The Pushkin Prize for Egregiously Deceptive Self-Promotion
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Pushkin. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

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Become a Navy Federal member today. Navy Federal Credit Union members are the mission. Insured by NCUA, equal housing lender. This is Michael Lewis from Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. If you have a small business or work as a freelancer, every little decision matters. So it's important to get those decisions right. Lenovo Pro has the expertise and resources to help you get them right. And it's free.

Lenovo Pro is a partnership that will help you understand and utilize tech trends. It works with you over time to take advantage of offers and resources that are right for your business. So, to join Lenovo Pro, visit Lenovo.com. That's Lenovo.com. And the Emmy goes to... And the Oscar goes to... And the People's Choice Award goes to...

Thank you to the Academy for this incredible recognition. I'm so honored. Everybody wants to know what I would do if I didn't win. I guess we'll never know. 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 have observed this oversight with what can only be described as dismay. Until I decided, damn it, if this country wasn't going to 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 company's namesake, we're going to call them the Pushkin Prizes. Folks, these prizes are super prestigious. You can't see this because this is audio, but we have little gold statuettes of Alexander Pushkin himself. You're going to walk into the lobby of your favorite 18th century ivy-colored marble and granite university administration building, and there, 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, 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 Pushkin Prize for Egregiously Deceptive Self-Promotion.

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 can the little boy born in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, in New York City, become a United States congressman at 34. It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit, as we like to call it.

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 a 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.

Turns out he's not Jewish. Santos said his mom was a 9/11 survivor. Turns out she wasn't even in New York City during 9/11. He said he worked at Goldman Sachs. Turns out he never set foot in Goldman Sachs. And then there was this.

tallest of tall tales, which I love so much. Hey, you know, it's funny, George, you go right to the heart here of me, Sid and Bernie. This is Santos on a local New York radio show, Sid and Friends in the Morning, during his first congressional run in 2020. And the host, Sid Rosenberg, starts talking about sports.

At the very end of your biography, it says, in his spare time, George Anthony enjoys volleyball and tennis. Rosenberg says that's funny because both his daughter and his co-host daughter are avid volleyball and tennis players.

Then, Santos' response. You know, it's funny. I actually went to school on a volleyball scholarship. You did? I did, yeah. When I was in Baruch, we were the number one volleyball team. Did you graduate from Baruch? Did you graduate from there? Yeah. So did I. I did. So did I. Oh, very cool. Great school, great institution. But it's funny that we went to play against Harvard, Yale, and we...

Slay them. We slayed 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 6'2". We had on our block, on our block alone, there were 6'7", 6'8". These guys weren't jumping. They were just stretching their arms up in the air.

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. Look, I sacrificed both my knees and got very nice knee replacements from HSS playing volleyball. That's how serious I took the game. Well, that's how serious you're taking politics as well. Remember this name, folks, George Santos, out in the 3rd District.

This is, to my mind, the gold standard George Santos fabrication. A wedding cake of prevarication. The Washington Post did a breakdown of the tape, and here's what they found. Let's start with the smallest lies and work backwards. Baruch didn't beat Yale at volleyball because Yale doesn't have a varsity volleyball team. Santos later said he played the position of striker. Volleyball teams don't have strikers. That's soccer.

Nor did Santos have a volleyball scholarship at Baruch because Baruch doesn't give out volleyball scholarships. And at 6'2", he would not have been the shortest player on the team, even if he had been on the team. But he wasn't. He never played volleyball at Baruch, maybe because he never attended Baruch at all, which means his knees are perfectly fine unless, that is, he blew them 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, there were many nominees, 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, in the back of your mind, think there might be something questionable going on? Yes. Not even, no, not in the back of my mind, in the front of my mind. You're listening to a math professor at Columbia named Michael Thaddeus, 50s, 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 Thaddeus, you'll find papers that begin with things like, We discuss sympletic cutting for Hamiltonian actions of non-abelian compact groups. By using a degeneration based on the Vindbergh monoid, we give, in good cases, a global quotient description of a surgery construction introduced by Woodward and Meinrenken and show it can be interpreted in algebra geometric terms.

I have no idea what that means, but Michael Thaddeus 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. 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. The dean announces to everyone, I have amazing news.

Columbia has just risen to number two in the U.S. 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 U.S. News rankings means. More alumni dollars, more prestige, more applications, more excitement and desire from neurotic 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 kid said, Mom, I just got into Columbia, you would be over the moon. And why would you be over the moon? Because Columbia is number two in the U.S. news rankings. So the dean makes her big announcement, but Michael Thaddeus, the numbers guy, isn't buying it. And that just piqued my curiosity, too, 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 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 us? How do the numbers break down? Columbia started in these rankings at 18th.

Then began a steady, dramatic climb past Cornell, Washington U, 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 to second, shooting like a shiny asteroid past their glittering peers. I'm a runner, you know, in the running world.

The tell for whether someone is doping is an unexpected improvement. You know, when the 27-year-old miler suddenly lops three seconds off their personal best, you say, aha. A sudden improvement is the tell. Sudden, out-of-context improvement. The first thing Thaddeus did after the faculty meeting is buy a subscription to the U.S. News Rankings.

He downloaded the data Columbia submitted for his application, and his eye falls on class size. Columbia reported to U.S. News that 82.5% of its classes had less than 20 students. Thaddeus looked at that number and thought, huh?

Anyone who has taught here, as I have for the last 25 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 76 students, and that's typical for a course of that nature. The reporting to US News said that, what was it again, I think 82.5% of all classes enrolled below 20 students.

And that just did not square with my experience at all. - So he decided to fact check Columbia's claim. He went to the university's class catalog and pulled out the data on all 30,000 of the school's classes.

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. And then I opened it up in Excel. He analyzed the data, double-checked his math, and realized his pokey feeling was

was justified. I was able to arrive at an estimate that was more like 62 to 68 percent, a far cry from 83 percent. Now he's getting suspicious. He picks another number. The U.S. News rankings penalizes a school if it has too many part-time faculty. Columbia told U.S. News that it only had 137 part-timers. But Thaddeus found that the school also had to report this statistic to the Department of Education.

The number reported, the government was over a thousand. And I think that that's the more accurate number. To me, this is a really important figure. 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 a sort of gig economy model where most people are working contingently 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. He kept going. U.S. News wants to know what percentage of your faculty has a terminal degree in their field. Basically, do they have a Ph.D. or not?

Columbia reported the highest terminal degree number of any college in the entire country, 99.5%, which U.S. News rounded up to 100%. That's everyone. So Thaddeus goes to 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 with no more than a BA to their name. And that was enough that there was no way that the percentage could have been 99.5%.

Columbia says its student-faculty ratio is 6 to 1. It's not. It's more like 11 to 1. On and on. Every single figure where I could check it independently, I found a significant discrepancy between what was reported to U.S. News and what I could confirm elsewhere. Then he sat down and wrote up a massive analysis of his findings. Charts, graphs, computer analyses, pages upon pages.

He puts it up on his faculty webpage, and there it sits for weeks and weeks, until, for some strange reason, someone posts a link to Thaddeus' manifesto on the message board of the running website letsrun.com. If you are unfamiliar with the message boards of Let's Run, here are some typical threads. Tooey runs crazy 423 anchor leg for NC State, but still not enough for DMR or DMR.

At 27, I finally realized every tattoo anyone has is for attracting a mate. Or, 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 U.S. news rankings. I'm 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 U.S. rankings, I walked around the streets of New 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. 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. The first nice thing anyone has ever said about my Twitter.

So the story goes everywhere. Colombia goes into a defensive crouch and the U.S. news reanalyzes the situation and downgrades Colombia back to 18. How the mighty have fallen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.

It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. Brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection.

Now you may think, I'm smart, I'm careful with my data, I don't need to worry. But the truth is, a lot of your personal information is in the control of others, like your doctor's office, your bank, your insurance provider. All it takes is one breach of any organization that has your info and you could become a victim of identity theft.

LifeLock is a leader in identity theft protection and empowers you to take control of your identity, alerting you to more uses of your personal information and fixing identity theft if it happens. Guaranteed. All your money back. LifeLock offers extensive, proactive protection, and all plans include the LifeLock Million Dollar Protection Package.

So start protecting your identity today. Save up to 40% off your first year of LifeLock identity theft protection. Go to LifeLock.com slash metal to save 40% off. Terms apply. Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Sure, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees.

They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success. So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve.

The Hartford Group Benefits makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not like policies. The Hartford offers flexible products to meet the needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has you covered.

So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The buck's got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits. This is Michael Lewis from Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. If you have a small business or work as a freelancer, every little decision matters. So it's important to get those decisions right. Lenovo Pro has the expertise and resources to help you get them right. And it's free.

Lenovo Pro is a partnership that will help you understand and utilize tech trends. It works with you over time to take advantage of offers and resources that are right for your business. For example, explore how AI can elevate your enterprise with Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Powered by Intel at Core Ultra Processors. Lenovo Pro provides access to the critical IT tools you need to succeed.

whether you're a startup or a mature business. So to join Lenovo Pro, visit Lenovo.com. That's Lenovo.com. 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 Colombia 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 are three criteria Colombia needs to meet to rise to Santos-level deception.

The first is gratuitousness. That's the power of the Santos bit about his volleyball career at Baruch. This was a lie fundamentally different from his claims to being Jewish, working at Goldman Sachs, and running a charity for unwanted pets. Sorry, I left that one out before. 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 Baruch volleyball squad. He had them at Jewish, Goldman Sachs, and abandoned kittens. The volleyball lie was pure gilding the lily. And that's what makes it so heroic. Santos lied when it wasn't even in his interest to lie. Now, does Colombia meet this standard? Was their deception gratuitous?

In order to answer this question, I turn to Revisionist History's resident data scientist, Lauren Lavelle. Lauren, Lauren, Lauren. Hey, Malcolm. We ride again. Some of you may remember Lauren from the Project Dillard episode of Revisionist History. A group of undergraduates at Reed College hacked their way into the U.S. 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 Reed, to use the model to figure out how a historically black college could rise in the US News rankings. You may recall her answer. It was that 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.

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 scientist getting paid millions of dollars to do this for some super prestigious university. Like it's students. In other words, the barriers to manipulation are low. Yes.

So I said to Lauren, let's use the trusted Reed College model to get at this question of gratuitousness. I sent her a list of questions, starting with, tell me which of Columbia's whoppers mattered the most. And her conclusion was a shocker. The thing that's really making the biggest difference is the faculty resources category. So for faculty resources, we have our class size, our percent of our faculty that are full-time, and our student-to-faculty ratio.

U.S. News grades all universities on a scale of 0 to 100. So Princeton at number one is 100. Columbia is a close second at 96. 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 the overall U.S. News ranking algorithm.

You tinker with those variables, you get a massive payoff. Exactly. And 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.

Wait, so Lauren, I want to pause on this. This is really interesting because this supports the notion that this was not an accidental happening at Columbia. This suggests there was some significant thought behind this because what you told me is something that's not intuitive. Right. I would have thought that you could identify one whiz bank that would have given us a massive payoff and we wouldn't have had to do anything else.

But what you're saying is, no, you actually, it's an unexpected area, it gives you a huge payoff. And also, if you want to get a 12-point swing, you have to tinker with a lot of variables. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's some kind of thing greater than the sum of its parts that's at 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 U.S. News. 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? Can you tilt your camera to just show me the thing? Oh, it's on your screen. Can you screen share an email? Lauren, I'm 59 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 over Zoom.

Lauren lapsed into geek mode for like 20 minutes, talking about unexpected non-linearities. 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 by eyeballing the criteria that U.S. News makes public, you'd fail. To go back to the point I was saying before, 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 this is all in the realm of speculation, but they basically manufactured a 12-point swing, and it's very hard to imagine how you could manufacture a 12-point swing by the seat of your pants because it's not intuitive.

I agree there's probably some dirty play happening somewhere. Lauren, they hired someone like you. That's what they did. Somewhere out there, there is some brainy 26-year-old with blood on their hands. I mean, maybe. To be clear, I don't know that they hired someone like Lauren to coordinate this. But here's the crucial fact that puts Colombia in George Santos' territory.

Lots of Colombia's inventions don't have much of a payoff. Like, for instance, their most spectacular nonsense of all, the Big Kahuna, concerns something called instructional resources. The more money you spend on teaching, the more U.S. news rewards you. And the number Colombia claimed to spend on teaching was hilariously large, just over $3 billion.

Thaddeus spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out just where that preposterous number came from before he realized they just added in the $1.2 billion they spend every year on patient care at Columbia's Medical Center. They're pretending that the person getting an appendectomy is a student, which is completely and utterly bananas. Now, what difference did this particular outrageous bit of shenanigan make? Let's see. I have a graph somewhere.

Okay, so Columbia reported that it spends about $3 billion on instruction. This is for fiscal year 2022. In its consolidated financial statements, they report for instruction and educational administration about $2 billion. Okay.

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. So that's a billion dollars extra that they're reporting to U.S. News, basically. Yeah. And when that works out on a per-student basis, you know, it's a lot of money that they're

Kind of playing around with there. Are you telling me, Lauren, that a billion dollars is a lot of money in your book? 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 $3 billion down to $2 billion, we're still only seeing like...

a three-point drop in the score, two or three points. So from about a 96 to about a 94 or 93. Three points. 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.

That's what you're saying? Exactly. Okay. All right. That's good to know. Which sounds crazy, right? Like that's a lot of money to not really make a big difference in your score. 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 it's not floating your boat. Yeah. It doesn't seem like a very high return rate. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

It's gratuitous. It's just like George Santos and Baruch volleyball. In retrospect, that was their error, wasn't it? They shouldn't have 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 you...

It's a ridiculous overstatement. Like it's more than, it's larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined. I know, it's so bananas. It's so bananas. Here's my, you know what my interpretation is? So there's like some dude who,

Man or woman is charged with coming up with a strategy. And that's the one they do last. So it's like, it's Monday morning at 3 a.m. They got to hand in their proposal for hacking the U.S. news by 9 a.m. They've been up for 48 hours. They've done all the hard stuff. And they're like, F it. Let's just throw in an extra bill on this. Why not? Just throw in a few extra zeros. The bar set by George Santos was very high.

The Pushkin Prize Committee believes Columbia met it. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. Brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection.

Now you may think, I'm smart, I'm careful with my data, I don't need to worry. But the truth is, a lot of your personal information is in the control of others, like your doctor's office, your bank, your insurance provider. All it takes is one breach of any organization that has your info and you could become a victim of identity theft.

LifeLock is a leader in identity theft protection and empowers you to take control of your identity, alerting you to more uses of your personal information and fixing identity theft if it happens. Guaranteed. All your money back. LifeLock offers extensive, proactive protection, and all plans include the LifeLock Million Dollar Protection Package.

So start protecting your identity today. Save up to 40% off your first year of LifeLock Identity Theft Protection. Go to lifelock.com slash metal to save 40% off. Terms apply. Malcolm Gladwell here. Imagine you could rewrite history. What would you change about your current employees' benefits?

How would a simple change make your life and theirs simpler? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success.

So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve. The Hartford Group Benefits makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies.

The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered. So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The buck's got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits.

This is Michael Lewis from Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. If you have a small business or work as a freelancer, every little decision matters. So it's important to get those decisions right. Lenovo Pro has the expertise and resources to help you get them right. And it's free. Lenovo Pro is a partnership that will help you understand and utilize tech trends. It works with you over time to take advantage of offers and resources that are right for your business.

For example, explore how AI can elevate your enterprise with Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Powered by Intel at Core Ultra Processors. Lenovo Pro provides access to the critical IT tools you need to succeed, whether you're a startup or a mature business. So, to join Lenovo Pro, visit Lenovo.com. That's Lenovo.com.

Okay, criteria number two. The second thing our namesake George Santos teaches us is that you have to show as little remorse as possible. When the furor over his lies was at its peak, he was unruffled. I don't understand where these allegations come from. Oh, George Santos lives in a fantasy world or whatever it is that they're trying to allude there because it's just people who know me know that that's just not the case.

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 journalist 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 think is a relevant counterexample. It concerns Temple University's online business school.

The story goes that the dean of the B-school there, a man named Moshe Porat, was upset about his school's low U.S. News ranking. So he sends several of his underlings to Washington, D.C. to complain to the U.S. News rankings team. And in the course of that meeting, U.S. News let slip that they don't actually check any of the data that schools send them. So the underlings report this back to Moshe, and Moshe'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 schools is what percentage of the school's incoming class has taken the GMAT. In Temple's case, it's something like 19%. So Moshe changes that number to 100%. And voila, Temple's online business school vaults to number one in the U.S. News Online B-School Rankings.

Now, you hear that story and you say to yourself, why wasn't Moshe up for a Pushkin Prize? And believe me, we thought long and hard about his nomination. I mean, Moshe was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 14 months. He committed a crime. The charges against Perot were not just simply that he defrauded

That's Jennifer Williams, who was in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia at the time of the Temple case.

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 $40 million over the course of several years. So that is the goal of the fraud. That's what made this a crime. So why doesn't Temple get the Santos Award? Because, and this is crucial, the school has too much remorse.

When word leaks out about Moshe's shenanigans, 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 the number one ranked school in the country. It was Temple who turned in Moshe to the authorities. This is not how Columbia behaved at all.

Thaddeus releases his report on February 28, 2022, and Columbia responds with a press release from the school's provost on June 30. Four 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 getting it right. Temple hired one of the world's biggest law firms. Columbia launched a review.

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. Are you saying that no member of the administration has reached out to you since you published that article? Good God, no. Wait, that's nuts. 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 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 to get to the bottom of the matter. It was 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 30th press release. I waited, waited, waited.

Six months passed. 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 30th. We are not commenting beyond the statements issued below, I was told.

So I respond, because I don't want some blogger down the line saying I rushed 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. 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, I get another email, essentially restating the original press release. I print out the statement and run around the office holding it high. I can't believe it. We have met the formal standard for remorselessness.

One last bar to me. You have to be reckless to win a Pushkin Prize. Your lies 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, I need to be serious for a second. I actually love Colombia. 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. They're never going to have $50 billion in the bank. And without $50 billion in the bank, it's awfully hard to climb to the top of the U.S. news rankings.

But the president of Columbia ought to be able to stand up and say, we are the preeminent institution of learning in the greatest city in the world. And if we have lots of part-time faculty, it's because 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 that the best measure of a university's intellectual vitality is how much 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 Colombia ought to be able to stand up and explain to the world what Colombia is and what it stands for. But he didn't do that.

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. 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 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

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 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 produced by Kiara Powell with Limengistu, Ben Nadav-Haffrey and Jacob Smith. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Fact-checking by Cashel Williams and Tali Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Mastering by Flan Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. And special thanks to...

to Columbia's own Michael Thaddeus, who not only did the research that inspired this episode, but also made a joke when I was talking to him that inspired the name of our first ever Santos Memorial Prize. There's a postscript to this story. On June 6th, two days before this episode aired, Columbia University made an announcement.

They were dropping out of the U.S. News undergraduate rankings, becoming the first Ivy League school to abandon the U.S. News methodology that did so much to make the Ivy League the Ivy League. The press release, like so many of the press releases issued by Columbia over the course of this controversy, read like it was dictated by a room of $10,000-an-hour attorneys on a Zoom call from midtown 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, issued public 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 U.S. News, about class sizes or about proportion of full-time faculty, for example.

What it did was admit in a general way to, quote, outdated and or incorrect methodologies and acknowledge that, quote, class size data was previously reported incorrectly, unquote. But it never corrected the false figures, nor has it even specified which figures were false or for how long, end of quote. Oh, and by the way,

The school's provost, whose office is responsible for its submissions to U.S. 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 to Revisionist 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. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.

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