Holly Stewart, The Harvard Crimson

In December, a virtuosic liar narrowly missed fooling one of the best and most rigorous universities in the world. After fraudulently making his way through Harvard University as a phony literary critic, Adam Wheeler, 24, pleaded guilty on December 16 to charges of fraud, identity theft, falsifying endorsements, and pretending to hold a degree. He has spent 30 days in jail, will serve 10 years of probation, and will surrender $45,806 in unjustly won awards and financial aid.

Wheeler posed as a postmodern critic of Renaissance English literature and an expert in Armenian studies. In his resumé, which was released and reviewed by The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, he claimed to have written or co-authored six books and to be proficient in Old English, Classical Armenian, and Old Persian. In addition, he claimed to have given talks at McGill and to have had two books under review with McGill-Queen’s University Press. The majority of his claims were completely false.

“Old Persian? Are you kidding me?” said Barmak Nassirian, assistant executive director of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Wheeler attended a public high school in Delaware, where he was a good-but-not-great student. According to a detailed report by the Boston Globe, he had a penchant for regularly using huge and difficult words in conversation, a habit on which Wheeler would rely in his ascent to Harvard. Sentences of his reported by the Crimson read as though they were doctored with a thesaurus.

“[At MIT], I was, to put it poorly, suckled upon the teat of disdain. That being said (fortified by a reflexive snort), I was inspired thereby to apply to Harvard, where the humanities, in short, are not, simpliciter, a source of opprobrium,” read one of his emails printed in the Crimson.

He told one of his first major public lies when he won a poetry competition with “This Much I Know,” a poem plagiarized from an Irish poet.

In 2005, he entered Bowdoin College, a prestigious liberal arts school in Maine.  After Bowdoin put him under investigation for academic dishonesty, he decided to transfer. Instead of saying he had spent his first years at Bowdoin, though, he said that he had gone to MIT.  Moreover, he said  he had obtained a perfect 4.0 GPA and a perfect 1600 score on his SAT.

After impressing a Harvard interviewer, Wheeler was admitted to Harvard College. Not satisfied there, he applied for and won a number of awards with plagiarized work. In fact, it was not until he was under consideration for a Rhodes Scholarship that he aroused some suspicion. Harvard English professor W. James Simpson noticed that one of Wheeler’s papers was similar to the work of another Harvard professor, and Harvard subsequently began to investigate Wheeler’s records.  

Nassirian was amazed that Wheeler was able to counterfeit the most fraud-proof parts of an application: transcripts and standardized test scores.

“I don’t want to get into them, but there are some really compelling details about transcripts and test scores that are designed to ensure their authenticity,” Nassirian said.

At the beginning of his trial in May, Wheeler pleaded not guilty, but eventually changed his plea.

 “Mr. Wheeler decided to accept responsibility for his conduct so that he could move forward,” said Steven Sussman, Wheeler’s lawyer, in an email to the Tribune.

Wheeler’s resumé claims that he gave three talks in 2009 at a conference at McGill given by Seven Days Work Foundation, an interdisciplinary research organization.  But the Foundation’s director Marc Shell, a Harvard comparative literature professor, denied that Wheeler had ever been involved.

“Adam Wheeler has never spoken at Seven Days Work and has never visited there,” said Shell in an email to the Tribune.

In reality, the conference did not take place at McGill, but in New Brunswick. Wheeler also claimed to have co-authored four books with Shell, two of which he fraudulently claimed were under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.  Shell flatly denied Wheeler’s involvement in any of his work.

Gerald Leone, the Middlesex District Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, called attention to the victims of Wheeler’s crime.

“His fraudulent actions seriously undermined the integrity of the competitive admissions process, sullied the reputation of some of the finest educators and educational institutions in the country, and cheated those who competed honestly for what he fraudulently received,” Leone said in a press release.