the office of some professor at Columbia and
Speaker 2: had the world opened up for me. I love Columbia,
Speaker 2: even though I know Columbia will never be Princeton or Harvard.
Speaker 2: They're never going to have fifty billion dollars in the bank,
Speaker 2: and without fifty billion dollars in the bank. It's awfully
Speaker 2: hard to climb to the top of the US News rankings.
Speaker 2: But the President of Columbia ought to be able to
Speaker 2: stand up and say, we are the pre eminent institution
Speaker 2: of learning in the greatest city in the world, and
Speaker 2: if we have lots of part time faculty, it's because
Speaker 2: we are drawing on the resources of amazing people who
Speaker 2: spend their working days on Broadway or Madison Avenue or
Speaker 2: Wall Street. And if our classes are large, it just
Speaker 2: means that every student has the privilege of rubbing shoulders
Speaker 2: with lots of other curious and willing students. And by
Speaker 2: the way, if you are someone who believes at the
Speaker 2: best measure of a university's intellectual vitality is how much
Speaker 2: money it has in the bank, or what percentage of
Speaker 2: its faculty have PhDs, or how many students are in
Speaker 2: its classes, then Columbia is probably going to be wasted
Speaker 2: on you. The President of Columbia ought to be able
Speaker 2: to stand up and explain to the world what Columbia
Speaker 2: is and what it stands for. But he didn't do that,
Speaker 2: and his school got consumed with succeeding at a rankings
Speaker 2: game that is morally and intellectually bankrupt some jackass in
Speaker 2: the Columbia administration. And I have no idea who it was,
Speaker 2: but I hope they are found out and made to
Speaker 2: do a thousand hours of community service teaching arithmetic to
Speaker 2: some first grader. That jackass decided to cook the books.
Speaker 2: And now what do we have a school that has
Speaker 2: broken the most fundamental of promises to its own community.
Speaker 2: Let me quote to you from the Columbia University Code
Speaker 2: of Conduct, the Ethical Standard. Columbia holds its own students
Speaker 2: to falsification, forgery, or misrepresentation of information to any university
Speaker 2: official in order to gain an unfair academic advantage in
Speaker 2: coursework or lab work on any application, petition, or documents
Speaker 2: submitted to the university is prohibited. This includes, but is
Speaker 2: not limited to, falsifying information on a resume, fabrication of
Speaker 2: credentials or academic records, misrepresenting one's own research, and providing
Speaker 2: false or misleading information. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
Speaker 2: the winner of the Pushkin Prize for gratuitous, remorseless, and
Speaker 2: recklessly deceptive self promotion. This episode of Revisionist History was
Speaker 2: produced by Kiara Powell with Leemingestu ben ATAF. Haffrey and
Speaker 2: Jacob Smith. Original scoring by Luis Garra, fact checking by
Speaker 2: Kishelle Williams and Tolly Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney,
Speaker 2: mastering by Flawn Williams, engineering by Nina Lawrence, and special
Speaker 2: things to Columbia's own Michael Thaddius, who not only did
Speaker 2: the research that inspired this episode, but also made a
Speaker 2: joke when I was talking to him that inspired name
Speaker 2: of our first ever Santos Memorial Prize. There's a PostScript
Speaker 2: to this story. On June sixth, two days before this
Speaker 2: episode aired, Columbia University made an announcement they were dropping
Speaker 2: out of the US News Undergraduate rankings, becoming the first
Speaker 2: IVY League school to abandon the US News methodology that
Speaker 2: did so much to make the IVY League the IVY League.
Speaker 2: The press release, like so many of the press releases
Speaker 2: issued by Columbia over the course of this controversy, read
Speaker 2: like it was dictated by a room of ten thousand
Speaker 2: dollars an hour attorneys on a zoom call from mid
Speaker 2: taw Manhattan. In a statement, Columbia said that in response
Speaker 2: to the allegations of cheating, it had quote conducted an
Speaker 2: exhaustive internal review and where errors were confirmed, shoot public
Speaker 2: corrections and made changes to the collection methodologies that led
Speaker 2: to the inaccuracies. I got an email from Michael Thaddeus
Speaker 2: almost immediately. This is completely untrue, he wrote. Columbia has
Speaker 2: never corrected the false information it provided, probably over many years,
Speaker 2: to US News about class sizes or about proportion of
Speaker 2: full time faculty. For example. What it did was admit
Speaker 2: in a general way to quote outdated, end or incorrect
Speaker 2: methodologies and acknowledged that quote class sized data was previously
Speaker 2: reported incorrectly unquote. But it never corrected the false figures,
Speaker 2: nor has it even specified which figures were false or
Speaker 2: for how long end of quote. Oh and by the way,
Speaker 2: the school's provost, whose office is responsible for its submissions
Speaker 2: to US News, suddenly announced that she was resigning after
Speaker 2: an unusually short term in office. We may have to
Speaker 2: do a follow up, don't you think If you're listening
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