Srully Blotnick

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Srully D. Blotnick (22 May 1941–18 December 2004) was an American author and journalist.^[1] Notable books include Getting Rich Your Own Way, Computers Made Ridiculously Easy, The Corporate Steeplechase: Predictable Crises in a Business Career, Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women, and Ambitious Men: Their Drives, Dreams and Delusions.^[2]

1 Education
2 Investigation into credentials and methodology
3 Later life
4 References

[edit] Education

A swimmer, Blotnick first attended the University of Miami, but he later transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for math. After receiving his BS degree, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then Princeton University, to study for his PhD. His thesis attempted to apply mathematical models to medicine. It didn't succeed, and he refused to revise it. At the same time, he applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a study of mathematical models in sociology but was turned down. An early marriage brought him to his wife's family focus and the stock market.

His first two books were solid efforts based on experience. However, he was impatient to advance. Realizing that a PhD meant a higher salary and more authority, he quickly and quietly obtained a Ph.D. in 1978 from Pacific Western University, an unaccredited correspondence school in Los Angeles. Before long, he was claiming the NSF grant as the foundation for on-going research that gave him an inside track on society and investing. He became a business psychology columnist for Forbes magazine and began writing social science books.

[edit] Investigation into credentials and methodology

However, in time, the press found out that his social research books were not supported by the claims he made. Blotnick was not charged with any crimes but his Forbes column was cancelled on July 20, 1987, when his column was dismissed for reportedly misleading editors and readers about his research. He was also the subject of a New York State criminal investigation for describing himself as a psychologist without a license.^[3] Blotnick did not have a license to practice psychology in New York at that time, but he described himself in print as a business psychologist and often used the title Dr.

Leslie Bennetts wrote in 1992 about the investigation of his studies:

Although Blotnick claimed his was a groundbreaking twenty-five year longitudinal study, he would have been only seventeen years old when he purportedly began his data collection. The "Dr." title he had adopted "turned out to be the product of a mail-order degree from an unaccredited correspondence school," Faludi reports. When a U.S. News reporter finally investigates Blotnick's credentials, it was discovered that "almost nothing on his resume checked out" -- but U.S. News never published that story. It was only after New York State launched a criminal fraud investigation against Blotnick that Forbes finally discontinued his column. News of Blotnick's fall from grace, however, was almost completely ignored by the press.^[4]

[edit] Later life

Blotnick refused to acknowledge fraud on his part and retreated to Boston, where he attended Harvard Medical School and finally received his PhD in Medicine. While there he published several peer-reviewed contributions to the medical field.

Blotnick was listed in a 1995 medical paper as affiliated with the Departments of Cell and Developmental Biology, Harvard Medical School, and Surgical Research, Children's Hospital Boston.^[5]

When Blotnick died in 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts City Councillor Anthony D. Galluccio passed a resolution at the next meeting noting Blotnick's death.^[6]