CT Blue

This post is only tangentially related to politics, though the story is emblematic of our culture. I found out about it because my wife and I subscribe to the Boston Globe, for it’s a local Boston story. We were particularly interested because our son currently has a fellowship at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, where the story takes place.

If, like us before he got the fellowship, you have never heard of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, let me enlighten you. It is, as the Globe reports, a prestigious institution, founded by John Adams, John Hancock and their ilk while the American Revolution raged around them. They felt Boston deserved an institution that could compete head to head with Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia based American Philosophical Society. But this story is not about our patriotic forbears, for it is very much a modern fable.

The Globe ran a story yesterday revealing that the president of this institution, one Leslie Cohen Berlowitz has, not to put too fine a point on it, lied about her academic credentials. That Ph.D from NYU that appears on her resume? NYU has no record of it. In fact, the good “Doctor”’s only claim to the title is an honorary degree, and calling yourself a Doc on the strength of a free degree is a giant academic no-no.

But the real story here is twofold. First, there’s the backstory, and dare we assume that word of Ms. Berlowitz’s mendacity may have come to the Globe from her staff:

She was almost fired in 1997, a year after she became chief executive of the academy, because of her heavy-handed management style, according to a former member of the governance board who asked not to be named.

Gail Loffredo lasted just 14 days as Berlowitz’s executive assistant in 2012. She said Berlowitz fired her last year after her teenage daughter found a lump in her chest and Loffredo told Berlowitz she needed to take her daughter to the doctor the following week. Loffredo later learned that Berlowitz had gone through as many as five other assistants in as many months.

“She is horrible,” Loffredo said, adding that she regularly witnessed Berlowitz scolding employees in her office in front of colleagues.

Ben Didsbury, a former membership coordinator charged with compiling contact information for academy fellows, recalled being ordered to apologize in front of other staffers after Berlowitz mistakenly called a person’s fax number rather the voice line and thought Didsbury had reversed the numbers.

“There was fear permeating through the whole place,” said Didsbury, who now works as a freelance audio engineer in Cambridge.

Workers were even afraid to speak much of the time, making the office seem eerily quiet. Didsbury recalls one time when an office assistant asked him if he needed any more staples, and Berlowitz stormed into his office yelling: “You do not talk to each other!”

(via The Boston Globe)

Did I mention that this lady is paid over $600,000.00 (more than most college presidents) to run an institution with a budget of a little more than $8 million? Or that she is chauffeured around by her long suffering employees, travels frequently on the Academy’s dime, and while doing so eats at only the finest restaurants?

But I haven’t gotten to the second fold (the story is twofold, remember?). When the Globe confronted her, she, of course refused to speak. She had a flack do it for her. Unfortunately, the response was, shall we say, not terribly convincing:

“Neither the academy nor President Berlowitz is going to respond to subjective, interpretive, and gossipy allegations from former employees and unnamed sources,” Howell said in the statement. “Nor are they going to respond to personal questions that are irrelevant, do not belong in the public domain and, frankly, smack of sexism.”

Well that didn’t really quite cut it, for obvious reasons. In fact, my wife and I were speculating about whether press flack Howell was purposely subverting his boss, but given her style she surely reviewed every word before it was released. So, yesterday, they tried again. Bear in mind that the Globe’s original article concentrated more on her penchant for “kissing up and kicking down” (a great phrase, that) than on her fraud. So, give a guess how she chose to explain the fraud:

A spokesman for Berlowitz, who has often clashed with employees in her 17-year tenure, blamed her staff for incorrect information in a statement Tuesday, even though Berlowitz signed some of the submissions and is known for being a micromanager who insists on seeing every document that leaves the academy.

“President Berlowitz, who reviewed only the substantive content of the applications, was unaware of the mistakes,” academy spokesman Ray Howell said in the statement. “President Berlowitz takes full responsibility for the error, and the academy is working to correct the information with relevant funding agencies.”

(via The Boston Globe)

Blame the staff, of course. It’s clear from the articles that there is no way in the world the woman wasn’t aware of the fraud.

This truly is a story of our time. Arrogance, greed, fraud, and contempt for the ordinary American worker, all mixed up and baked to perfection. She missed her calling. She belongs on Wall Street.

Postscript: While my son does have a fellowship at the Academy, he doesn’t, so far as I know, work directly for this woman and never mentioned her before we read the article. He is not “staff” and is not among her victims.