If Adam Wheeler, a former Harvard student, hadn’t applied for a Rhodes Fellowship, it appears he would have gotten away with four years of academic dishonesty. While at Harvard, he won several prizes. On his Rhodes application, he listed “numerous books he had co-authored, lectures he had given, and courses he had taught”. “Numerous books”? Yet this is how he was caught:
A Harvard professor first became suspicious of Wheeler while reviewing his application for the Rhodes scholarship. He discovered that Wheeler had plagiarized his piece almost completely from the work of another professor.
His “piece”? What’s that? When you apply for a Rhodes fellowship you don’t submit an academic article as part of your application. Why didn’t the reviewer check if the “numerous books” that a college senior claimed to have written actually existed? What’s next, a sixth-grader says she’s won a Nobel Prize and a Harvard prof doesn’t notice a problem?
Like Wheeler, Ranjit Chandra was caught toward the very end of his academic career. My impression with Chandra is that, as he repeatedly escaped detection, the falsifications became more extreme.
And speaking of falsifications: I bought A Million Little Pieces not long after it was published. However, I stopped reading it after the first couple of chapters, because I became convinced that the author (James Frey) was making it up, or at least greatly exaggerating. To this day I can’t understand why it took so long for him to be exposed as a fraud.