June 8, 2023 • 41 mins
Consider this your invitation to the greatest award show no one’s ever heard of: the Pushkin Prizes, created to honor the giants of the American education system. This year, Malcolm is celebrating one prominent university that decided to play the US News & World Report at its own dirty rankings game—and smeared themselves in the process. Featuring an eagle-eyed math professor, our favorite data scientist, and the legend of one disgraced congressman.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, and the Emmy goes too, and the Oscar goes
to and the People's Choice Award goes to.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you to the Academy for this incredible recognition. I'm
so honored.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm so honored. Everybody wants to know what I would
do if I didn't win. I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Everybody gets a prize in modern America, actors, writers, musicians.
But you know who doesn't get a fancy prize the
hardworking administrators of America's elite colleges and universities. For years,
I've observed this oversight with what can only be described
as dismay, until I decided, damn it, if this country
(01:17):
wasn't gonna honor the beleaguered giants of the Ivy League,
then I would. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
In this episode, we are pleased to inaugurate the first
annual Revisionist History Higher Education Award in honor of our
(01:40):
company's namesake. We're gonna call them the Pushkin Process. Folks,
these prizes are super prestigious. You can't see this because
this is audio, But we have little gold statuettes of
(02:02):
Alexander Pushkin himself. You're gonna walk into the lobby of
your favorite eighteenth century ivy colored marble and granite University
Administration building, and they are in a glass case. Below
the tiffany chandelier is going to be a Pushkin. That is,
if you're lucky. I promise that over the next few years,
(02:24):
the giants of American academia will be graced with a
Pushkin statuette in recognition of one stupendous achievement or another.
And in this episode we begin our awards program with
the mac Daddy of Pushkin Prizes, the George Santos Memorial
(02:44):
Pushkin Prize for egregiously Deceptive Self Promotion.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
My parents came to this country in search of the
American dream. Today I live that American dream, only in
this country, only in this country. And the little boy
born in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens in
New York City, become a United States Congressman at thirty four.
(03:19):
It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit as
we like to call it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Actually it's not a story of survival, tenacity and grit
as we like to call it. The story of George Santos,
Congressman from Long Island, is the story of someone who
made up basically everything on his resume. And it is
that shamelessness that we seek to reward with the first
of the coveted Pushkin Prizes.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
Good morning, chabatchalom to everybody. Thank you for being here,
Thank you for having me. We're no stranger to persecution.
My grandfather fleeing Ukraine in nineteen twenties to Belgium.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Turns out he's not Jewish. Santos said his mom was
a nine to eleven survivor. Turns out she wasn't even
in New York City during nine to eleven. He said
he worked at Goldman Sachs. Turns out he never set
foot in Golden Sex. And then there was this tallest
of tall tales, which I love so much.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Hey, you know what's funny, George. You go right to
the heart here of me, Sid and Bernie.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
This is Santos on a local New York radio show
Sit and Friends in the Morning during his first congressional
run in twenty twenty, and the host Sid Rosenberg starts
talking about sports.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
At the very end of your Biography, it says in
his spare time, George Anthony enjoys volleyball and tennis.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Rosenberg says, that's funny because both his daughter and his
co host daughter are avid volleyball and tennis players. Then
Santo's response.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
You know, it's funny. I actually went to school on
a volleyball scholarship and did what I did. Yeah, when
I was in Beru, we were the number one volleyball.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Did you graduate from Baruk? Did you graduate from there?
Speaker 6 (05:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
So did I did?
Speaker 5 (05:06):
I did so?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Did I?
Speaker 5 (05:07):
Oh? Very cool, great institutions. But it's funny that we
went to play against Harvard Yale and we lay them.
We were champions across the entire Northeast corridor. Every school
that came up against us, they were shaking at the time.
And it's funny. I was the smallest guy and I'm
six two. We had on our block, on our on
(05:29):
our on our block alone, there were six seven, six eight.
These guys weren't jumping, they were just stretching their arms up.
We were, we were and all of us could have
been playing basketball, but we chose volleyball because it was easier.
So it was a great time I look, I sacrificed
both my knees and got very nice replacements, knee replacements
from playing volleyball. That's how serious I took the game.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Well, that's how serious it's taking politics as well. Remember
this name, folks, George Santos out in the third district.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
This is, to my mind, the gold standard George Santos fabrication,
a wedding cake of prevarication. The Washington posted a breakdown
to the tape and here's what they found. Has start
with the smallest lies and work backwards. Bruke didn't be
Yale at volleyball because Yale doesn't have a varsity volleyball team.
(06:21):
Santels later said he played the position of striker. Volleyball
teams don't have strikers.
Speaker 6 (06:27):
That sucker.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Nor did Santos have a volleyball scholarship at Baruque because
Baruch doesn't give out volleyball scholarships. And at six '
to two, he would not have been the shortest player
in the team even if he had been on the team,
but he wasn't. He never played volleyball at Baruk, maybe
because he never attended Baruk at all, which means his
knees are perfectly fine, unless that is, he blew them
(06:49):
out playing some other imaginary sport. That's seven lies in
a row, and if you listen to the tape, it's
clear that he made up the whole string on the fly.
The man is an icon. And with our first Pushkin Prize,
we ask what American college came closest in the past
year to this lofty standard. Believe me, they were many nominees,
(07:14):
all of them worthy. Envelope please, and the winner is
Columbia University. The big beginning when you heard when you said,
I want to investigate Columbia's rise to number two, did you,
(07:37):
in the back of your mind think there might be
something questionable going on?
Speaker 7 (07:40):
Yes, not even no, not in the back of my mind.
At the front of my mind.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
You're listening to a math professor at Columbia named Michael
Thaddius fifties long hair. I went to see him in
his office on the Columbia campus, full of books and strange,
captivating jottings on the wall. My father was a mathematician.
I have great affection for the species. If you google Thaddius,
you'll find papers that begin with things like we discuss
(08:03):
simpletic cutting for Hamiltonian actions of non Abelian compact groups.
By using a degeneration based on the Vinburg monoid, we
give in good cases a global quotient description of a
surgery construction introduced by Woodward n mind ranking, and show
it can be interpreted in algebra geometric terms. I have
(08:25):
no idea what that means, but Michael Thaddius does, which
is to say that when it comes to numbers and
statistics and things, he's someone to take very seriously. So
one day, not long ago, he hears something that doesn't
seem right.
Speaker 7 (08:41):
So I saw that Columbia had risen to number two.
I think in fact, this was even mentioned by our
own dean at a faculty meeting. I think that's how
I found out about it.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
The dean announces to everyone, I have amazing news. Columbia
has just risen to number two in the US News
College rankings, just a hair behind Princeton. Everyone basks in
the glow of the school's extraordinary achievement, because you know
what a high US News rankings means, more alumni dollars,
more prestige, more applications, more excitement and desire from neurotic
(09:14):
upper middle class suburban parents, for anyone with Ivy League dreams,
it's the holy grail. I mean, if you have a
kid in high school and your kids said, Mom, I
just got into Columbia, you will be over the moon.
And why would you be over the moon Because Columbia
is number two in the US News rankings. So the
(09:35):
Dean makes her big announcement, but Michael Thaddeus, the numbers guy,
isn't buying.
Speaker 7 (09:42):
And that just piqued my curiosity. Two is pretty high ranking.
You know, In particular, we were tied with Harvard and MIT,
which are institutions that objectively have certain big advantages over us.
They have much larger endowments, they have much more space
than we do. And I just you know, I've also
over the years, I've taken a greater and greater, perhaps
(10:02):
almost obsessive interest in facts and figures about the university.
I look at a lot of websites where the numbers appear,
and I just wondered, how could Columbia have performed so
well on this ranking as to be tied with institutions
that have these objective advantages over it. How do the
numbers break down?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Columbia started in these rankings at eighteenth, then began a steady,
dramatic climb past Cornell, Washington, w Rice, Vanderbilt, Brown, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, Caltech,
Penn Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Yale, Stanford. In the
past five years alone, they've gone from fifth to third
(10:49):
to second, shooting like a shiny asteroid past their glittering peers.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I'm a runner.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
In the running world, the tell for whether someone is
doping is in an unexpected improvement. You know, when the
twenty seven year old miler suddenly lops three seconds off
their personal best. I see you say, sudden improvement is
the tell sudden out of context improvement. Oh my. The
(11:23):
first thing Thadius did after the faculty meeting is by
a subscription to the US News Rankings. He downloaded the
data Columbia submitted for his application, and his eye falls
on class size. Columbia reported to US News that eighty
two point five percent of its classes had less than
twenty students. Thaddius looked at that number and thought, huh.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
Anyone who was taught here as I have for the
last twenty five years, knows that our class sizes are
not particularly small for an elite university, and that they
have been steadily growing. I'm teaching calculus or I have
just finished teaching a calculus course that had about seventy
six students, and that's typical for a course of that nature.
T us News said that what was it again? I
(12:12):
think eighty two point five percent of all classes enrolled
below twenty students, and that just did not square with
my experience at all.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
So he decided to fact check Columbia's claim. He went
to the university's class catalog and pulled out the data
on all thirty thousand of the school's classes.
Speaker 7 (12:32):
I took the HTML code of those pages, downloaded the
source code, concatenated all the files. Then I used a
text editor, Emacs to edit the resulting gigantic file in
such a way that I turned it into a database
comma separated database with the course names, numbers, and enrollments,
(12:54):
and then I opened it up in Excel.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
He analyzed the data, double checked his math, and realized
his pokey feeling was justified.
Speaker 7 (13:03):
I was able to arrive at an estimate it was
more like sixty two to sixty eight percent, a far
cry from eighty three percent.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Now he's getting suspicious. He picks another number. The US
News rankings penalizes the school if it has too many
part time faculty. Columbia told US News that it only
had one hundred and thirty seven part timers, but that
has found that the school also had to report the
statistic to the Department of Education.
Speaker 7 (13:31):
The number report of the government was over one thousand,
and I think that that's the more accurate number. To me,
this is a really important figure that the balance between
full time and part time faculty is a crucial matter
for the future of intellectual life and the future of
American universities. If we just casualize our faculty, we switch
to the sort of gig economy model where most people
(13:54):
are working contingally at part time. That's going to be
disastrous for the quality of education. It's going to be
disastrous for the quality of intellectual life. And so we
need to have honest, reliable figures about this. And yet
we have these two figures from Columbia that differ by
a factor of eight.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
He kept going, US News wants to know what percentage
of your faculty has a terminal degree in their field. Basically,
do they have a PhD?
Speaker 8 (14:20):
Or not.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Columbia reported the highest terminal degree number of any college
in the entire country, ninety nine point five percent, which
US News rounded up two one hundred percent. That's everyone.
So Thadeus goes through the faculty directory and looks to
see if there's anyone teaching at Columbia who only has
a bachelor's degree and finds dozens and dozens of faculty
(14:43):
with no more than a BA to their name, And.
Speaker 7 (14:46):
That was enough that there was no way that the
percentage could have been ninety nine point five.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Columbia says it's student faculty ratio is six to one.
It's not. It's more like eleven to one.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
On and on every single figure that where I could
check it independently, I found a significant discrepancy between what
was reported to US News and what I could confirm elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Then he sat down and wrote up a massive analysis
of his findings, charts, grafts, computer analyzes pages upon pages.
He puts it up on his faculty web page, and
there it sits for weeks and weeks until, for some
strange reason, someone posts a link to Thaddeus's manifesto on
the message board of the running website Let's run dot com.
(15:34):
If you are unfamiliar with the message boards of Let's Run,
here are some typical threads. Twoey runs Crazy four to
twenty three anchor leg for NC State, but still not
enough for DMR or At twenty seven, I finally realized
every tattoo anyone has is for attracting a mate or
(15:54):
rip Spencer, the official dog of the Boston Marathon, has died.
Now how do I know about this? Because Let's Run
is one of my favorite websites. I am one of
those people dutifully reading the Let's Run message boards. So
I see a link and click on it. Because you
know how I feel about the US News rankings. I'm
(16:14):
obsessed with them. I've lost track of how many revisionist
history episodes have been devoted to testifying to their stupidity.
I don't understand why college administrators care so much about them,
why parents and their college bound teenagers go nuts about them.
When law schools and medical schools began dropping out of
the US rankings, I walked around the streets of New
(16:35):
York pounding on my chest like I was personally responsible.
Do you see what I'm saying? I was the target
audience for the Thaddeus expose.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Again, I salute you. You were sort of the tipping point,
as I said, I mean, but when you started tweeting
about it, that was when the rest of the world
started to take notice. So I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Oh, the first nice thing anyone has ever said about
my Twitter. So the story goes everywhere. Colombia goes into
a defensive crouch, and the US News reanalyzes situation and
downgrades Columbia back to eighteen. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
(17:27):
I know what you're thinking. The Pushkin Prize is a
highly prestigious award. Those statuettes are coveted. So how can
we be sure that Columbia meets the elevated standard set
by our namesake George Santos? Very good question. Please join
me as we break it down. To my mind, there
(17:49):
are three criteria Columbia needs to meet to rise to
Santo's level deception. The first is gratuitousness. That's the power
of the Santos bit about his volleyball career at Baruk.
This was a lie fundamentally different from his claims to
being Jewish, working at Golden Sachs and running a charity
for un wanted pets. Sorry I left that one out before.
(18:12):
Those were all lies that helped his case with the
voters of Long Island. A Jewish investment banker who loves
domestic animals is pretty much the Long Island equivalent of
George Clooney. But no one was going to vote for
him because he blew out two knees battling as the
shortest man on the barof volleyball squad. He had them
a Jewish goldman Sachs and abandoned kittens. The volleyball lie
(18:37):
was pure gilding the lily, and that's what makes it
so heroic. Santoslied when it wasn't even in his interest
to lie. Now does Columbia meet this standard? Was their
deception gratuitous? In order to answer this question, I turned
to Revisionist History's resident data scientist, Lauren Lavelle. Lauren Lauren Lauren, Hey, Malcolm,
(19:04):
we ride again. Some of you may remember Lauren from
the Project dillardpisode of Revision's History. A group of undergraduates
at Read College hacked their way into the US News algorithm,
which gave them a computer model that can test any
hypothesis about a school's rankings. So I asked Lauren, who
studied statistics at Read, to use the model to figure
(19:26):
out how a historically black college could rise in the
US News rankings. You may recall her answer. It was
the best way for a college full of black students
to rise in the US News rankings was to let
in lots of white students.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
And I can't emphasize enough that this model was built
by undergraduate students for a class project. They did a
great job, and this model works amazingly. You know, it
wasn't some super prestigious data scientists getting paid millions of
dollars to do this for some super prestigious university like
it's students.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
In other words, the barriers to manipulation are low. Yes,
So I said to Lauren, let's use the trusted Read
college model to get at this question of gratuitousness. I
send her a list of questions starting with tell me
which of Columbia's whoppers mattered the most, and her conclusion
was a shocker.
Speaker 8 (20:23):
The thing that really making the biggest difference is the
faculty resources category. So for faculty resources, we have our
class size r percent of our faculty that are full
time and our student of faculty ratio.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
US newsgrades all universities on a scale of zero to
one hundred, so Princeton at number one is one hundred.
Columbia is a close second at ninety six. According to
Lauren's analysis, fiddling with just those three variables gave Columbia
an eight point boost. And the reason that's unexpected is
because faculty resources only count for a tiny amount in
(21:00):
the overall US News ranking algorithm. You tinker with those variables,
you get a massive payoff.
Speaker 8 (21:08):
Exactly when you change just one or two of them, again,
it's only like a one or two point, But when
you put all three of them together, it's the synergies
between these variables that create these big jumps.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Wait, so on apausitives. Yeah, this is really interesting because
this supports the notion that this was not an accidental
happening at Columbia. This this suggests there was some significant
thought behind this, because what you told me is something
that's not intuitive.
Speaker 8 (21:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
I would have thought that you could identify one whiz
bank that would have given us a massive payoff. We
wouldn't have had to do anything else. But what you're
saying is no, you actually it's an unexpected area gives
you a huge payoff. And also if you want to
get a twelve point swing, you have to tinker with
a lot of variables. Absolutely, absolutely, And there's some kind
(22:01):
of thing greater than the some of its parts that's
that work here that you could only stumble on if
you went behind the scenes and sort of tried to
figure out the murky black box that is US news.
Speaker 8 (22:11):
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. So can we
do screen share on here? Is that a thing? Can
I show you my code?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Can you? Can you tilt your camera to just showing
me the thing in I see? Oh oh it's on
your screen? Can you screenshare an emo? Lauren, I'm fifty
nine years old. I barely know how to work a computer. Sorry,
this went on for a bit. This is what happens
when a data scientist tries to communicate with a boomer
(22:40):
over zoom. Lauren lapsed into geek mode for like twenty minutes,
talking about unexpected nonlinearities. Her point was that the way
to climb the rankings is not obvious. It's a laundry
list of nips and tucks that an unexpected combination give
you a facelift. If you tried to do it just
(23:02):
by eyeballing the criteria that US News makes public, you'd
fail to go back to the point I was saying,
so for to my mind, this argues powerfully for some
kind of premeditation on the part of Columbia. I mean,
we have no idea what they did, so it is
all in the realm of speculation. But they basically manufactured
(23:23):
a twelve point swing. And it's very hard to imagine
how you could manufacture a twelve point swing by the
seat of your pants, because it's not intuitive.
Speaker 8 (23:35):
I agree, there's probably some dirty play happening somewhere, Lauren.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
They hired someone like you, that's what they did. Somewhere
out there, there is some brainy twenty six year old
with blood on their hands.
Speaker 8 (23:53):
I mean, maybe, to.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Be clear, I don't know that they hired someone like
Lauren to coordinate this. But here's the crucial fact that
puts Columbia in George Santo's territory. Lots of Columbia's inventions
don't have much of a payoff, like, for instance, their
most spectacular nonsense of all the Big Kahuna concerns something
(24:15):
called instructional resources the more money you spend on teaching,
the more US News rewards you. And the number of
Columbia claim to spend on teaching was hilariously large, just
over three billion dollars. That he has spent a huge
amount of time trying to figure out just where that
preposterous number came from, before he realized they just added
(24:37):
in the one point two billion they spend every year
on patient care at Columbia's medical center. They're pretending that
the person getting an appendect Toby is a student, which
is completely and utterly bananas. Now what difference did this
particular outrageous bit of Shenanigan make.
Speaker 8 (24:59):
Let's see, I have a graph somewhere. Okay, So Columbia
reported that it spends about three billion dollars on an instruction.
This is for fiscal year twenty twenty two, and it's
consolidated financial statements. They report for instruction and educational administration
(25:21):
about two billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Oh. The reason we know this is a lie is
that on its official financial statements, which are audited by
actual professionals, the school doesn't pull the same stunt.
Speaker 8 (25:33):
So that's a billion dollars extra that they're reporting to US.
News basically, and when that works out on a per
student basis, you know, it's a lot of money that
they're kind of you feel a billion around.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
With their Are you telling me long that a billion
dollars is a lot of money in your book?
Speaker 8 (25:53):
Yeah, imagine that, Like this number that's so large the
human brain literally can't even understand. Imagine. And yet when
we drop that three billion down to two billion dollars,
we're still only seeing like a three point drop in
(26:15):
the score, two or three points. So from about ninety
six to about a ninety four or ninety three three points.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's it. If they were only going to cheat by
inflating their student instructional expenditures by a billion, they only
get a three point jump exactly. Okay, Right, it's good to.
Speaker 8 (26:35):
Know, which sounds crazy, right, Like that's a lot of
money to not really make a big difference in your score.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah. So if you're the president of Columbia and I
come to you and I say we can drop an
imaginary billion into this and we're only getting three points,
you're saying, Okay, but I'm not. It's not floating your boat.
Speaker 8 (26:55):
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a very high return, right,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
It's gratuitous. It's just like George Santos and Baruke volleyball
in retrospect. That was their error, wasn't it. They shouldn't
have done the bill done. The billion dollar thing was
so obvious and egregious, and it gave them such a
small payoff. Yeah, why if you're trying to get away
with some shenanigans, would.
Speaker 8 (27:19):
You It's a ridiculous overstatement, like it's more than it's
larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I know it bananas, Like it's so bananas. Here's my
you know what my interpretation is. So there's like some
dude man or woman is charged with coming up with
a strategy and that that's the one they do last.
So it's like it's it's Monday morning at three am.
They got a hand in their proposal for hacking the
(27:55):
US News. By nine am, they've been up for forty
eight hours. They've done all the hard stuff, and they're like,
f let's just throw it an extra bill on this.
Speaker 8 (28:04):
Why not just throw in a few extra zeros?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
The bar set by George Santos was very high. The
Pushkin Prize committee believes Columbia met it okay criteria number two.
The second thing our namesake, George Santos teaches us is
that you have to show as little remorse as possible.
(28:31):
When the furer over his lies was at its peak,
he was unruffled.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
I don't understand where these allegations come from. Oh, George
Santels lives in a fantasy world or whatever it is
that they're trying to elude there, because it's just people
who know me know that that's just not the case.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
People who know me, which is hilarious, right, because the
whole reason there was a controversy over George Santos is
that he wouldn't tell us who he was. At some point,
some enterprising journalists counted seven different names that Santos has
used over the years for Pushkin Prize consideration. We need
that kind of remorselessness. Let me give you what I
(29:12):
think is a relevant counter example. It concerns Temple University's
online Business School. The story goes the dean of the
b school there, a man named Mosha Pora, was upset
about his school's low US News ranking, so he sends
several of his underlings to Washington, d C. To complain
to the US News rankings team, and in the course
(29:33):
of that meeting, US News let slip that they don't
actually check any of the data that schools send them.
So the underlings report this back to Mosha, and Mosha's like, great,
I guess there's no state troopers on this stretch of
the university prestige Highway. So he hires a data scientist.
They figure out that what really matters for online business
(29:54):
schools is what percentage of the school's incoming class has
taken the GMAT. In Temple's case, it's something like nineteen percent.
So Mosha changes that number to one hundred percent, and
Wall Temple's online business school faults to number one in
the US News Online b School rankings. Now you hear
(30:18):
that story and you say to yourself, why wasn't Mosha
up for a pushkin price? And believe me, we thought
long and hard about his nomination. I mean, Mosha was
convicted of fraud and sentenced to fourteen months. He committed
a crime.
Speaker 9 (30:34):
The charges against Parat were not just simply that he
defrauded US News Rankings, but that he defrauded applicants to
the school, students at the school, and donors, all of
whom look at the rankings and making their decision about
where to direct their money.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That's Jennifer Williams, who was in the US Attorney's office
in Philadelphia at the time of the Temple case.
Speaker 9 (31:00):
And in fact, the scheme, as charged in the indictment,
was very successful. Not only did the rankings improve dramatically,
but the enrollment went way up and the total amount
of tuition that Temple was able to get due to
the increased enrollment was almost forty million dollars over the
course of several years. So that is the goal of
the fraud. That's what made this a crime.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
So why doesn't Temple get the Sentos Award Because, and
this is crucial, the school has too much remorse When
word leaks out about Moshes shedanigans. The school hires a
big name outside law firm, Jones Day to investigate. The
university pays out millions of dollars in damages to the
students who enrolled thinking they were getting a degree from
(31:44):
the number one rank school in the country. It was
Temple who turned in Mosha to the authorities. This is
not how Columbia behaved at all. Thaddius releases his report
on February twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, and Columbia responds
with a press release from the school's provost on June thirtieth,
(32:09):
months later. I'm quoting. Columbia has long conducted what we
believe to be a thorough process for gathering and reporting
institutional data, but we are now closely reviewing our processes
in light of the questions raised. The ongoing review is
a matter of integrity. We will take no shortcuts in
(32:32):
getting it right. Temple Hired, one of the world's biggest
law firms. Colombia launched a review.
Speaker 7 (32:41):
The approach has been just to say as little as possible,
try to attract as little attention, and wait for the
storm to blow over.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
You're saying that no member of the administration has reached
out to you since you published that article.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
Good God.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
No, wait, that's nuts.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
That's nuts. I'm glad you think so. I asked the
question at a faculty meeting. Did the review that Columbia
conducted explore the question of intent about whether you know
these falsehoods were provided intentionally? Did anyone know that they
were false? And if so, who and the answer was, well, no,
our review did not look into that question. So it's
clear to me that the review was not seriously intended
(33:18):
to get to the bottom of the matter.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Well's not a review because the Santos criteria are so rigorous.
I realized I needed to take further steps to see
if Columbia's remorselessness remained in place. First, I waited to
see whether they would update the June thirtieth press release.
(33:41):
I waited, waited six months past, so then I decided
I needed to contact them directly. I sent an email,
asked for an interview with the provost. Waited, waited, waited,
until finally someone in the media relations department emailed me
back with a link to the press release of June thirtieth.
(34:06):
We are not commenting beyond the statements issued, I was told.
So I respond because I don't want some blogger down
the line saying I rush to judgment on the remorselessness criteria.
Are you sure? I write back. I talk about Michael Thaddeus,
I tell him about Lauren and her computer model. I
tell him about Jennifer Williams talking about the Temple case.
(34:29):
Are you sure for the university not to comment under
these circumstances, will, from your perspective, be problematic. Don't you
think A week passes, I get an email back, We're
working on it. A month passes. Finally get another email,
essentially restating the original press release. I print at the
(34:52):
statement and run around the office holding it high.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
We have met the formal standard for remorselessness. One last
part of me. You have to be reckless to win
a Pushkin prize. Your lines have to put you in
potential jeopardy if you want to win one of our
coveted gold statuettes. We have gratuitousness, we have remorselessness, But
do we have recklessness? We do? And to say how,
(35:25):
I need to be serious for a second. I actually
love Columbia. I think it's an extraordinary place full of
extraordinary people. I can't tell you how many times I've
sat in the office of some professor at Columbia and
had the world opened up for me. I love Columbia,
even though I know Columbia will never be Princeton or Harvard.
(35:47):
They're never going to have fifty billion dollars in the bank,
and without fifty billion dollars in the bank. It's awfully
hard to climb to the top of the US News rankings.
But the President of Columbia ought to be able to
stand up and say, we are the pre eminent institution
of learning in the greatest city in the world, and
if we have lots of part time faculty, it's because
(36:08):
we are drawing on the resources of amazing people who
spend their working days on Broadway or Madison Avenue or
Wall Street. And if our classes are large, it just
means that every student has the privilege of rubbing shoulders
with lots of other curious and willing students. And by
the way, if you are someone who believes at the
best measure of a university's intellectual vitality is how much
(36:30):
money it has in the bank, or what percentage of
its faculty have PhDs, or how many students are in
its classes, then Columbia is probably going to be wasted
on you. The President of Columbia ought to be able
to stand up and explain to the world what Columbia
is and what it stands for. But he didn't do that,
(36:53):
and his school got consumed with succeeding at a rankings
game that is morally and intellectually bankrupt some jackass in
the Columbia administration. And I have no idea who it was,
but I hope they are found out and made to
do a thousand hours of community service teaching arithmetic to
some first grader. That jackass decided to cook the books.
(37:15):
And now what do we have a school that has
broken the most fundamental of promises to its own community.
Let me quote to you from the Columbia University Code
of Conduct, the Ethical Standard. Columbia holds its own students
to falsification, forgery, or misrepresentation of information to any university
(37:40):
official in order to gain an unfair academic advantage in
coursework or lab work on any application, petition, or documents
submitted to the university is prohibited. This includes, but is
not limited to, falsifying information on a resume, fabrication of
credentials or academic records, misrepresenting one's own research, and providing
(38:05):
false or misleading information. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
the winner of the Pushkin Prize for gratuitous, remorseless, and
recklessly deceptive self promotion. This episode of Revisionist History was
(38:40):
produced by Kiara Powell with Leemingestu ben ATAF. Haffrey and
Jacob Smith. Original scoring by Luis Garra, fact checking by
Kishelle Williams and Tolly Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney,
mastering by Flawn Williams, engineering by Nina Lawrence, and special
things to Columbia's own Michael Thaddius, who not only did
(39:02):
the research that inspired this episode, but also made a
joke when I was talking to him that inspired name
of our first ever Santos Memorial Prize. There's a PostScript
to this story. On June sixth, two days before this
(39:26):
episode aired, Columbia University made an announcement they were dropping
out of the US News Undergraduate rankings, becoming the first
IVY League school to abandon the US News methodology that
did so much to make the IVY League the IVY League.
The press release, like so many of the press releases
(39:47):
issued by Columbia over the course of this controversy, read
like it was dictated by a room of ten thousand
dollars an hour attorneys on a zoom call from mid
taw Manhattan. In a statement, Columbia said that in response
to the allegations of cheating, it had quote conducted an
exhaustive internal review and where errors were confirmed, shoot public
(40:09):
corrections and made changes to the collection methodologies that led
to the inaccuracies. I got an email from Michael Thaddeus
almost immediately. This is completely untrue, he wrote. Columbia has
never corrected the false information it provided, probably over many years,
to US News about class sizes or about proportion of
(40:32):
full time faculty. For example. What it did was admit
in a general way to quote outdated, end or incorrect
methodologies and acknowledged that quote class sized data was previously
reported incorrectly unquote. But it never corrected the false figures,
nor has it even specified which figures were false or
(40:54):
for how long end of quote. Oh and by the way,
the school's provost, whose office is responsible for its submissions
to US News, suddenly announced that she was resigning after
an unusually short term in office. We may have to
do a follow up, don't you think If you're listening
(41:18):
to Revision's history on pushkin plus, you already know the
pleasure of hearing our shows early and without ads. If
you're not part of pushkin plus, my friends, you're missing out.
Our season's really heating up. You will not regret This,
get our new episodes two weeks early, and listen to
every episode of This your favorite show, ad free
Pushkin, and the Emmy goes too, and the Oscar goes
to and the People's Choice Award goes to.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you to the Academy for this incredible recognition. I'm
so honored.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm so honored. Everybody wants to know what I would
do if I didn't win. I guess we'll never know.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Everybody gets a prize in modern America, actors, writers, musicians.
But you know who doesn't get a fancy prize the
hardworking administrators of America's elite colleges and universities. For years,
I've observed this oversight with what can only be described
as dismay, until I decided, damn it, if this country
(01:17):
wasn't gonna honor the beleaguered giants of the Ivy League,
then I would. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
In this episode, we are pleased to inaugurate the first
annual Revisionist History Higher Education Award in honor of our
(01:40):
company's namesake. We're gonna call them the Pushkin Process. Folks,
these prizes are super prestigious. You can't see this because
this is audio, But we have little gold statuettes of
(02:02):
Alexander Pushkin himself. You're gonna walk into the lobby of
your favorite eighteenth century ivy colored marble and granite University
Administration building, and they are in a glass case. Below
the tiffany chandelier is going to be a Pushkin. That is,
if you're lucky. I promise that over the next few years,
(02:24):
the giants of American academia will be graced with a
Pushkin statuette in recognition of one stupendous achievement or another.
And in this episode we begin our awards program with
the mac Daddy of Pushkin Prizes, the George Santos Memorial
(02:44):
Pushkin Prize for egregiously Deceptive Self Promotion.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
My parents came to this country in search of the
American dream. Today I live that American dream, only in
this country, only in this country. And the little boy
born in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens in
New York City, become a United States Congressman at thirty four.
(03:19):
It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit as
we like to call it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Actually it's not a story of survival, tenacity and grit
as we like to call it. The story of George Santos,
Congressman from Long Island, is the story of someone who
made up basically everything on his resume. And it is
that shamelessness that we seek to reward with the first
of the coveted Pushkin Prizes.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
Good morning, chabatchalom to everybody. Thank you for being here,
Thank you for having me. We're no stranger to persecution.
My grandfather fleeing Ukraine in nineteen twenties to Belgium.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Turns out he's not Jewish. Santos said his mom was
a nine to eleven survivor. Turns out she wasn't even
in New York City during nine to eleven. He said
he worked at Goldman Sachs. Turns out he never set
foot in Golden Sex. And then there was this tallest
of tall tales, which I love so much.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Hey, you know what's funny, George. You go right to
the heart here of me, Sid and Bernie.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
This is Santos on a local New York radio show
Sit and Friends in the Morning during his first congressional
run in twenty twenty, and the host Sid Rosenberg starts
talking about sports.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
At the very end of your Biography, it says in
his spare time, George Anthony enjoys volleyball and tennis.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Rosenberg says, that's funny because both his daughter and his
co host daughter are avid volleyball and tennis players. Then
Santo's response.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
You know, it's funny. I actually went to school on
a volleyball scholarship and did what I did. Yeah, when
I was in Beru, we were the number one volleyball.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Did you graduate from Baruk? Did you graduate from there?
Speaker 6 (05:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
So did I did?
Speaker 5 (05:06):
I did so?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Did I?
Speaker 5 (05:07):
Oh? Very cool, great institutions. But it's funny that we
went to play against Harvard Yale and we lay them.
We were champions across the entire Northeast corridor. Every school
that came up against us, they were shaking at the time.
And it's funny. I was the smallest guy and I'm
six two. We had on our block, on our on
(05:29):
our on our block alone, there were six seven, six eight.
These guys weren't jumping, they were just stretching their arms up.
We were, we were and all of us could have
been playing basketball, but we chose volleyball because it was easier.
So it was a great time I look, I sacrificed
both my knees and got very nice replacements, knee replacements
from playing volleyball. That's how serious I took the game.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Well, that's how serious it's taking politics as well. Remember
this name, folks, George Santos out in the third district.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
This is, to my mind, the gold standard George Santos fabrication,
a wedding cake of prevarication. The Washington posted a breakdown
to the tape and here's what they found. Has start
with the smallest lies and work backwards. Bruke didn't be
Yale at volleyball because Yale doesn't have a varsity volleyball team.
(06:21):
Santels later said he played the position of striker. Volleyball
teams don't have strikers.
Speaker 6 (06:27):
That sucker.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Nor did Santos have a volleyball scholarship at Baruque because
Baruch doesn't give out volleyball scholarships. And at six '
to two, he would not have been the shortest player
in the team even if he had been on the team,
but he wasn't. He never played volleyball at Baruk, maybe
because he never attended Baruk at all, which means his
knees are perfectly fine, unless that is, he blew them
(06:49):
out playing some other imaginary sport. That's seven lies in
a row, and if you listen to the tape, it's
clear that he made up the whole string on the fly.
The man is an icon. And with our first Pushkin Prize,
we ask what American college came closest in the past
year to this lofty standard. Believe me, they were many nominees,
(07:14):
all of them worthy. Envelope please, and the winner is
Columbia University. The big beginning when you heard when you said,
I want to investigate Columbia's rise to number two, did you,
(07:37):
in the back of your mind think there might be
something questionable going on?
Speaker 7 (07:40):
Yes, not even no, not in the back of my mind.
At the front of my mind.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
You're listening to a math professor at Columbia named Michael
Thaddius fifties long hair. I went to see him in
his office on the Columbia campus, full of books and strange,
captivating jottings on the wall. My father was a mathematician.
I have great affection for the species. If you google Thaddius,
you'll find papers that begin with things like we discuss
(08:03):
simpletic cutting for Hamiltonian actions of non Abelian compact groups.
By using a degeneration based on the Vinburg monoid, we
give in good cases a global quotient description of a
surgery construction introduced by Woodward n mind ranking, and show
it can be interpreted in algebra geometric terms. I have
(08:25):
no idea what that means, but Michael Thaddius does, which
is to say that when it comes to numbers and
statistics and things, he's someone to take very seriously. So
one day, not long ago, he hears something that doesn't
seem right.
Speaker 7 (08:41):
So I saw that Columbia had risen to number two.
I think in fact, this was even mentioned by our
own dean at a faculty meeting. I think that's how
I found out about it.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
The dean announces to everyone, I have amazing news. Columbia
has just risen to number two in the US News
College rankings, just a hair behind Princeton. Everyone basks in
the glow of the school's extraordinary achievement, because you know
what a high US News rankings means, more alumni dollars,
more prestige, more applications, more excitement and desire from neurotic
(09:14):
upper middle class suburban parents, for anyone with Ivy League dreams,
it's the holy grail. I mean, if you have a
kid in high school and your kids said, Mom, I
just got into Columbia, you will be over the moon.
And why would you be over the moon Because Columbia
is number two in the US News rankings. So the
(09:35):
Dean makes her big announcement, but Michael Thaddeus, the numbers guy,
isn't buying.
Speaker 7 (09:42):
And that just piqued my curiosity. Two is pretty high ranking.
You know, In particular, we were tied with Harvard and MIT,
which are institutions that objectively have certain big advantages over us.
They have much larger endowments, they have much more space
than we do. And I just you know, I've also
over the years, I've taken a greater and greater, perhaps
(10:02):
almost obsessive interest in facts and figures about the university.
I look at a lot of websites where the numbers appear,
and I just wondered, how could Columbia have performed so
well on this ranking as to be tied with institutions
that have these objective advantages over it. How do the
numbers break down?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Columbia started in these rankings at eighteenth, then began a steady,
dramatic climb past Cornell, Washington, w Rice, Vanderbilt, Brown, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, Caltech,
Penn Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Yale, Stanford. In the
past five years alone, they've gone from fifth to third
(10:49):
to second, shooting like a shiny asteroid past their glittering peers.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I'm a runner.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
In the running world, the tell for whether someone is
doping is in an unexpected improvement. You know, when the
twenty seven year old miler suddenly lops three seconds off
their personal best. I see you say, sudden improvement is
the tell sudden out of context improvement. Oh my. The
(11:23):
first thing Thadius did after the faculty meeting is by
a subscription to the US News Rankings. He downloaded the
data Columbia submitted for his application, and his eye falls
on class size. Columbia reported to US News that eighty
two point five percent of its classes had less than
twenty students. Thaddius looked at that number and thought, huh.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
Anyone who was taught here as I have for the
last twenty five years, knows that our class sizes are
not particularly small for an elite university, and that they
have been steadily growing. I'm teaching calculus or I have
just finished teaching a calculus course that had about seventy
six students, and that's typical for a course of that nature.
T us News said that what was it again? I
(12:12):
think eighty two point five percent of all classes enrolled
below twenty students, and that just did not square with
my experience at all.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
So he decided to fact check Columbia's claim. He went
to the university's class catalog and pulled out the data
on all thirty thousand of the school's classes.
Speaker 7 (12:32):
I took the HTML code of those pages, downloaded the
source code, concatenated all the files. Then I used a
text editor, Emacs to edit the resulting gigantic file in
such a way that I turned it into a database
comma separated database with the course names, numbers, and enrollments,
(12:54):
and then I opened it up in Excel.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
He analyzed the data, double checked his math, and realized
his pokey feeling was justified.
Speaker 7 (13:03):
I was able to arrive at an estimate it was
more like sixty two to sixty eight percent, a far
cry from eighty three percent.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Now he's getting suspicious. He picks another number. The US
News rankings penalizes the school if it has too many
part time faculty. Columbia told US News that it only
had one hundred and thirty seven part timers, but that
has found that the school also had to report the
statistic to the Department of Education.
Speaker 7 (13:31):
The number report of the government was over one thousand,
and I think that that's the more accurate number. To me,
this is a really important figure that the balance between
full time and part time faculty is a crucial matter
for the future of intellectual life and the future of
American universities. If we just casualize our faculty, we switch
to the sort of gig economy model where most people
(13:54):
are working contingally at part time. That's going to be
disastrous for the quality of education. It's going to be
disastrous for the quality of intellectual life. And so we
need to have honest, reliable figures about this. And yet
we have these two figures from Columbia that differ by
a factor of eight.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
He kept going, US News wants to know what percentage
of your faculty has a terminal degree in their field. Basically,
do they have a PhD?
Speaker 8 (14:20):
Or not.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Columbia reported the highest terminal degree number of any college
in the entire country, ninety nine point five percent, which
US News rounded up two one hundred percent. That's everyone.
So Thadeus goes through the faculty directory and looks to
see if there's anyone teaching at Columbia who only has
a bachelor's degree and finds dozens and dozens of faculty
(14:43):
with no more than a BA to their name, And.
Speaker 7 (14:46):
That was enough that there was no way that the
percentage could have been ninety nine point five.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Columbia says it's student faculty ratio is six to one.
It's not. It's more like eleven to one.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
On and on every single figure that where I could
check it independently, I found a significant discrepancy between what
was reported to US News and what I could confirm elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Then he sat down and wrote up a massive analysis
of his findings, charts, grafts, computer analyzes pages upon pages.
He puts it up on his faculty web page, and
there it sits for weeks and weeks until, for some
strange reason, someone posts a link to Thaddeus's manifesto on
the message board of the running website Let's run dot com.
(15:34):
If you are unfamiliar with the message boards of Let's Run,
here are some typical threads. Twoey runs Crazy four to
twenty three anchor leg for NC State, but still not
enough for DMR or At twenty seven, I finally realized
every tattoo anyone has is for attracting a mate or
(15:54):
rip Spencer, the official dog of the Boston Marathon, has died.
Now how do I know about this? Because Let's Run
is one of my favorite websites. I am one of
those people dutifully reading the Let's Run message boards. So
I see a link and click on it. Because you
know how I feel about the US News rankings. I'm
(16:14):
obsessed with them. I've lost track of how many revisionist
history episodes have been devoted to testifying to their stupidity.
I don't understand why college administrators care so much about them,
why parents and their college bound teenagers go nuts about them.
When law schools and medical schools began dropping out of
the US rankings, I walked around the streets of New
(16:35):
York pounding on my chest like I was personally responsible.
Do you see what I'm saying? I was the target
audience for the Thaddeus expose.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Again, I salute you. You were sort of the tipping point,
as I said, I mean, but when you started tweeting
about it, that was when the rest of the world
started to take notice. So I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Oh, the first nice thing anyone has ever said about
my Twitter. So the story goes everywhere. Colombia goes into
a defensive crouch, and the US News reanalyzes situation and
downgrades Columbia back to eighteen. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
(17:27):
I know what you're thinking. The Pushkin Prize is a
highly prestigious award. Those statuettes are coveted. So how can
we be sure that Columbia meets the elevated standard set
by our namesake George Santos? Very good question. Please join
me as we break it down. To my mind, there
(17:49):
are three criteria Columbia needs to meet to rise to
Santo's level deception. The first is gratuitousness. That's the power
of the Santos bit about his volleyball career at Baruk.
This was a lie fundamentally different from his claims to
being Jewish, working at Golden Sachs and running a charity
for un wanted pets. Sorry I left that one out before.
(18:12):
Those were all lies that helped his case with the
voters of Long Island. A Jewish investment banker who loves
domestic animals is pretty much the Long Island equivalent of
George Clooney. But no one was going to vote for
him because he blew out two knees battling as the
shortest man on the barof volleyball squad. He had them
a Jewish goldman Sachs and abandoned kittens. The volleyball lie
(18:37):
was pure gilding the lily, and that's what makes it
so heroic. Santoslied when it wasn't even in his interest
to lie. Now does Columbia meet this standard? Was their
deception gratuitous? In order to answer this question, I turned
to Revisionist History's resident data scientist, Lauren Lavelle. Lauren Lauren Lauren, Hey, Malcolm,
(19:04):
we ride again. Some of you may remember Lauren from
the Project dillardpisode of Revision's History. A group of undergraduates
at Read College hacked their way into the US News algorithm,
which gave them a computer model that can test any
hypothesis about a school's rankings. So I asked Lauren, who
studied statistics at Read, to use the model to figure
(19:26):
out how a historically black college could rise in the
US News rankings. You may recall her answer. It was
the best way for a college full of black students
to rise in the US News rankings was to let
in lots of white students.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
And I can't emphasize enough that this model was built
by undergraduate students for a class project. They did a
great job, and this model works amazingly. You know, it
wasn't some super prestigious data scientists getting paid millions of
dollars to do this for some super prestigious university like
it's students.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
In other words, the barriers to manipulation are low. Yes,
So I said to Lauren, let's use the trusted Read
college model to get at this question of gratuitousness. I
send her a list of questions starting with tell me
which of Columbia's whoppers mattered the most, and her conclusion
was a shocker.
Speaker 8 (20:23):
The thing that really making the biggest difference is the
faculty resources category. So for faculty resources, we have our
class size r percent of our faculty that are full
time and our student of faculty ratio.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
US newsgrades all universities on a scale of zero to
one hundred, so Princeton at number one is one hundred.
Columbia is a close second at ninety six. According to
Lauren's analysis, fiddling with just those three variables gave Columbia
an eight point boost. And the reason that's unexpected is
because faculty resources only count for a tiny amount in
(21:00):
the overall US News ranking algorithm. You tinker with those variables,
you get a massive payoff.
Speaker 8 (21:08):
Exactly when you change just one or two of them, again,
it's only like a one or two point, But when
you put all three of them together, it's the synergies
between these variables that create these big jumps.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Wait, so on apausitives. Yeah, this is really interesting because
this supports the notion that this was not an accidental
happening at Columbia. This this suggests there was some significant
thought behind this, because what you told me is something
that's not intuitive.
Speaker 8 (21:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
I would have thought that you could identify one whiz
bank that would have given us a massive payoff. We
wouldn't have had to do anything else. But what you're
saying is no, you actually it's an unexpected area gives
you a huge payoff. And also if you want to
get a twelve point swing, you have to tinker with
a lot of variables. Absolutely, absolutely, And there's some kind
(22:01):
of thing greater than the some of its parts that's
that work here that you could only stumble on if
you went behind the scenes and sort of tried to
figure out the murky black box that is US news.
Speaker 8 (22:11):
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. So can we
do screen share on here? Is that a thing? Can
I show you my code?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Can you? Can you tilt your camera to just showing
me the thing in I see? Oh oh it's on
your screen? Can you screenshare an emo? Lauren, I'm fifty
nine years old. I barely know how to work a computer. Sorry,
this went on for a bit. This is what happens
when a data scientist tries to communicate with a boomer
(22:40):
over zoom. Lauren lapsed into geek mode for like twenty minutes,
talking about unexpected nonlinearities. Her point was that the way
to climb the rankings is not obvious. It's a laundry
list of nips and tucks that an unexpected combination give
you a facelift. If you tried to do it just
(23:02):
by eyeballing the criteria that US News makes public, you'd
fail to go back to the point I was saying,
so for to my mind, this argues powerfully for some
kind of premeditation on the part of Columbia. I mean,
we have no idea what they did, so it is
all in the realm of speculation. But they basically manufactured
(23:23):
a twelve point swing. And it's very hard to imagine
how you could manufacture a twelve point swing by the
seat of your pants, because it's not intuitive.
Speaker 8 (23:35):
I agree, there's probably some dirty play happening somewhere, Lauren.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
They hired someone like you, that's what they did. Somewhere
out there, there is some brainy twenty six year old
with blood on their hands.
Speaker 8 (23:53):
I mean, maybe, to.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Be clear, I don't know that they hired someone like
Lauren to coordinate this. But here's the crucial fact that
puts Columbia in George Santo's territory. Lots of Columbia's inventions
don't have much of a payoff, like, for instance, their
most spectacular nonsense of all the Big Kahuna concerns something
(24:15):
called instructional resources the more money you spend on teaching,
the more US News rewards you. And the number of
Columbia claim to spend on teaching was hilariously large, just
over three billion dollars. That he has spent a huge
amount of time trying to figure out just where that
preposterous number came from, before he realized they just added
(24:37):
in the one point two billion they spend every year
on patient care at Columbia's medical center. They're pretending that
the person getting an appendect Toby is a student, which
is completely and utterly bananas. Now what difference did this
particular outrageous bit of Shenanigan make.
Speaker 8 (24:59):
Let's see, I have a graph somewhere. Okay, So Columbia
reported that it spends about three billion dollars on an instruction.
This is for fiscal year twenty twenty two, and it's
consolidated financial statements. They report for instruction and educational administration
(25:21):
about two billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Oh. The reason we know this is a lie is
that on its official financial statements, which are audited by
actual professionals, the school doesn't pull the same stunt.
Speaker 8 (25:33):
So that's a billion dollars extra that they're reporting to US.
News basically, and when that works out on a per
student basis, you know, it's a lot of money that
they're kind of you feel a billion around.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
With their Are you telling me long that a billion
dollars is a lot of money in your book?
Speaker 8 (25:53):
Yeah, imagine that, Like this number that's so large the
human brain literally can't even understand. Imagine. And yet when
we drop that three billion down to two billion dollars,
we're still only seeing like a three point drop in
(26:15):
the score, two or three points. So from about ninety
six to about a ninety four or ninety three three points.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's it. If they were only going to cheat by
inflating their student instructional expenditures by a billion, they only
get a three point jump exactly. Okay, Right, it's good to.
Speaker 8 (26:35):
Know, which sounds crazy, right, Like that's a lot of
money to not really make a big difference in your score.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah. So if you're the president of Columbia and I
come to you and I say we can drop an
imaginary billion into this and we're only getting three points,
you're saying, Okay, but I'm not. It's not floating your boat.
Speaker 8 (26:55):
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a very high return, right,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
It's gratuitous. It's just like George Santos and Baruke volleyball
in retrospect. That was their error, wasn't it. They shouldn't
have done the bill done. The billion dollar thing was
so obvious and egregious, and it gave them such a
small payoff. Yeah, why if you're trying to get away
with some shenanigans, would.
Speaker 8 (27:19):
You It's a ridiculous overstatement, like it's more than it's
larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I know it bananas, Like it's so bananas. Here's my
you know what my interpretation is. So there's like some
dude man or woman is charged with coming up with
a strategy and that that's the one they do last.
So it's like it's it's Monday morning at three am.
They got a hand in their proposal for hacking the
(27:55):
US News. By nine am, they've been up for forty
eight hours. They've done all the hard stuff, and they're like,
f let's just throw it an extra bill on this.
Speaker 8 (28:04):
Why not just throw in a few extra zeros?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
The bar set by George Santos was very high. The
Pushkin Prize committee believes Columbia met it okay criteria number two.
The second thing our namesake, George Santos teaches us is
that you have to show as little remorse as possible.
(28:31):
When the furer over his lies was at its peak,
he was unruffled.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
I don't understand where these allegations come from. Oh, George
Santels lives in a fantasy world or whatever it is
that they're trying to elude there, because it's just people
who know me know that that's just not the case.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
People who know me, which is hilarious, right, because the
whole reason there was a controversy over George Santos is
that he wouldn't tell us who he was. At some point,
some enterprising journalists counted seven different names that Santos has
used over the years for Pushkin Prize consideration. We need
that kind of remorselessness. Let me give you what I
(29:12):
think is a relevant counter example. It concerns Temple University's
online Business School. The story goes the dean of the
b school there, a man named Mosha Pora, was upset
about his school's low US News ranking, so he sends
several of his underlings to Washington, d C. To complain
to the US News rankings team, and in the course
(29:33):
of that meeting, US News let slip that they don't
actually check any of the data that schools send them.
So the underlings report this back to Mosha, and Mosha's like, great,
I guess there's no state troopers on this stretch of
the university prestige Highway. So he hires a data scientist.
They figure out that what really matters for online business
(29:54):
schools is what percentage of the school's incoming class has
taken the GMAT. In Temple's case, it's something like nineteen percent.
So Mosha changes that number to one hundred percent, and
Wall Temple's online business school faults to number one in
the US News Online b School rankings. Now you hear
(30:18):
that story and you say to yourself, why wasn't Mosha
up for a pushkin price? And believe me, we thought
long and hard about his nomination. I mean, Mosha was
convicted of fraud and sentenced to fourteen months. He committed
a crime.
Speaker 9 (30:34):
The charges against Parat were not just simply that he
defrauded US News Rankings, but that he defrauded applicants to
the school, students at the school, and donors, all of
whom look at the rankings and making their decision about
where to direct their money.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That's Jennifer Williams, who was in the US Attorney's office
in Philadelphia at the time of the Temple case.
Speaker 9 (31:00):
And in fact, the scheme, as charged in the indictment,
was very successful. Not only did the rankings improve dramatically,
but the enrollment went way up and the total amount
of tuition that Temple was able to get due to
the increased enrollment was almost forty million dollars over the
course of several years. So that is the goal of
the fraud. That's what made this a crime.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
So why doesn't Temple get the Sentos Award Because, and
this is crucial, the school has too much remorse When
word leaks out about Moshes shedanigans. The school hires a
big name outside law firm, Jones Day to investigate. The
university pays out millions of dollars in damages to the
students who enrolled thinking they were getting a degree from
(31:44):
the number one rank school in the country. It was
Temple who turned in Mosha to the authorities. This is
not how Columbia behaved at all. Thaddius releases his report
on February twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, and Columbia responds
with a press release from the school's provost on June thirtieth,
(32:09):
months later. I'm quoting. Columbia has long conducted what we
believe to be a thorough process for gathering and reporting
institutional data, but we are now closely reviewing our processes
in light of the questions raised. The ongoing review is
a matter of integrity. We will take no shortcuts in
(32:32):
getting it right. Temple Hired, one of the world's biggest
law firms. Colombia launched a review.
Speaker 7 (32:41):
The approach has been just to say as little as possible,
try to attract as little attention, and wait for the
storm to blow over.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
You're saying that no member of the administration has reached
out to you since you published that article.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
Good God.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
No, wait, that's nuts.
Speaker 7 (32:55):
That's nuts. I'm glad you think so. I asked the
question at a faculty meeting. Did the review that Columbia
conducted explore the question of intent about whether you know
these falsehoods were provided intentionally? Did anyone know that they
were false? And if so, who and the answer was, well, no,
our review did not look into that question. So it's
clear to me that the review was not seriously intended
(33:18):
to get to the bottom of the matter.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Well's not a review because the Santos criteria are so rigorous.
I realized I needed to take further steps to see
if Columbia's remorselessness remained in place. First, I waited to
see whether they would update the June thirtieth press release.
(33:41):
I waited, waited six months past, so then I decided
I needed to contact them directly. I sent an email,
asked for an interview with the provost. Waited, waited, waited,
until finally someone in the media relations department emailed me
back with a link to the press release of June thirtieth.
(34:06):
We are not commenting beyond the statements issued, I was told.
So I respond because I don't want some blogger down
the line saying I rush to judgment on the remorselessness criteria.
Are you sure? I write back. I talk about Michael Thaddeus,
I tell him about Lauren and her computer model. I
tell him about Jennifer Williams talking about the Temple case.
(34:29):
Are you sure for the university not to comment under
these circumstances, will, from your perspective, be problematic. Don't you
think A week passes, I get an email back, We're
working on it. A month passes. Finally get another email,
essentially restating the original press release. I print at the
(34:52):
statement and run around the office holding it high.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
We have met the formal standard for remorselessness. One last
part of me. You have to be reckless to win
a Pushkin prize. Your lines have to put you in
potential jeopardy if you want to win one of our
coveted gold statuettes. We have gratuitousness, we have remorselessness, But
do we have recklessness? We do? And to say how,
(35:25):
I need to be serious for a second. I actually
love Columbia. I think it's an extraordinary place full of
extraordinary people. I can't tell you how many times I've
sat in the office of some professor at Columbia and
had the world opened up for me. I love Columbia,
even though I know Columbia will never be Princeton or Harvard.
(35:47):
They're never going to have fifty billion dollars in the bank,
and without fifty billion dollars in the bank. It's awfully
hard to climb to the top of the US News rankings.
But the President of Columbia ought to be able to
stand up and say, we are the pre eminent institution
of learning in the greatest city in the world, and
if we have lots of part time faculty, it's because
(36:08):
we are drawing on the resources of amazing people who
spend their working days on Broadway or Madison Avenue or
Wall Street. And if our classes are large, it just
means that every student has the privilege of rubbing shoulders
with lots of other curious and willing students. And by
the way, if you are someone who believes at the
best measure of a university's intellectual vitality is how much
(36:30):
money it has in the bank, or what percentage of
its faculty have PhDs, or how many students are in
its classes, then Columbia is probably going to be wasted
on you. The President of Columbia ought to be able
to stand up and explain to the world what Columbia
is and what it stands for. But he didn't do that,
(36:53):
and his school got consumed with succeeding at a rankings
game that is morally and intellectually bankrupt some jackass in
the Columbia administration. And I have no idea who it was,
but I hope they are found out and made to
do a thousand hours of community service teaching arithmetic to
some first grader. That jackass decided to cook the books.
(37:15):
And now what do we have a school that has
broken the most fundamental of promises to its own community.
Let me quote to you from the Columbia University Code
of Conduct, the Ethical Standard. Columbia holds its own students
to falsification, forgery, or misrepresentation of information to any university
(37:40):
official in order to gain an unfair academic advantage in
coursework or lab work on any application, petition, or documents
submitted to the university is prohibited. This includes, but is
not limited to, falsifying information on a resume, fabrication of
credentials or academic records, misrepresenting one's own research, and providing
(38:05):
false or misleading information. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
the winner of the Pushkin Prize for gratuitous, remorseless, and
recklessly deceptive self promotion. This episode of Revisionist History was
(38:40):
produced by Kiara Powell with Leemingestu ben ATAF. Haffrey and
Jacob Smith. Original scoring by Luis Garra, fact checking by
Kishelle Williams and Tolly Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney,
mastering by Flawn Williams, engineering by Nina Lawrence, and special
things to Columbia's own Michael Thaddius, who not only did
(39:02):
the research that inspired this episode, but also made a
joke when I was talking to him that inspired name
of our first ever Santos Memorial Prize. There's a PostScript
to this story. On June sixth, two days before this
(39:26):
episode aired, Columbia University made an announcement they were dropping
out of the US News Undergraduate rankings, becoming the first
IVY League school to abandon the US News methodology that
did so much to make the IVY League the IVY League.
The press release, like so many of the press releases
(39:47):
issued by Columbia over the course of this controversy, read
like it was dictated by a room of ten thousand
dollars an hour attorneys on a zoom call from mid
taw Manhattan. In a statement, Columbia said that in response
to the allegations of cheating, it had quote conducted an
exhaustive internal review and where errors were confirmed, shoot public
(40:09):
corrections and made changes to the collection methodologies that led
to the inaccuracies. I got an email from Michael Thaddeus
almost immediately. This is completely untrue, he wrote. Columbia has
never corrected the false information it provided, probably over many years,
to US News about class sizes or about proportion of
(40:32):
full time faculty. For example. What it did was admit
in a general way to quote outdated, end or incorrect
methodologies and acknowledged that quote class sized data was previously
reported incorrectly unquote. But it never corrected the false figures,
nor has it even specified which figures were false or
(40:54):
for how long end of quote. Oh and by the way,
the school's provost, whose office is responsible for its submissions
to US News, suddenly announced that she was resigning after
an unusually short term in office. We may have to
do a follow up, don't you think If you're listening
(41:18):
to Revision's history on pushkin plus, you already know the
pleasure of hearing our shows early and without ads. If
you're not part of pushkin plus, my friends, you're missing out.
Our season's really heating up. You will not regret This,
get our new episodes two weeks early, and listen to
every episode of This your favorite show, ad free
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com