A Tale of Two Frauds.

For academics, whose vocation is the pursuit of the truth, what justification, if any, can excuse their lying? And what action will a university take when it is exposed publicly that one of their professors has perpetrated a wide-ranging fraud?

These are not hypothetical questions at Columbia University. In two strikingly similar cases, both involving members of the English Department, this prestigious institution has had to face devastatingly embarrassing disclosures about popular members of its faculty who had brought recognition to the university. These cases, though separated by forty years, involved public dishonesty that impaired their teaching capacity. One instance was made into a feature film. The other, which recently became public knowledge, has already prompted 150 newspaper and magazine articles around the world.

The first affair centered on a junior faculty member in the English Department at Columbia University and his involvement in the sensational television "quiz show" deception. Charles Van Doren made a name for himself as a high-profile intellectual, a national hero of intellect, through the adroit use of television. Van Doren's medium was the highly popular late-1950s NBC television program Twenty-One, watched by fifty million viewers. For a comparison, the current top rated TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has almost thirty million viewers who tune in to any of the three weekly programs. And of course the population of the United States has grown dramatically during the four decades that separated these two quiz shows.

The story of Twenty-One was retold a few years ago in the successful feature movie Quiz Show that garnered four Oscar nominations. Actor Ralph Fiennes starred as the handsome, telegenic, highly educated, blue-blood quiz show contestant Charles Van Doren. Twenty-One featured questions ostensibly kept in a bank vault, supposedly to keep the contest fair.

As the reigning champion for fourteen weeks, Van Doren's demonstrable mastery of arcane and esoteric facts put him on the cover of Time, Life, and TV Guide magazines and enabled him to take home $129,000, the largest sum "won" by any contestant on the show. His popularity was such that following his defeat NBC hired him, at a handsome salary of $50,000 a year, to add a few minutes of cultural seasoning to the daily morning Today show. Then a couple years later Van Doren's world began to collapse when a defeated contestant alleged that Twenty-One was rigged.

Van Doren initially denied he was given the answers, but after lying to the media and perjuring himself before a grand jury, he came clean before the congressional subcommittee investigating the quiz programs. Facing one of the largest crowds ever to attend a congressional hearing, Van Doren described how he was furnished with questions, and often the answers as well, prior to each live broadcast of the show. Van Doren explained how he had suppressed his guilty feelings by rationalizing that as an academic, his success served to popularize respect for education. Referring to himself as "foolish" and "incredibly naive," Van Doren movingly testified that he became caught up in something dishonest that he did not know how to stop. A headline in the New York Times captured these sentiments: "Teacher Fears He has Done Disservice to All in Education."

Although Van Doren offered his resignation to Columbia as a matter of courtesy, his earnest desire was to continue to teach. The university's reaction, however, was swift and unforgiving. The evening after Van Doren made his admissions to the congressional subcommittee, Columbia University president Grayson Kirk issued the following statement: