The Curriculum Tidy-Up

Hello again, dear reader.

Today's dispatch is once more not the one I had planned, because this story flatly refuses to run to a timetable. You settle down to deal with one thing and something else crawls out from under a rock, and there you are, wondering which thread to pull first. The subject looks trivial. In our case it isn't, given the enthusiastic image-building of one of our protagonists. And all these details are going to converge before long.

Remember when we talked about the Streisand effect? The principle is simple: sometimes the surest way to draw attention to a piece of information is to try to remove it. I would never have returned to what I'm about to tell you if somebody hadn't decided to give his LinkedIn a little tidy-up.

On the old LinkedIn, and I call it old chiefly because on it Henrik was still Henrik H. Christiansen (Dr.), there were, besides the doctoral saga that caught my beady eye straight away, three rather handsome lines in the Education section: MIT Professional Education, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Texas McCombs School of Business.

I looked at them at the time and, in all honesty, thought little of it.

LSE listed Competitive Strategy and Innovation, July 2022 to September 2022. The course is real, eight weeks long, nothing amiss there. But LSE publishes the timetables for its online courses down to the day, and for 2022 there are two such documents. On the first, the course ran from 13 April to 14 June. On the second, from 28 September to 29 November. There is no July cohort in either. For now we'll file that under "interesting".

Under MIT Professional Education he listed Digital Transformation: From AI and IoT to Cloud, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity, June 2024 to September 2024. That course exists too, the title is genuine, so at the time I walked straight past it.

Texas McCombs was marginally more entertaining. Henrik wrote: Postgraduate Degree, Cyber Security. The actual programme is called the Post Graduate Program in Cybersecurity. Program, note, not degree, and what you get at the end of it is a certificate of completion rather than an academic qualification.

So the man gilded the lily with a single word. It happens. You and I have already toured that remarkable stretch of the English language where one well chosen substitution can improve a biography no end.

The same entry noted that the University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business was ranked ninth in the World University Rankings. That one belongs to the "the number is real, the sentence is a work of art" genre: ninth place applied to a specific ranking of a specific McCombs programme, not to the university's standing in the world at large. Never mind. People do not generally go on LinkedIn to make themselves sound less impressive than they are.

Anyway. I saw all of this, noted it and duly set it aside.

Until today.

Because today I opened Henrik's profile again and found no MIT, no LSE and no Texas McCombs.

All three gone.

And that is the point at which I became properly interested.

People tend to be proud of their achievements, and Henrik, on the evidence of his previous LinkedIn, was no exception. Until quite recently, MIT, LSE, Texas McCombs and a "Dr." in front of his name were all cohabiting happily in that profile, and one assumes they did not arrive there because he wished to keep his educational triumphs a secret.

Of course, deleting something from LinkedIn proves nothing in itself. A man may edit his profile, trim it, shift the emphasis, discover a sudden streak of modesty, or simply conclude that three loud university names no longer flatter his professional biography.

These things happen.

But this is precisely where the wretched Streisand effect steps in, because for as long as those entries sat quietly in the profile, it never once occurred to me to check whether Henrik had actually taken the courses.

Now it has. That profile was never a biography. It was the pitch.

If yes, wonderful. Better still, this is one of those rare cases where the question can be closed almost indecently easily: programmes of this kind issue certificates, credentials and verification links. I have seen them on the profiles of other alumni of these very same courses. You click the link, you look at the certificate, and thirty seconds later you go off and do something more useful with your life. On Henrik's profile I found no such confirmations. They may well exist. In which case I shall be delighted to see them and to write here that my suspicions were entirely misplaced.

Particularly since my other public question, the one about the doctorate, has now gone unanswered for 26 days and 22 hours. I have no intention of taking the counter down, as a matter of principle, and in any case I have become rather curious about how long it takes a man to produce a document that ought to demolish my authorial conclusions in a matter of seconds.

As ever, I would be sincerely glad to be wrong.

I still hope we get an answer. From Henrik would be ideal. From other sources will do nicely. And I shall of course share the result with you, even if it turns out to be nothing like the one I currently suspect.

P.S. The Blackbox remains open for business and, judging by the rate at which it is swelling, in excellent health. If you have something to put inside, don't be shy.