HARVARD ‘GRIFTER’S’ MADE-UP RESUME
ANDREW BRUSS in Cambridge, Mass., and CHUCK BENNETT in NY
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May 19, 2010
What, he didn’t invent the Internet?
The accused Harvard grifter whose over-the-top fictions fooled gullible
ad mission officers and professors amazingly claimed on a resume to
have authored scholarly tomes, won heaps of awards, given lectures
and mastered three dead languages.
Adam Wheeler — who pleaded not guilty yesterday to 20 counts of fraud,
larceny and forgery in a Massachusetts court — passed himself off
in the document as a Canadian literature expert fluent in French,
Old English, Classical Armenian and Old Persian.
The outlandish curriculum vitae was submitted to The New Republic
last year for an internship.
The magazine, which was rocked by its own plagiarism scandal in late
1990s, posted the resume online yesterday and said it did not accept
Wheeler into its program.
As if mastering ancient tongues wasn’t enough, the small-town Delaware
student wrote that he had at tended Harvard for four years, kept up
a 4.0 grade- point average and took graduate-level classes.
In fact, he transferred to Harvard in 2007 after getting tossed out
of Bowdoin College in Maine for plagiarizing an essay.
Bowdoin is mentioned nowhere on the resume.
As for the perfect GPA, Wheeler managed only "some A’s, a few B’s as
well as a D" at Harvard, a prosecutor said.
Wheeler had already allegedly duped Harvard into believing he was
transferring from MIT and scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs. In
reality, his scores were 1160 and 1220, prosecutors said.
In the resume, Wheeler, 23, also appears to claim he was the "invited"
lecturer on Canadian and Armenian culture when the talks were given
by Harvard’s own professors.
Even more brazenly, the document also says that he authored two
scholarly books on the philosophy of communication and said he co-wrote
four books about Canada that were actually penned by Harvard professor
Marc Shell.
In all, he collected $45,000 in financial aid, grants and prize money
from his alleged lies.
Wheeler’s parents, Richard and Lee of Milton, Del., did not post his
$5,000 bail, and he remained in jail yesterday.