Hometown Con

Wheeler has torn another little hole in the trust that holds us together.

by Bruce Schimmel

The town of Milton, Del., home of Dogfish Head Brewery, is celebrated for its wonderful beer-making. Some in this tiny town, 100 miles south of Philly, seem eager to add world-class bamboozling to Milton's accolades.

Milton — where I've lived on weekends for nearly 20 years — is the hometown of Adam Wheeler. The 23-year-old son of a retired shop teacher has been accused of lying, cheating and forging his way into several top colleges, including Harvard — from whom he got more than $45,000 in financial aid.

The English major created such a fabulous fiction that apparently nobody checked the facts. Wheeler claimed a perfect score on the SATs, a transcript of all A's, and co-authorship of a long list of books. All apparently false. At Harvard, as charges of plagiarism piled up, the school finally dropped the hammer last fall and kicked him out. When Wheeler tried to transfer to Yale, officials there called his parents, who essentially gave up their son.

Still, many here in lower, slower Delaware were openly gloating after downstate's biggest paper, the Delaware State News, recently devoted its entire front page to his caper. Over a huge photo of Wheeler, the newspaper's banner headline practically congratulated their native son for having "dupe[d] Harvard."

People here will tell you that what he's accused of is wrong. But many found all sorts of ways to justify it. Call it hometown pride.

"I would have done it," said a teenage boy as he bagged groceries at the Food Lion, "if it meant I'd get a Harvard education."

"In a way, he didn't actually steal anything," claimed a local bookstore owner, himself a former academic. "The $45,000 he got was really just an internal transfer from Harvard's endowment to the school itself to pay for their incredibly high tuition."

As Wheeler's tale of cracking eggheads went from bookstore to coffee shop to supermarket, you'd think he was in line to replace Santa to ride the fire engine in the Christmas parade.

But after the cheering dies down, you have to wonder what the remarkable Mr. Wheeler has done to the prospects of other kids of moderate means or minority backgrounds. How he's hurt kids, like himself, who don't have rich parents to pave their paths. But who, unlike himself, are the real thing. For instance, Wheeler's lying bullshit has hurt my godson, Ian, who also comes from rural Delaware. Ian got into top universities (and, yes, he chose Temple Honors) because he worked hard and played by the rules. Now Ian says his achievements will be viewed with greater suspicion.

To be sure, having top institutions double-check the credentials of applicants from off the beaten path isn't such a bad thing.

But Wheeler's abuse has torn another little hole in the trust that holds us together. And while some — like Harvard students hawking "Free Adam Wheeler" T-shirts — think it's just ducky anytime the powerful are duped, this incident has only dumped more poison into a culture brimming with cynicism.

Everyone loves a con man — until you've been made the fool. And in a small way, Wheeler has screwed us all. So, I sincerely hope that Wheeler will get a tell-all book deal. This time, however, he might try something that will do some good: telling the truth.

(bruce@schimmel.com)