MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee admits “the ball was dropped” when WVU hired Dr. Anoop Shankar, the former chair of epidemiology, who had — it was later learned — fictionalized much of his impressive resume.
“We didn’t vet him carefully enough,” Gee said on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
Gee said an internal WVU investigation, which has now been completed, showed Shankar’s credentials were not properly checked before he was hired and it took too long to finish an inquiry once discrepancies with his resume, also called a curriculum vitae, were discovered.
“This is something that was not a happy moment for us,” Gee said. “The only common currency that we have as a university is our integrity and our transparency and, in this instance, we did not do well.”
The problems with Shankar’s resume, detailed in a report NBC News published earlier this year, first started coming to light in late 2012 when Shankar was being considered for an endowed position within WVU’s School of Public Health.
“He (Shankar) presented himself as some kind of genius. He was apparently, according to his CV (curriculum vitae), sort of, the ‘Doogie Howser’ of India, a 21-year old practicing doctor, went to the Harvard of India,” Nona Aronowitz, who co-authored the NBC story with Tony Dokoupil, said in September.
Those claims turned out to be false. “He was not a Ph.D. A lot of the places that he claimed to be affiliated with, he wasn’t affiliated with. He didn’t really have an M.D. He never wrote a dissertation,” Aronowitz said.
Ian Rockett, chair of the promotion and tenure committee at the School of Public Health, initially discovered the discrepancies. During the investigation, Shankar left WVU for Virginia Commonwealth University, but he is no longer working there.
At this point, Gee said WVU is continuing to review its own hiring processes to find out how Shankar was brought on board despite his outright resume lies.
“Wherever the failure is, we will make appropriate recommendations or amends. I can assure you of that,” Gee said. “I hope the fact that we have moved forward aggressively, now that we can move past this and also learn from our mistakes.”