His CV is available on The New Republic website. I take back what I said about Aleksey Vayner beating this guy for fabulousness. In academic accolade land, Adam Wheeler WINS.
I wonder how the professor whose books he claims to have co-authored in impressively rapid progression feels about sharing credit. Do the books even exist? (They're not listed on his website--and hey! weird unrelated connection, but I think this guy's wife was in my Emile class this semester?) I also wonder if he's ever met the kid? Wouldn't it be weird if one day you woke up and found that some little fraudster you've never seen in your life claimed to have co-written all your books?
Also, I wonder whether Phi Beta Cons will point out that part of the success of this hoax was brought to you by the the strong resemblance between incomprehensible literary theory and actual bullshit?
UPDATE: The Crimson has a fact-check rundown of his resume. I'm pleased that someone thought my job was impressive enough to lie about having.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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6 comments:
I wonder if he really did independent graduate study at Georgetown in the Summer of '08 or just figured that after Glass and that ChickLit plagarist G'town had a soft spot for people like him, which is to say lying liars who lie?
He may have just picked the name Georgetown out of a hat of prestigious school names. I doubt he did ANYTHING on this resume. He also claims to have been my coworker this year at the Extension School writing center.
One of the books from Wheeler's CV ("Wampum and the Origins of American Money") is listed as "forthcoming" on Marc Shell's webpage (with no mention of a co-author of course).
Yeah, another one is also forthcoming in 2012 but not on his website, so I guess Wheeler knew his work, although he evidently did not contribute to it.
The Old English and Classical Armenian(!) are nice touches on the resume. One hopes that he said he reads these, rather than speaks them, as I suspect there's not much case for speaking them. Perhaps he thought, if asked, that he could just bull-shit with gibberish.
(Or perhaps he should have partnered with Vayner and claimed to be a master of classical Armenian martial arts.)
All the arcane specialization is a good strategy, I think. It frees you from scrutiny by the vast majority of even other academics, and leaves only a handful of people who could authoritatively claim that you're bullshitting.
That is, as long as you don't plagiarize. That kind of kills the whole ruse since anyone can use Google, even people without PhDs.
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