One thing is for sure:  Adam Wheeler isn't going away any time soon.  The story of the "Ivy League Impostor" pushes too many of our buttons.  Not only does the fact that his ridiculous and improbable résumé was apparently never fact-checked by Harvard, despite containing claims bordering on the facetious, confirm suspicions among the cynical that the Ivy League actively recruits future frauds, but the fact that he was a mere semester away from getting away with it — well, you can't help but root for the kid.  He almost got through without anyone calling his bluff.  It's the great American success story.

The question is what did Adam Wheeler have that Brand Harvard wanted badly enough to accept literally at face value a biography of bald-faced lies?  I mean, Harvard has an acceptance rate for freshmen just shy of seven percent, and traditionally about half that for transfer students.  Adam Wheeler must really have represented something exceptional to the recruiter who interviewed him on the Bowdoin Campus (especially since Wheeler was claiming to be enrolled at MIT at the time) to get that golden ticket. 

Actually, it's not hard to see.  Though none of his little subterfuges was really very subtle — his lies were hardly Harvard-worthy — Wheeler fairly embodies Brand Harvard.  Albeit circa 1910.  I mean, he looks the part.  Those searching blue eyes, the tousled hair.  That quiet, pensive mien.  We can imagine him muttering quatrains in Old Persian while he bustles through the yard on his way to a lecture on the dramatic works of Grillparzer.  Heck, I wouldn't hesitate to cast him in the Harvard version of Porky's (Roti de Porc Au Lait's).  This is the kind of kid you want skulking around campus, haunting the Widener stacks searching for obscure texts to plagiarize.

How many of these handsome impostors are among us?  Our bosses, opinion-makers, presidents?  Adam Wheeler was on his way.  He might have plagiarized himself to the top, not because the truth is hard to find, but because the lie is always so much closer to what we'd like to believe is true.  As the immortal Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “people do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to” — which apparently goes double for Harvard Admissions, with their "trust-based" system.   

And that's what we love about this story.  It's about the beautiful lie.  A whole host of them, in fact.  The lie of excellence in the age of grade inflation.  The lie of merit in an age of entitlement.  The lie of integrity in the arts and humanities.  You've got to admit, the kid got one thing right.  The lie. 

Honestly, even if Wheeler had written “Black Milk and the Stairway to Heaven: Bedros Tourian, Paul Celan, and Anselm Kiefer”, as he claimed in his now-famous TNR résumé, who the heck would have known?  I mean, here's a bullshit artist portraying... a bullshit artist!  An ingenious disguise — hiding in plain sight! 

But now that the ruse has been uncovered, I would personally love to see the rest of Adam Wheeler exposed.  I think it'd be therapeutic.  After all, junk never lies.