indicted on 20 counts of larceny, identity fraud, falsifying an endorsement or approval, and pretending to hold a degree."OK, 'larceny' I get. 'Fraud' I understand, although I'm not entirely sure what "Identity Fraud" is in this context. But the remaining charges don't even sound like the kind of things that should even be criminalized."
The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.Ah, sweet sweet cultural history... maybe if I start googling I can find the originals that he plagiarized from? I'm getting all sorts of unseemly excitement going on here...
“….Those who knew Wheeler in the past said in interviews with The Crimson that he kept his personal life discreet, rarely drawing attention to himself in conversation.posted by ericb at 4:47 PM on May 18, 2010
‘He was a good guy who didn’t talk about his academics or his life history much, but he came off as very smart,’ a source close to Wheeler, who did not wish to be named, said in an interview Monday. ‘We just allowed him his privacy.’
"He also allegedly doctored a transcript to make himself a straight-A student. Court documents show Wheeler had a far less impressive record — some A’s, a few B’s, and a D."*posted by ericb at 7:58 PM on May 18, 2010
"When Mr. Wheeler, now 23, applied as a transfer student in 2007, for example, he sent along fabricated transcripts from Phillips Andover Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, he had graduated from a public high school in Delaware and had attended Bowdoin College, in Maine.posted by ericb at 8:16 PM on May 18, 2010
One tipoff could have been that M.I.T. does not give letter grades in the fall semester of freshman year, like the straight A’s that appeared on the grade report that Mr. Wheeler submitted. And the names of the four M.I.T. professors who wrote his glowing recommendations? The letters were fakes. And while the professors were real, each teaches at Bowdoin."
“....Other prestigious colleges have seen similar cases before. Two years ago, Yale determined that a student who successfully transferred from Columbia had forged his transcript to give himself straight A’s. Connecticut authorities later charged him with larceny, over the $32,000 in scholarships he’d received.posted by ericb at 8:25 PM on May 18, 2010
In 1993, another man pleaded guilty to theft by deception in New Jersey, for obtaining $22,000 in financial aid from Princeton.
Edward de Villafranca, dean of college counseling at the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., said that such applicants can sometimes slip through admissions screening because ‘there is an expectation that students in this situation act honorably and truthfully.’
‘It is not in our inherent nature in our industry to be suspicious,’ added Mr. de Villafranca, who has worked in admissions at Manhattanville College and the University of Richmond. ‘This is not ‘C.S.I. Harvard.’ ‘
Mr. de Villafranca said that Mr. Wheeler had likely exploited one potential loophole: because he applied to Harvard as a transfer student several years removed from high school, his school counselor — ostensibly at Phillips Andover — might not have been contacted by Harvard about his application.
Mr. Wheeler had come close to being caught at Harvard after his admission interview with a Harvard alumnus. It took place in 2007 at Bowdoin, which, Mr. Verner said, was a red flag to the alumni interviewer, who had been told he was meeting a student from M.I.T.
But, as was apparently so often the case with Mr. Wheeler, he had a ready answer for the alumnus, who was not identified.
Mr. Wheeler said he had finished his M.I.T. coursework early, telling the alumnus, ‘Instead of wasting time I decided to come to Bowdoin to help a professor work on a book,’ according to Mr. Verner.
It was not immediately clear whether the alumnus’s skepticism, and Mr. Wheeler’s response, were ever passed on to officials at Harvard. (As Harvard would later learn, he had been suspended from Bowdoin for ‘academic dishonesty,’ according to the indictment.)
Even before Yale reached out to Mr. Wheeler’s parents this spring, officials and professors at Harvard had their own concerns.
In September, when Mr. Wheeler began his senior year at Harvard, an English professor read his Rhodes submission and saw similarities between it and the work of a colleague. When confronted by Harvard faculty members, Mr. Wheeler remarked, ‘I must have made a mistake, I didn’t really plagiarize it,’ according to Mr. Verner. He soon withdrew from Harvard.
Harvard officials then began reviewing his transfer application, and discovered it had been falsified — including the M.I.T. and Andover transcripts, Mr. Verner said.
Harvard said in a statement Tuesday that ‘in the rare instance where we discover that someone has falsified his or her application materials to Harvard College, we typically rescind that individual’s admission’ and ‘revoke’ any course credits received.
Separately, Yale began its own inquiry when Mr. Wheeler applied for transfer admission earlier this year.
Officials at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Del., from which Mr. Wheeler graduated in 2005, said they were contacted in April by Yale admissions officials. Yale wanted to confirm that he was the class valedictorian (he was not, though he was in the top 10 percent of the class) and that his SAT scores were perfect (they were several hundred points lower.)
Mr. Wheeler’s father taught shop and drafting at the high school, and retired last year. ‘It seemed out of character that the young man we knew would would try to pull off this type of hoax,’ said Kevin Fitzgerald, the district superintendent, who was principal of Caesar Rodney when Mr. Wheeler attended. ‘That conversation between our guidance office and the Yale admissions officer sent up the red flags.’
But there were other red flags. In February, Mr. Wheeler applied for an internship at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, in which he ‘provided fraudulent information regarding his credentials and student status at Harvard,’ the hospital said in a statement.
In applying to Yale and Brown, though, he not only suggested he was a McLean employee, but also submitted a false letter of recommendation from the McLean official who had refused to hire him.
He also provided Yale and Brown with a falsified recommendation from David Smith, his resident dean at Harvard, the district attorney’s office said.
It was Dr. Smith who had informed Mr. Wheeler of the plagiarism accusations regarding his Rhodes application.
The New Republic reported Tuesday that Mr. Wheeler had recently applied for an internship at the magazine, and it posted the resume he submitted online.
It included references to his being able to speak French, as well as ‘Old English’ ‘Classical Armenian’ and ‘Old Persian.’’’*
« Older On May 18th, 1980, thirty years ago today, at 8:32... | Patrick Adams: The king of und... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Today The New Republic wrote that Wheeler had "... recently applied for an internship at the magazine; specifically, an internship for our literary section. We did not accept him. Click here for a PDF of his rather remarkable two-page resume, in which he claims that (a) he's contracted to write several books; (b) he can speak French, Old English, Classical Armenian, and Old Persian; and (c) he's in demand on the lecture circuit."
posted by ericb at 2:22 PM on May 18, 2010 [3 favorites]