Melissa Howard and the Diploma That Wasn't

There are a couple of stories about primary elections in the American southeast that have caught Curmie’s attention this week. One is serious, and plays into larger issues of securing the electoral process. I might get to writing about that sometime soon, but that’s a complex and frankly rather terrifying issue. Sometimes, you just need a story best accompanied by raised eyebrows and an ample supply of popcorn.

Melissa Howard and her fake diploma.
That’s probably her real mom, though.

And that is why, Gentle Reader, the gods have provided us with Melissa Howard, an erstwhile candidate to represent the 73rd district in the Florida House.  A little over a week ago, FLA News Online reported that Howard’s claim to have graduated from Miami University in Ohio couldn’t be corroborated. The National Student Clearinghouse lists Ms. Howard, maiden name Melissa Marie Fox, as having attended Miami in the early 1990s, but not as having received a degree.

On the one hand, it is passing strange that a political candidate would lie about something so easily proved one way or the other, but it’s just as odd that a news agency would pay to verify so pedestrian a credential: a BS in Marketing isn’t exactly going to make an otherwise reluctant voter to suddenly take an interest in a candidate. It is true, of course, that FLA News is a conservative site, and Howard’s opponent in the Republican primary, Tommy Gregory, is a more loyal minion of the NRA and in general the more frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary of the two candidates to replace current Representative Joe Gruters, who decided to seek a seat in the State Senate rather than run for re-election to the House.

Anyway, when the story broke, Ms. Howard, of course, denied it. According to the FLA News article,

She offered to send yearbook pictures and even provided a picture of her at a graduation ceremony. When FLA News asked for the one document that would verify graduation–a diploma–Howard promised to send an electronic copy but did not. She claimed it was in her mother’s storage unit in Ohio. Her campaign consultant later said Howard did not graduate in 1994, she was one credit short and later completed it in 1996. However, the campaign was unable to provide a copy of her diploma, despite four days of repeated requests.

Still, there’s not really a story yet. Getting a copy of a transcript can take a few days, and FLA News may well have been less than an honest broker in the proceedings.

But the campaign completely overplayed its hand, as with this preposterous claim:

This is just another attempt by our desperate opponent, Tommy Gregory to lie about Melissa Howard. He lied about her being a Democrat in Ohio, which the Supervisor of Elections refuted. There’s nothing he won’t do or say to hurt Melissa or her reputation within the community. It’s shameful. Melissa graduated with a degree in marketing and we have requested her transcripts from the University and have been told they take 4-6 weeks to arrive.

Anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the process of getting a transcript can tell you that whereas three or four days might be a bit short (although Curmie was e-mailed an electronic copy of his grad school transcript in a matter of hours a couple of years ago), 4-6 weeks is ridiculously long. One week, maybe. Four to six weeks (oh, so conveniently enough time to get past the primary in a safe GOP district), not a chance.  Of course, that’s for a transcript as opposed to a diploma, but a transcript would certainly have served the purpose.

Former President Obama showed a prescience one might wish had been more on display during his actual term in office, in a speech in Johannesburg at a celebration in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday.  He said:

We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie, and they just double down and they lie some more…. Let me say, politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught ‘em lying, they’d be like, “aw, man…” Now they just keep on lying.

Obama’s remarks were widely and no doubt accurately interpreted as a not so thinly veiled excoriation of President Trump, whose administration has indeed reached levels of mendacity hitherto undreamed of even by the most dishonest of pols. But those comments certainly apply, as well, to the likes of small-time prevaricators like Melissa Howard.

What’s important here is that her falsified credentials were completely unnecessary. Ms. Howard is a successful businesswoman, and coming up one or two courses short of graduation (which appears to have been the case) from a quite reputable university is not an insignificant achievement, and, as Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune notes in a follow-up essay, “If Howard had been honest about not graduating, her academic credentials likely would never have been an issue in the race. There are other state lawmakers without college degrees.”

Indeed, it’s quite easy to imagine a scenario whereby an honest misunderstanding could have happened:

—Where’d you go to college?

—Miami of Ohio.

—What was your major?

—Marketing.

And we now have a completely accurate and perhaps even completely honest exchange which leads to a completely reasonable but completely erroneous conclusion. Well, except for the fact that Miami doesn’t have a Marketing major... more on that later.

Even after the story broke, if she’d apologized, said she had come very close to graduating but struggled with that one course (or whatever), blamed her campaign’s website’s false claim on a miscommunication with a staffer, the chances that she’d have lost more than a handful of votes are pretty slim.

But Howard, to use President Obama’s phrase, doubled down, with headline-making results. Let’s face it, she’s the best-known failed state representative candidate in the country. Why? Because of the lie? No, as President Obama said, politicians lie. It’s just that in true Watergate fashion, the cover-up was worse than the crime. Howard stalled, claimed she’d made up the missing credits two years after finishing her full-time studies, asserted that her diploma was in her mom’s storage facility, then posed with Mom and Diploma in a stratagem that was nothing if not audacious. It even worked, briefly. FLA News Online even rescinded (as opposed to “retracted”) its story.

But then university officials became pro-active. Miami, as noted above, doesn’t offer a BS in Marketing; marketing students would receive a BS in Business. But Howard didn’t, in fact, major in Marketing, but in Retailing (why would anyone sane lie about this?), which would have led to a degree in Family and Consumer Sciences... assuming she actually got a degree. Moreover, one of the signatures on the obviously fallacious diploma was that of Robert C. Johnson, who was, alas, the Dean of the Graduate School, not of Business nor of Education and Allied Professions. Oops.

Still, Howard persisted, briefly, before finally admitting she’d lied about the degree, claiming, “It was not [her] intent to deceive or mislead anyone.” Wow. She accused journalists, her primary opponent, and at least by implication her presumptive alma mater of lying about her; she staged a trip to Ohio to prove an innocence that never existed; she ultimately fabricated a fake diploma, even somehow convincing her mom to pose with it. Curmie wonders what one must do to qualify as being intentionally deceptive on Ms. Howard’s home planet.

And yet she announced she was staying in the race! Joe Gruters, the Howard campaign treasurer and presumably same person who is the incumbent in that House seat, came up with one of the great political quotes of all time. First, he said he’d urge her step aside if arrested (!), but followed it up with this gem: “in the meantime it’s a slippery slope when you start asking candidates who lie to remove themselves from the ballot.” How, exactly, is anyone to take the Florida GOP seriously after that?

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, Wait! There’s more! Of course, she lied about staying in the race, too. (Well, to be fair, it wasn’t really a lie, as she might just have been crazy enough to believe her own rhetoric.) But before she dropped out we also have an unnamed Republican political consultant saying this:

Common sense and normal politics would say she can’t survive it but everything seems to be upside down…. I wonder if people don’t feel anesthetized or insensate from [President Trump]. He set the bar so high or so low, depending on your point of view, that the stuff that used to matter doesn’t seem to matter.

When your own party’s mouthpieces start saying outright that the POTUS has so degraded normal standards of integrity that they don’t even matter anymore, it might be a portent of some serious introspection on the part of the handful of remaining Trump supporters who are otherwise intelligent adults.

Meanwhile, it strikes Curmie that there are three lessons to be learned from the Melissa Howard affair:

1. Telling the truth is better than lying.
2. When the hole is too deep, stop digging.
3. If you need a diploma forged, don’t hire someone over Craigslist..

The Case of the False Credentials (and the Idiot Administrator)

Curmiphiles of a certain age will remember well the phrase, “it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up,” one of the incessantly-intoned mantras of the Watergate era. I was reminded of that line today in reading about recent events at Birch Vocational Academy in Providence, RI. Birch is the district’s school for children with developmental and/or intellectual disabilities.

Nancy Stevenin: Liar and Cheat

After a scandal involving Birch students’ being forced to work essentially as prison labor, the district needed to turn things around. Part of the solution was to have been the hiring of Nancy Stevenin as Supervisor of Transition and Community Development (whatever the hell that means). Trouble is, the job requires a college degree and Stevenin doesn’t have one. Or, rather, she purchased hers online from a whorehouse diploma mill called Ashley University. Ashley University has no physical campus, no accreditation, presumably no actual faculty who can be contacted, and it’s kind of significant that their website is a dot-com instead of a dot-edu, don’t you think? But they’ll sell you a PhD for $648 (including tax, apparently) with no apparent concern for anything other than whether your credit card company approves payment. One supposes PhDs are pricier than other degrees; Stevenin probably didn’t have to pay that much for a Bachelor’s. And, after all, they’ll even backdate the degree for you, so they’re a model of customer service, right?

Everyone who works for Ashley is dishonest, and every one of their… erm… clients is worse. This is, after all, not Monsters U., Hogwarts, or the North American School of the Artsy and Somewhat Musically Inclined, who sent me a couple of brochures twenty-odd years ago for t-shirts, mugs, and the like. No, Ashley University is nothing more or less than a scam and a fraud: they really want unsuspecting people—like the folks in Providence—to believe in their legitimacy as an education institution.

Stevenin got the job, which pays roughly 50% more than Curmie makes with well over 20 years’ experience and an honest-to-God PhD from an actual university, because although nobody on the hiring committee had presumably ever heard of Ashley University, nobody checked to see if it was…you know… real. That’s not the quintessence of good hiring practices, but it’s at least understandable: no one can possibly know every college in the country, and even HR folks can be a little too trusting at times. So far in the story, then, there’s nothing to precipitate a Curmie Award nomination. Dishonest people exist. Other dishonest people will help them. And sometimes one of them gets away with something.

Susan Lusi: Dumber than a Sack of Hammers

Ah. But we’re not done. Having found out about Stevenin’s dishonesty, you see, Providence School Superintendent Susan Lusi described her underling’s perfidy as “a lapse in judgment,” and proceeded to… wait for it… “put Miss Stevenin on a corrective action plan immediately in February when we discovered that.” A corrective action plan? How about firing her sorry ass? No, because you see “Lusi said Stevenin is getting results at Birch and has an impressive resume.” WHAT??? First off, she’d only been on the job a couple of months when the school discovered the deception, so it’s unlikely she’d really done much yet. More to the point—her “impressive resume” has already been proven to be fraudulent. No one ought to give a single solitary damn about what it might contain in the way of alleged credentials.

The problem, in real terms, isn’t that Stevenin is a liar and a cheat. It isn’t that whoever is behind “Ashley University” makes Chris Christie look ethical by comparison. It isn’t even that Stevenin was hired for a job for which she lacked appropriate credentials. It’s that she wasn’t promptly shown the door when the revelations of her mendacity became known. The problem, in other words, is that Susan Lusi is a card-carrying moron.

Frighteningly enough, it gets worse. When parents, teachers and other sensible people who have a legitimate stake in the matter—paying Lusi’s $190+K salary, for example—made the obvious point (well, obvious to anyone with either a whiff of ethical sensibility or the brains of a kumquat) that allowing Stevenin to continue would be to condone cheating, Lusi replied, “No, I don't think so at all. If cheating was OK we would not have put her on the immediate corrective action plan.” Meanwhile, the cheater in question continues in her current job and salary but is responsible only for paying her own tuition to an accredited university to actually earn the degree she lied about already having. Genius.

Lusi further embarrassed herself, her district, and her profession, in response to a statement by Maribeth Calibro, the president of the Providence Teachers Union. Calibro noted that her members, who actually have university degrees and are making only a fraction of Stevenin’s salary, are “extremely disconcerted” and “very angry” about the situation, as well they should be. TV reporter Katie Davis (who appears to be an actual journalist) suggested to Lusi that it must be “frustrating” to teachers making “$30,000 or $40,000 a year with a bachelor's degree, [seeing] an administrator making $94,000 a year without.”

Lusi, of course, seizes on the seemingly no-longer-required credential rather than the integrity issue and presents an argument truly remarkable for its inanity. Remember, it was presumably Lusi who either insisted on or at the very least signed off on the bachelor’s degree requirement to begin with. And yet we get: “I guess people may get frustrated that Bill Gates doesn't have a degree. But he's judged on the merits of his work.” Actually, of course, there’s no stated requirement that Bill Gates needs a degree, he has never to my knowledge purported to have one, and (of course) he’s a particularly horrible example for any argument involving education, since his hypocrisy, arrogance, and pseudo-philanthropy have probably done more harm to the education system in this country than anyone whose name isn’t Michelle Rhee or Arne Duncan.

The real issue, of course, is skirted by Lusi. If you want to say that the job doesn’t require a degree, that’s OK with me. But there remain two unresolved issues. First, it’s not the teachers who need a degree who are the real victims of Stevenin’s dishonesty and Lusi’s ineptitude, although they certainly have a right to be upset. But what of the other applicants for Stevenin’s job—the ones who actually had the required credentials? Shouldn’t they be a little peeved that not only did the job go to someone without the necessary degree, but that Lusi did nothing to remedy the situation when the fraud was discovered? If I were Ms. Lusi, I might just be expecting a call from someone’s lawyer in the near future.

The most important point, of course, is that Stevenin simply can’t be trusted… nor can Lusi, albeit in a different way. Curmie may be old-fashioned, but lying on a résumé is about the surest way to prove to me that you’re fundamentally incapable of functioning in an ethical universe.

Be it noted, there are sometimes judgment calls. For example, had Stevenin de facto passed the last class required for a real degree but the BS (could have been a BA, I suppose, but Stevenin and “BS” seem to go so well together) hadn’t officially been awarded yet at the time she applied… maybe. If she had fulfilled the job description of an assistant director of a project without ever having officially been given that title… maybe. If her undergrad college didn’t have minors (Curmie’s didn’t), but she’d done enough coursework in a discipline to have qualified for a minor at a different university… no, but at least there’s a case.

But this little escapade? There is literally no way to spin this as anything but an absolutely intentional deception without the slightest bit of actual justification. Ashley University is a fraud. Stevenin knows it to be a fraud, and is apparently utterly unrepentant (or she’d have resigned, thereby defusing the situation considerably). Stevenin should, of course, be fired. “Ashley University” should be roundly denounced as the deceitful enterprise it is (if not investigated for criminal misrepresentation). But the fact is that dishonest people will behave dishonestly, regardless of occupation. The greater threat to education per se, and therefore the Curmie nominee du jour, is Susan Lusi, whose transcendent incompetence is an inspiration to idiots everywhere.