Lying About One’s Education Shows a Lack of Class(es)

The good news is that women are getting the message: Education counts.

Smart is good for your career, your children and great for your self-esteem. Smart is savvy. Smart is sexy.

The bad news is that some women who know this better than most have been surprisingly stupid. They lied about their smarts. They said they earned a college degree that they did not. Then they played dumb before they were forced to ‘fess up.

Sally Anne Sheridan, an Irvine councilwoman, is the latest to join this ditsy club. I can only guess that she wanted to make herself look good, but, of course, the opposite has been the result.

Sheridan is hoping to unseat Larry Agran from the Irvine mayor’s seat this June. Agran graduated cum laude from Harvard University School of Law.

Sheridan said Harvard awarded her a degree, too. A master’s in nursing. Problem is Harvard doesn’t award a master’s in nursing.

But if it did, Sheridan says today, now that she’s been found out, the university would have surely bestowed her with just such a crown. She says she did graduate work there with a leading open-heart specialist from 1959 to 1961, making her a “nursing specialist extraordinaire.”

That may well be. Practical experience, of which Sheridan seems to have plenty, certainly counts for a lot.

But so does the truth.

Before Sheridan, you may recall, there was California State University Chairwoman Marianthi Lansdale of Huntington Beach, who invented a 1959 associate of arts degree from Long Beach City College.

And before that, Supervisor Harriet Wieder was forced to admit that she fabricated a BA in journalism from Wayne State. Wieder had even stuck to the claim under oath.

The flap over Wieder and Lansdale has blown over, and neither woman, it seems, has suffered any irreparable political harm.

Wieder, the only woman among the five supervisors, lost her 1988 congressional bid in the wake of the phantom degree brouhaha, but she’s still one of Orange County’s most powerful politicians. She’s up for reelection this year.

Lansdale, meanwhile, has refused to give up her position, which pays $100 a meeting, despite calls from members of the state Senate, which approved her appointment.

The Senate has passed a bill that would give it the power to remove any Marianthi Lansdales of the future, but Lansdale, for now, would be out of its reach.

Her colleagues on the Cal State board, all of them political appointees, say that is just fine. They think Marianthi’s doing a hell of a job. They passed a resolution offering her their “full support.”

Gov. Deukmejian, who picked Lansdale after she and her husband donated more than $100,000 to his campaign, says her lie was a “big mistake,” but he hasn’t asked her to step down. It’s unlikely that he will.

“She is a real fine representative for the system,” the Duke says.

So what is wrong with this picture?

No harm done, is what many say. Mistakes were made. Mea culpas , albeit reluctant ones, have been offered and for the most part, accepted.

What is wrong with this picture is that it is part of a series. It’s happening time and again, blurring too many lines.

Truth in advertising has become an oxymoron. When a product or a service or a politician lives up to the advance billing, people really take note. It is the exception to the rule.

Maybe the truth just slipped away from these three women, all of them born of a time when higher education remained a predominately male domain. They considered themselves members of that educational elite. They were smart. They deserved a degree.

Over the years--25 of them in Wieder’s case--maybe their lie came to seem like so much less than it really was.

“It wasn’t like I lied about a traffic infraction or a felony or a fraud,” Lansdale said late last year, when her fib was found out.

These women, it seems, began to perceive themselves as mere accessories, rather than perpetrators, of any crime. To blame, they say, was carelessness, or campaign workers or the machinations of public relations.

And a crime, of course, this kind of lying is not. Stretching the truth is what some call it, fudging, exaggeration or giving the apple an extra shine. It happens all the time.

Sheridan, Wieder and Lansdale say they have learned from their mistakes.

I think we can, too.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.