January 31, 2002

By MARK WROLSTAD
The Dallas Morning News

Lies are like land mines.

When fitted onto resumes, falsehoods can sit undetected indefinitely.

Or they can detonate at any moment, proving fatal to careers and credibility.

Public life in America is strewn with wreckage from the reputations of figures sabotaged by their own lies.

From politicians to educators, the deceptions eventually and unexpectedly exploded beneath them, as they did last month for a man who had risen to one of the most prestigious jobs in college athletics.

George O'Leary's convocation as Notre Dame's football coach quickly dissolved into disgrace and resignation with the admissions that he lied on his resume for more than two decades about earning a master's degree and playing football in college.

Why would he do it? Why would anyone do it?

Or are those questions all wrong, considering how commonplace the act - the art - of resume falsification and other forms of cheating seem to be?

"It's hard to say how often it goes on because we only hear about the ones who get caught," said Steve Sverdlik, a philosophy and ethics professor at Southern Methodist University. "If people think a lot of others are lying and cheating, the thought that everyone does it can be very worrisome and subversive.

"They're thinking it's going to help them somehow and they're not going to get caught."

There's plenty of discouraging evidence that a younger generation is learning the lessons of deceit.

A recent nationwide study of about 2,200 college students found that 13 percent of those with resumes had put inaccurate information on them.

"So there's a little resume fraud going on even among college students," said researcher Don McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers University.

His survey of about 4,500 high school students a year ago found that cheating was widespread and easily rationalized; more than 30 percent admitted repetitive, serious cheating on exams, and three-quarters reported they'd cheated seriously at least once.

Maybe they've been watching some of their elders' escapades.

A 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning author and history professor, Joseph Ellis, is among the many offenders who have admitted fabricating Vietnam War roles. Another was Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson, fired in 1999 over combat lies.

In the mid-'90s, former U.S. Rep. Wes Cooley was convicted of lying in Oregon voters' pamphlets after claiming he fought in the Korean War; federal Judge James Ware's nomination to a higher court was tripped up by the discovery that he lied repeatedly about being the brother of a black teen-ager killed by whites in 1963.

The lies seem uniquely American to scholar William May. To explain all the "inflationary rhetoric," he said, look at the sort of society we have - large and urban - in contrast to smaller, traditional societies "where everybody knows everybody else, and formal credentials are not so important."

"In a society of strangers, people make their way through dossiers," said May, an ethics professor emeritus at Southern Methodist University who taught at Yale University last fall. "The name of the game is to advertise yourself."

That leads from airbrushing past blemishes to overstatement and outright falsification, even if the conse quences can be severe.

"An awful lot of people do it and an awful lot get away with it, which tends to increase the doing of it," he said.

The high school cheats and high-profile prevaricators don't mean that honesty and integrity are on their deathbeds, Sverdlik said.

"We sometimes have this rosy picture of the past and how honest everyone used to be," he said. "I'm not saying people are angels, but I'm not convinced there's more deception than there was 100 years ago.

"Certainly, academically, there's more lying today because more people get an education. You didn't have to lie about a college degree 100 years ago."

Even if this isn't the Golden Age of Lying, the pace and variety of daily routines have set up an ethical obstacle course that Great-Grandpa never faced.

Americans seem to have more opportunities than ever to be dishonest, and the technology of cellular phones, satellite TV, computers and the Internet has added new avenues for fraudulent behavior.

Michael Josephson, a Southern California ethics consultant, sees in society a disturbing readiness to lie, in its many forms - plagiarizing, cheating on taxes, faking an illness, bragging about sex that didn't happen, or denying sex that did.

"People are very apt to rationalize if they can think of any justification for a lie," said Josephson, head of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. "They'll lie about their kid's age to save a few dollars at Disney World or to get past the deductible on an insurance claim.

"Most of these cheaters act as if it's a victimless crime, and it never is. If you lied on your resume and got the job, then a qualified candidate didn't get it."

Still, except by the most rigid standards, all lies are not equal.

When ethical values collide, Josephson said, a lie can be the best choice.

If a relative knits you a sweater that you don't like, your ethical obligation to be kind and respectful outweighs your obligation to tell the truth, he said. 

"Sometimes a moral person lies," Josephson said. "We have to make a distinction between lies that don't break trust and those that are fundamentally self-serving to gain an advantage and destroy a fair system."

Distributed through the P.O.W. NETWORK in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.

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