Adam Wheeler: Hero or Villain?
18 May
When I first heard about Adam Wheeler, I was inclined to like him. Anyone who can beat the system à la Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can — with a slick New York accent, ideally — is pretty much a stud in my book.
Wheeler, a 23-year-old former Harvarder, faces an arraignment today for 20 charges including identity theft, larceny, faking professor endorsements, and falsely claiming to hold a degree. Basically, Wheeler conned his way into Harvard and then conned his way into winning a variety of grants and prestigious awards.
It all sounds pretty amusing, until you add up all the financial aid and grant money Wheeler accumulated — 45,000 technically stolen dollars that should have gone to some brown-noser from your AP Bio class. Who, you know, probably had to settle on Princeton.
The moral of the story? That part’s kind of hard to figure out.
Maybe we should take the Adam Wheeler incident as indicative of how utterly unreachable universities like Harvard seem to, I don’t know, almost everyone. Maybe it should remind us that, while we place so much emphasis on degrees and awards, they are really only symbols of the knowledge and experience that (hopefully) inspired their allotment.
Or maybe it’s just an eye-opener. Like those people that manage to sneak guns onto planes, Wheeler is a reminder that the system isn’t all that bulletproof. And for that, maybe he is a hero.
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For a few degrees of separation, my best buddy had his first sleepover with this kid before he moved to Delaware. He was normal, an excellent artist, and hopefully will now spend some time in jail.
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