Conning Harvard
'Conning Harvard' is a fascinating look at a scandal written by a talented young journalist.
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Wheeler’s life of crime had relatively modest origins: he was accepted to Bowdoin College as a high school senior on the strength of plagiarized essays and decent, legitimate grades. At Bowdoin, he snagged a prize for submitting a poem actually written by the highly regarded poet Paul Muldoon. His luck went a bit sour after that when a professor caught him plagiarizing journal entries for class and brought him before the university J-Board, which decided to fail him for the course and impose a semester-long suspension from Bowdoin. At around the same time, he got accepted to Harvard as a transfer student by creating an alter ego of stratospheric intellect and by plagiarizing his personal statements. (A favorite source, we learn, is Harvard luminary and best-selling author Stephen Greenblatt).
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Wheeler had an abysmal first semester at Harvard, but quickly got his act together his sophomore spring when he declared his English concentration. Passing off obscure monographs as his own, he managed to secure funding for study at Oxford University one summer and also to win the prestigious Hoopes Prize (usually awarded to senior thesis writers) as a junior. All told, Wheeler cheated Harvard out of $45,806.
His lucky streak finally ground to a halt when he applied for a Fulbright scholarship (as Zauzmer lets us know, the credit goes to James Simpson, a member of the award committee whose keen eye also terminated Wheeler’s dreams of winning a Rhodes scholarship). After being confronted with yet another charge of plagiarism by his dean, Wheeler withdrew from Harvard and attempted once more to gain admission to other elite universities as a transfer student. His abrupt leave-taking aroused enough suspicion for officials to do some more digging, and from there it was only a matter of time before his elaborate network of lies was unearthed and justice delivered.
For all its reportorial strengths, “Conning Harvard” isn’t flawless. One question that surfaced repeatedly in my mind was, “What were Wheeler’s parents doing at this time?” Now, I don’t mean to impugn Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler for failing to raise a morally upright son, but I do find it peculiar that it took them so long to finally catch on to their son’s act. Did they not, for instance, have the slightest reservations about the news that their son, facing suspension from Bowdoin, had been accepted as a transfer student at Harvard? Zauzmer’s reticence on Wheeler’s parents can be deeply frustrating, not least because of the fact that in the absence of counterevidence, the reader is often shoehorned into thinking of them as no better than a cartoonish pair of overly credulous caregivers.
Then, too, Zauzmer occasionally overplays her hand at irony for dramatic effect; for instance, she uses this sentence to introduce the fact that Wheeler stole lines from the poet Muldoon: “Literary critics may find it reassuring to learn that Wheeler won the poetry contest.” This is followed by a prolix and entirely superfluous dilation of the former point: “If some poetry is better than other poetry – based on the intrinsic quality of the writing rather than what magazine prints it or the poet’s name – then it follows that if someone slips a poem by a professional poet into a pool of works by undergraduates, the judges should be able to pick out that poet’s piece as the best in the bunch.” Irony suffers from explanation; the best of its practitioners know that for it to work, it must cut quickly to the point.
But this is nitpicking. “Conning Harvard” is, overall, an admirable piece of work by a talented young journalist whose substantial accomplishment is quietly underscored by the fact that, far from heading its death knell, the pursuit of truth – of veritas – flourishes yet.
Rhoda Feng is a Monitor contributor.
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