Verified: Kundra Did Receive an M.S. in Information Systems Management

http://techinsider.nextgov.com/2009/08/on_kundras_college_records.php

by luigi • 17 years ago

109 69 17 years ago

techinsider.nextgov.com

calambrac4• 17 years ago

When in doubt, always remember that John C. Dvorak is a complete jackass.

luigi• 17 years ago

Tim O'Reilly agrees:

http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/3270411756

socratees2• 17 years ago

Yes, he got his degree from University or Maryland University College in 2001. And what about the biology degree?

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

I don't know. Dvorak's an idiot but O'Reilly's belief that you can determine how qualified someone is for the highest technology post in the U.S. after "a few minutes" seems just as foolish.

DanielBMarkham9• 17 years ago

Please don't attack the messenger, even for a bad story.

Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying, slandering him doesn't make your case any better.

After all, if he screws this one up, he's going to have a very hard time getting respectability and credibility for future articles. That punishment is enough.

pavs2• 17 years ago

This is not the first time he "screwed up".

calambrac4• 17 years ago

It takes more than one bad story to establish yourself as a complete jackass. Dvorak finished the necessary legwork for that designation years ago.

jhancock2• 17 years ago

I hear you, but Dvorak did publish a slander against Kundra based simply on his rudimentary queries. This is hardly good journalism.

from the article: "But I was able to verify Kundra's degree with just a few phone calls in under two hours."

If your going to publish something so incendiary, you really must do your homework.

gehant• 17 years ago

Dvorak was more than a messenger he was the creator & instigator...

Would you argue he's just "blogging" so fact-based reporting is optional?

Dvorak was pushing the limits of responsible journalism (similar to TechCrunch at times).

We agree on one thing: his credibility is taking a huge hit, rightfully so.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

I think this comment is perverse.

Please don't attack the messenger

That phrase has always referred to someone delivering an unwanted truth. There was no "message" here at all, and no "messenger". "Please don't attack the libeler" would be more accurate. That doesn't pack the same pseudo-compassionate punch, does it?

Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying

That is an impossibly high and irrelevant bar. Gross irresponsibility, incompetence, and total disrespect for the truth aren't enough for you?

slandering him

Wow. That's a rich use of the word "slander", considering the activity this guy was just engaging in.

missile• 17 years ago

Truth, according to the law, is a complete defense against slander. With that in mind: Dvorak is a moron.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Please don't attack the messenger, even for a bad story.

Yes. The source may prompt more fact-checking about the reported facts than some other source, but as I have said before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

Consider the radical possibility that any person you disagree with in general might accidentally make a correct factual statement in a particular case.

AndrewO• 17 years ago

Yeah, let's not forget this is the guy we're talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ ("John Dvorak admits to baiting Mac users for hits")

Keep those clicks coming in!

Rawsock• 17 years ago

Exactly. John C. Dvorak is a professional internet troll disguised as a tech journalist. He uses misinformed rants ( or "controversial opinions" if you like the euphemism better ) as a source of hits. He has trolled the FLOSS and Mac communities for years. But trolling the White House ?. That's effing crazy.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Sorry to ask the obvious question, but who cares? IS Programs (even the top ones) aren't the most rigorous things in the world. Anyone who is in a CIO type position should probably have real world experience, professional degrees be damned. Why aren't we talking about that instead?

Skeuomorph• 17 years ago

That's what I'm wondering. Degree, so what. I want to know: where's the beef?

jey• 17 years ago

Worthless or not, they still shouldn't lie about receiving the degree.

EDIT: Do the downvotes imply that people here think it's OK to lie about credentials as long as you think that the credential you're lying about is worthless? Or what else are the downvotes expressing?

krschultz2• 17 years ago

It is in response to the other massive thread saying to the contrary.

eli8• 17 years ago

Agreed. The fact is he did a pretty good job with the DC.gov websites according to just about everyone involved. They're the most data rich and accessible complex government site I've ever seen. e.g. http://data.octo.dc.gov/

Visual design aside, DC may well have the best website of any city or state in the country.

warfangle2• 17 years ago

Are you serious?

"They're the most data rich and accessible"

Visual design aside, there's a distinct possibility that DC.gov is one of the most data rich government sites out there. The only problem is, well, finding the information. The findability level of this information is about like the hand-curated Yahoo! Directory from 1999.

And then there's accessibility. Maybe that means something different to you than me, but let's delve into it.

First of all, the page uses tables. That makes it a nightmare for any screen-reading software to utilize.

Turning off styles and javascript renders the main navigation useless.

The markup of the page is entirely table cells and font tags, granting no semantic meaning to the content whatsoever. This makes deep-searching the site even more problematic, as search engines have no context for the textual information contained within the page. E.g.; Google looks at h1 elements as having more important content than, say, a p element. It also limits the usefulness of screenreaders, as they read cell by cell, row by row. (thus, if two related pieces of content are in two cells, one on top of each other, they won't be read together - it will read the first one, then finish up the row before continuing on with the second cell).

Then there's deep-link URLs like, http://www.rrc.dc.gov/rrc/cwp/view,a,1182,q,447149,rrcNav_GI.... What does that even mean? Is it some attempt at securing the "Play in DC" page (which, to be honest, is fairly useless: all it does is list links to the history, entertainment, libraries, etc subpages.. the only reason it's needed is because the entire site design is one big Charlie Foxtrot).

Anyone who thinks this website is a "pretty good job" and has anything to do with: design, usability, accessibility, and SEO - well, you should probably turn in your card. Sorry to say. And if a C-level executive doesn't understand how -- especially with government sites -- accessibility for visually impaired individuals is extremely important, well. He either needs to be educated or, if ineffective, fired. It's nearly criminal (especially for a government website).

In finality:

Being a data rich site means nothing if accessing that data is akin to crawling through a swimming pool filled with broken glass and lemon juice. And then not even getting the information you were looking for when you first dove into the miasma of pain.

krschultz2• 17 years ago

The shocking thing to me was that

1) People trusted a random blogger over people getting paid full time to vet people. Understandably vetters miss things such as taxes (complicated) or illegal immigrant maids (hidden), but something as simple as a degree will get checked.

2) Dvorak didn't call all the campuses, there are multiple UMD campuses just like there are multiple Penn State campuses etc.

3) Dvorak trusted it based on the sole person he talked to. Does the school even have the obligation to tell a complete stranger these things? Did he try and find people who knew Dvorak in college? Did he find anyone but himself who thought to the contrary? Everyone has enemies, when you get thrust into public office they come out posting stuff against you, if you had skipped college someone would know.

4) Dvorak's question about teaching was trying to slide tense under the radar. He asked if Kundra was a professor. The person he talked to said no. That person was probably just an operator with a directory of proffessor RIGHT NOW. How did he know they looked at a list with every person who ever gave a lecture at UMD?

brown9-2• 17 years ago

From my impression, Dvorak was simply raising the questions, which based on the (incomplete) facts he found, seems perfectly valid to ask about someone in such a high position.

Now that the question has been answered about his degrees, great; let's move on.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Dvorak's pretty well known (for better or worse); I'm not sure "random blogger" is the right pejorative, here.

pyre3• 17 years ago

Maybe at the Federal level the 'vetters' are held to a higher standard, but I remember a local government official (can't remember if it was city or county level) in Michigan getting called to task over a degree that he never actually earned (or even went to the school). He had been on the job a few (3-4?) years when this came out. I can't remember the details of what happened, but some people wanted to overlook the lie because he was actually doing a good job in his position (i.e. he wasn't incompetent, just a liar I guess). It was in the Detroit area, I guess someone could look it up if they were interested for a similar case, though on a local rather than a Federal level.

stanleydrew• 17 years ago

University of Maryland University College is not exactly the same as the University of Maryland. It's their adult continuing education program basically.

eli8• 17 years ago

Huh? University College is exactly as much a part of the University of Maryland as College Park.

The complaint is that his bio doesn't specify which campus he attended? This really matters?

look_lookatme2• 17 years ago

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Of_Maryland

"However, in 1997 the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation allowing the University of Maryland, College Park to be known simply as the University of Maryland, recognizing the campus' role as the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland."

No one of thinks "oh one of those Maryland universities with different faculties and different quality of education" when they hear University of Maryland. They think of College Park.

It may be splitting hairs, but we shouldn't even be having this conversation, as it should be clear on the bio page.

eli8• 17 years ago

This is why professional journalists actually pick up the phone and call people before publishing accusations about them. And this is also why bloggers and "online columnists" are often not considered real journalists.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Dvorak said he telephoned the White House for comment on his story. That is what caught my eye in that story, the lack of White House immediate response.

eli8• 17 years ago

True, but you can't just make a token phone call so that you can write that they didn't return your calls.

I think it's pretty irresponsible to publish a hit piece on someone with making an honest effort to get their side of it. Om Malik was able to track Kundra down and get response within hours.

look_lookatme2• 17 years ago

(repost from other thread)

Dvorak called the University of Maryland, College Park and they said they had no record of him receiving a degree at there, which is what everyone things of when they read University of Maryland. NextGov confirmed he has an MS at UMUC, which might have a shared history with UMD, but only UMD is allowed to be known as the University of Maryland.

This is so obviously a non-story, or at least not worth more than a short, transparency inspired blog post. Of all Dvoraks bonehead stories, this one takes the cake.

Still, I'd like to see Kundra's bio updated to reflect the actual university he received that degree from. I would never say I received an MS from the University of Texas, when in fact I received one from some other UT system school, and certainly wouldn't phrase it that way on my .gov bio page.

huherto• 17 years ago

In any case it is fair to raise those questions. Government should be ready answer to public scrutiny. If there are good answers for them: Good.

leviathant• 17 years ago

I think it's important that if you are going to raise questions about someone's reputation, you make a real effort to find answers before throwing those questions out into the public. An irresponsible question can still be very misleading.

As an example: Do you still beat your wife?

TravisLS• 17 years ago

The fact that this is even a story is pretty distressing. As far as I can tell, the guy's gotten good results, which is much more than I can say for plenty of "qualified" people in Washington.

pyre3• 17 years ago

It still says something about someone's character nonetheless. Just because he's getting good results, doesn't also mean that he is not doing something dishonest in the shadows, while performing his duties admirably in the limelight.

j2d2• 17 years ago

But where's his birth certificate?!

justin_vanw• 17 years ago

I'm going to side with Dvorak here. "University of Maryland, University College" is a correspondence school. These days they also have online classes of course. They offer only nontechnical majors, including Information Systems Management (they do not offer CS, Math, Physics, etc). I believe many of the courses at UMUC aren't even accepted as transfer credits to the University of Maryland.

The bottom line is that everyone who has gone to school at a state school in maryland knows that "University of Maryland" == "College Park". To list UMD as where you got your degree when you went to UMUC is both technically incorrect, and intentionally misleading.

Verified: Kundra Did Receive an M.S. in Information Systems Management

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