骗得了哈佛，骗不了父母

来源: 7.5 于 2010-05-19 11:42:22 [] [博客] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 阅读数 : (3170 bytes)

Student accused of fooling Harvard foiled by his parents
Man pleads not guilty to what prosecutor dubs "life of deception."

By Jacques Steinberg and Katie Zezima

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: 10:47 p.m. Tuesday, May 18, 2010


There were, in hindsight, plenty of reasons for the admissions office at Harvard University to be suspicious of Adam Wheeler.

When Wheeler, now 23, applied as a transfer student in 2007, he sent along fabricated trans 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.

One tipoff could have been that MIT doesn't give letter grades in the fall semester of freshman year, like the straight A's that appeared on the grade report that Wheeler submitted. And the names of the four MIT professors who wrote his glowing recommendations? The letters were fakes. Although the professors were real, each teaches at Bowdoin.

In the end, it was Wheeler's parents who ended his adventure in fabrication.

At an arraignment Tuesday in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn, Mass., Wheeler was charged with 20 criminal counts, including larceny, because he received nearly $50,000 in scholarships and awards from Harvard.

In recounting how the case came to light, Assistant District Attorney John Verner told the court of a phone call that Wheeler's parents, Lee and Richard, got from Yale University this year.

By then, Wheeler had left Harvard, rather than face an academic hearing over accusations that he had plagiarized the work of a Harvard professor in his application for a Rhodes Scholarship. He then applied as a transfer student yet again, this time to Yale and Brown.

After Yale contacted Wheeler's parents, who were in court Tuesday, to express doubts about parts of his transfer application, they insisted that their son tell Yale the truth.

"Mr. Wheeler's life of deception would not have stopped if it were not for his parents," Verner said.

Wheeler's lawyer, Steven Sussman, said after the hearing that his client "pleaded not guilty" and that "he's never been in trouble before."

The court hearing provided no answer to a central question: how had Wheeler slipped through the Harvard admissions committee?

Harvard officials declined Tuesday to comment on the case, citing the inquiry and federal rules on student privacy.

Other prestigious colleges have seen similar cases. Two years ago, Yale determined that a student who successfully transferred from Columbia had forged his tran to give himself straight A's. Connecticut authorities later charged him with larceny over the $32,000 in scholarships he'd received.

In 1993, a man pleaded guilty to theft by deception in New Jersey for obtaining $22,000 in financial aid from Princeton.

"It is not in our inherent nature in our industry to be suspicious," said Edward de Villafranca, who has worked in admissions at Manhattanville College and the University of Richmond. "This is not 'CSI Harvard.' "

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