The Pushkin Prize for Egregiously Deceptive Self-Promotion

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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 hard-working 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 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.

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.

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.

We're no stranger to persecution. My grandfather fleeing.

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.

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 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.

We were, and all of us would 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.

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 in 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?

By using a degeneration based on the Vindberg 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.

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 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?

A sudden, out of context improvement. Oh my, 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 was taught here as I have for the.

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.

That's everyone. So Thaddeus 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 with no more than a B..A to their name.

5%.

It's not, it's more like 11 to 1 on and on.

S news and what I could confirm elsewhere. Then he sat down and.

Or, at 27, I finally realized every tattoo anyone has is for attracting a mate or R.I.P. Spencer, the official dog of the Boston Marathon, has died. Now. How do I know about this? Because Letsrun is one of my favorite websites.

I am one of those people dutifully reading the Lets 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.

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Please join me as we break it down. To my mind, there are three criteria Columbia 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 gilded the lily, and that's what makes it so heroic Santos lied 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 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 U.S news rankings, you may recall her answer It was the best way for a college full of Black students to rise in the U.S.

News rankings was to let in lots of white students.

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.

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 when you change just one.

I would have thought that you could identify one whiz bank that would have given.

You 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 12-point swing, you have to tinker with a lot of variables. Absolutely, absolutely.

And there's, 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.

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.

Argues powerfully for some kind of premeditation on the part of Columbia. I mean, we have no idea what they did, so we're 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.

News rewards you. And the number Columbia 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?

S News Basically, yeah. And when? That works out on a per-student basis.

And yet when we drop that $3 billion down to $2 billion, we're still only seeing.

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

Why if you're trying to get away with some shenanigans, would you?

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.

Had she been kidnapped? I'm Lucy Sheriff. I've been reporting this story for four years, and I've uncovered a tangled web of manipulation, estranged families and greed. Everyone, it seems, has a different version of events. Hear the story on Where's Dia? my new podcast? from Pushkin Industries and IHeart Podcasts.

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Let me give you what I think is a relevant counterexample. It concerns Temple University's online business school. The story goes. 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 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 falls 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 Porat were not just simply that he defrauded u.

S 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. 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 dollars over the course of several years. So that is the goal of the fraud. 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. 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.

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. Well, it's not a review.

The press release I 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 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. 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 P.h.DS, 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 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 an unfair academic advantage in coursework or lab work on any application, petition or document 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 false or misleading information. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the winner of the Pushkin Prize for gratuitous, remorseless and recklessly deceptive self-promotion Columbia.

Columbia shoddy, worthy forever.

There's a postscript to this story on June 6, 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.

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?

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In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them, except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events.

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