{"id":21994,"date":"2022-05-18T05:23:38","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T05:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=21994"},"modified":"2022-05-18T05:23:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T05:23:38","slug":"ferdinand-marcos-jr-urged-to-stop-pretending-he-has-an-oxford-degree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2022\/05\/18\/ferdinand-marcos-jr-urged-to-stop-pretending-he-has-an-oxford-degree\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferdinand Marcos Jr urged to stop pretending he has an Oxford degree"},"content":{"rendered":"

The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s are as you may expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator.<\/p>\n

Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after\u00a0a landslide presidential victory\u00a0by Marcos Jr, he is facing calls to stop misrepresenting the circumstances of his studies at Oxford.<\/p>\n

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The university has confirmed that he did not complete his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics after enrolling in 1975.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to our records, he did not complete his degree, but was awarded a special diploma in social studies in 1978,\u201d Oxford said in a response to a freedom of information request lodged by a UK-based Filipina supporter of Marcos Jr\u2019s nearest rival in last week\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

Marcos Jr, nicknamed \u201cBongbong\u201d,\u00a0has claimed\u00a0in interviews\u00a0that Oxford issued him with a bachelor\u2019s degree, while his official spokesperson\u00a0has said\u00a0that the politician and his team \u201cstand by the degree confirmation which was issued by the University of Oxford\u201d. His website\u00a0states: \u201cHe completed his undergraduate studies at Oxford University and graduated with a special diploma in social studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

But a UK-based Filipina supporter of Marcos Jr\u2019s rival Leni Robredo, who lodged the FoI request, said of Marcos: \u201cHe should stop misrepresenting his special diploma, which is clearly not a degree. It\u2019s clear he did not complete undergraduate studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Jenny<\/div>\n
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\u2018Strong opinions\u2019: how Marcos Jr\u2019s victory has divided UK Filipinos<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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She added: \u201cIn the grand scheme of things, it may not seem so important, as our constitution states that presidential candidates only have to be literate and be a citizen of a certain age. But it\u2019s a big thing in the\u00a0Philippines\u00a0if you have studied abroad and people are impressed by that. What he has been saying about that is a reflection on his personality and character. It\u2019s also a reflection of a pattern of disinformation that a lot of researchers have pointed out recently.\u201d<\/p>\n

After years of rebranding its image, the Marcos family seems to be back in power. Ongoing counts on Friday also showed that his political allies were set to capture most of the 300-seat House of Representatives and half of the 24-seat senate, which was also up for election.<\/p>\n

Marcos Jr received more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count, with projections showing one of the largest majorities in decades.<\/p>\n

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The result comes after an\u00a0onslaught of disinformation\u00a0designed to revise history, enhance the reputation of the family and undermine their opponents.<\/p>\n

The issue of Marcos Jr\u2019s Oxford degree first emerged seven years ago when his profile on the website for the Philippines senate stated that he had obtained an Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).<\/p>\n

Newly published letters\u00a0last year revealed that the envoys for his father had lobbied senior figures at Oxford University\u2019s St Edmund Hall to preserve the son\u2019s academic career after he failed examinations on a number of occasions.<\/p>\n

After university, Marcos Jr became the vice-governor of his home province, Ilocos Norte, on the north-western tip of Luzon, at the age of 23, and later governor. He was 29 when his father \u2013 who died in exile in Hawaii in 1989 \u2013 was ousted and the family was forced to leave the Philippines.<\/p>\n

Previously published documents revealed that Marcos failed two of his three preliminary exams at Oxford in the summer of 1976, later doing only enough to pass one of two resits \u2013 failing politics for a second time. Discussions followed between emissaries of Marcos Sr and John Kelly, the principal of St Edmund Hall, who was asked if they could \u201cthink of any special circumstances which would warrant the college departing from its normal rule\u201d.<\/p>\n

A deal was eventually hammered out in which Marcos was allowed to continue his PPE studies but was transferred to a special diploma in social sciences, a programme that has since been discontinued.<\/p>\n

A history of CV truth-twisters<\/h2>\n

Marcos Jr is not the only famous person to have presented a well-seasoned CV.<\/p>\n

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  • Gillian McKeith<\/strong>, the You Are What You Eat presenter,\u00a0agreed in 2007\u00a0to drop the title Dr from her company\u2019s advertising after a complaint to the industry watchdog. The complaint was brought by a Guardian reader who learned of McKeith\u2019s academic credentials from a Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre.<\/li>\n
  • Andrea Leadsom<\/strong>, in the midst of 2016 Tory leadership campaign, published a revised CV after claims that she had exaggerated her roles in a City of London career. Former colleagues claimed she had exaggerated the importance of her roles at Barclays and Invesco Perpetual.<\/li>\n
  • Mina Chang<\/strong>, a senior official in the administration of Donald Trump,\u00a0was caught out in 2019\u00a0after flaunting a Harvard education that in fact amounted to a seven-week course in 2016. She was also found to have invented herself a role on a UN panel and even created a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it.<\/li>\n
  • Craig Butfoy<\/strong>\u00a0was jailed in March for lying about his flying experience to get a job with British Airways.\u00a0<\/strong>He is also accused of giving false details on his CV, including that he had held a private pilot\u2019s licence since 1998, and fabricated documents, including a training course certificate.<\/li>\n
  • Jeffrey Archer,<\/strong>\u00a0the author and disgraced politician, was accepted on a one-year course at Oxford University\u2019s Department of Education after claiming he had six O-levels and three A-levels. He actually had three O-levels and no A-levels. The three A-levels that never were\u00a0saw him accepted for a one-year diploma course\u00a0at Oxford\u2019s Brasenose college, yet he fostered the impression that he had completed a full degree course.<\/li>\n
  • Lee McQueen\u00a0<\/strong>won a six-figure job\u00a0in June 2008 with Sir Alan Sugar in the final of the BBC show The Apprentice in spite of his claim that he had spent two years at university, when in fact he spent only four months there.<\/li>\n
  • Florin Roman\u00a0<\/strong>resigned in December 2021\u00a0as Romania\u2019s minister of innovation and digitalisation after an investigation by journalists who found significant irregularities on his resum\u00e9 and evidence that he had plagiarised an academic paper.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s are as you may expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator. Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after\u00a0a landslide presidential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":21995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11261,9951,8176,2735,5307,5268,4430,10387,10787,11254,9331,11381,10876,10668,5241,5432,423,911,7428,7298,5455,6606,11638,4028,10406,10197,8577,4054,3642,9974,6299,3684,2107,7964,11973,3983,6300,7803,5424,11377,12953,10897,8709,2381,8501,8840,10851,7333,255,146,12605,5465,214,10885,594],"class_list":["post-21994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-accused","tag-age","tag-barclays","tag-bbc","tag-britain","tag-british","tag-british-airways","tag-campaign","tag-certificate","tag-citizen","tag-city","tag-complaint","tag-dating","tag-dictator","tag-died","tag-digitalisation","tag-education","tag-election","tag-envoys","tag-fake","tag-family","tag-ferdinand-marcos-jr","tag-forced","tag-freedom","tag-hawaii","tag-investigation","tag-john-kelly","tag-kelly","tag-landslide","tag-leadership","tag-leni-robredo","tag-london","tag-mina","tag-north","tag-one","tag-oxford-university","tag-philippines","tag-pilot","tag-politics","tag-presidential","tag-principal","tag-roman","tag-romania","tag-science","tag-senate","tag-strong","tag-sugar","tag-summer","tag-tory","tag-truth","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-university","tag-victory","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}