The president of New Jersey’s Kean University, Dawood Farahi, will apparently continue to run the school, despite the fact that he was apparently lying on his resume. Students are not happy. According to an article by Nic Corbett in The Star-Ledger
Stung by the Kean University trustees’ vote of confidence in president Dawood Farahi — despite finding errors on his résumés — more than 100 students Thursday marched about two miles to the office of a state senator who supports Farahi.
Chanting “Hey, ho, Farahi must go,” the students walked through the rain to the office of state Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union), carrying signs that read “Farahi is a fraud” and “I was a dean at Harvard. Can I have a job?”
Apparently when faculty began to investigate resumes Farahi submitted for accreditation of Kean’s public administration program in 1994, 2001, and 2008 they discovered some things were a little off.
One resume said Farahi was acting academic dean at Avila College in Missouri. He was not. He also said he published “over 50 technical articles in major publications.” He did not. In Farahi’s 2002 application to become president of Kean University, he apparently said he “won the Morris Abrams Award for best dissertation research at the University of Kansas.” He did earn his PhD at Kansas, but he did not win the award.
According to an article in the Star-Ledger, he said on his resume, for instance, that one article was “‘accepted for publication’ by three journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly and Management Science. Administrative Science Quarterly’s managing editor said the journal has never published or accepted articles under Farahi’s name. An editor at the other journal said Management Science publishes everything it accepts.”
Still, the board thinks all is well.
After deliberating for several hours on Wednesday night the university board determined that Farahi’s lying was not a barrier to his “successful employment” as president. The board voted 7-4, with one abstention, to support Farahi.
Kean’s Academic Integrity Policy states that,
The temptation to ignore academic integrity in favor of potentially higher grades can be overwhelming. In order to help students to avoid this temptation, faculty and administrators of Kean University are committed to creating an environment in which academic integrity is supported and academic dishonesty is not tolerated.
The school’s board, upon issuing its statement in support of Farahi, indicated that Kean’s academic integrity policy “applies solely to students.”
