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Conning Harvard: Adam Wheeler, the Con Artist Who Faked His Way into the Ivy League
Julie Zauzmer
By
Published: Sep 17, 2012
Category:
Non Fiction
“Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there,” Woody Allen says in “Annie Hall.”
I can think of others who have shamed their Harvard affiliation: Larry Summers when he was Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin (ditto), Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. Their failings may be large, but they’re legal: greed, bad judgment, addiction to power.
Adam Wheeler committed actual crimes.
True, his crimes were small; the total economic damage was $45,000. But this little shit scammed his way into Harvard, plagiarized his way through Harvard, and then lied on an even larger scale to set himself up for a prestigious fellowship — everything about him strikes at the heart of the college.
I’d like to take a baseball bat to his knee caps.
Why so personal a response? Because I went to Harvard. And all these years later, I can remember the winter I read every word George Orwell wrote — and some of those novels are stinkers. I remember the secondary sources, the note cards, the taste of the day’s eighth cup of coffee, the fingers bloody from a full day of typing. And, in the end: summa cum laude. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Because I earned it. The old-fashioned way, as the brokerage ads used to say.
I was boring. Adam Wheeler — he’s fascinating. And in this book, a Harvard Crimson reporter tells his story, beat by sickening beat, with the help of a riveting collection of documents — Wheeler’s fake transcripts, fake resume and fake test scores. This book is “Catch Me If You Can” in the age of Photoshop. [To buy “Conning Harvard” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
How did Wheeler get away with it for so long? Why did he even think he could? What did he plan to do for a life when he was, belatedly but inevitably, caught?
That’s the mystery. Here are the facts, in brief:
Wheeler, no genius in high school, uses plagiarized essays and forged transcripts to gain admittance to Bowdoin. He wins a poetry prize there — or rather, Pulitzer-winner Paul Muldoon does. Caught for plagiarism, Wheeler is suspended for a term.
He doesn’t care; in 2007, he’s off to Harvard. And just like that, Bowdoin disappears — because he isn’t transferring from Bowdoin, but from MIT, a college he never attended and does not know he exists. Now that he’s in the big time, he leans on big time sources, putting his name on essays by world-renowned scholars. He gets a grant for summer study at Oxford. He even wins — as a junior — the Hoopes Prize, which has, until now, always gone to the author of the best senior thesis.
Wheeler is found out when he’s on the short list for a Fulbright Fellowship. Harvard not only kicks him out, it expunges him – there’s no record he was ever there. (Except for his Harvard e-mail account, which the college forgets to cancel.) But that doesn’t stop Wheeler. He applies to Yale, Brown and Stanford as if he were still a Harvard undergraduate. It’s only when one college calls his home that his parents seem to wake up and force him to tell the truth and withdraw his applications. Forty felony and misdemeanor counts follow.
Julie Zauzmer’s reporting is excellent, her conclusions less so. In fact, they’re almost as nonexistent as Adam Wheeler’s genuine achievements as a scholar. Like this: How did one teacher after another fail to wonder how this kid who spouted the worst kind of academic bullshit in conversation wrote such exquisitely learned essays? Until the very end, how did not one instructor copy a brilliant passage from one of his papers and paste it into Google?
His parents are equally baffling to me. It doesn’t compute that a kid gets bounced from Bowdoin, only to move on to Harvard. So you ask: What did his parents think about that extravagantly unlikely scenario?
There’s been a cheating scandal at Harvard recently, and it suggests that some kids don’t grasp the meaning of the word. I understand that confusion. But Wheeler’s something else. Like his parents, he’s given no interviews, but his behavior is telling. Even after he’s in the clutches of the court, he persists in using Harvard’s name and altering the truth on applications. You have to think he’s mentally ill. But why does his pathology take this form?
And why do I think that this miserable, defective kid isn’t ever going to be cured?
