Education: The Compulsion

For two whole semesters, everything went smoothly for Associate Professor Kenneth P. Yates at the University of New Hampshire. Both students and teachers seemed to take to the new physics teacher, and Dr. Yates himself was obviously enjoying his new job thoroughly. A quiet, amiable man whose nose was usually in a book, he had come to the university armed with an A.B. from the College of Wooster. Ohio, and a doctorate from Ohio State. He also had high recommendations from the Christie Engineering Co. of Philadelphia. Most important of all, Yates certainly seemed to know his physics. To New Hampshire's President Robert F. Chandler Jr., he was nothing short of "brilliant."

The turn came one day in class when a graduate student named Wayne Overman began asking the professor some knotty questions about tensor density, an esoteric aspect of upper-story mathematics. To Overman's surprise, Yates seemed completely unaware of an outstanding German authority on the subject, and more surprising still, he had precious little knowledge of technical German terms. So Student Overman took it upon himself to look Yates up in American Men of Science. Sure enough, Yates was there, Ohio degrees and all—but he was listed as a research director of the Pure Oil Co., a Chicago firm.

Math v. Fairy Tales. Last week the university had to admit that it had been the victim of one of the strangest academic hoaxes in history. Yates, it seemed, was not the real Yates at all, but 31-year-old Marvin Hewitt of Hempstead, N.Y. He had never gone beyond high school, had never been to Wooster or Ohio State, and the Christie Co. that recommended him simply did not exist. Why had he taken on another man's name and record? It was, said Hewitt, "a compulsion. I always wanted to teach."

The compulsion, according to Hewitt, came to him early. The son of a Philadelphia laborer, he had begun "taking math books out of the library when the other kids took out fairy tales." At ten he was reading books on Einstein's theory of relativity, later became interested in psychology because "I recognized myself as a brilliant child." In his teens Hewitt claims to have mastered engineering, once wrote a paper for a state engineering society that was "so complicated that no more than three men in the room understood it." It did not really bother him that his father had showed so little interest in sending him to college. "The thought," says he, "of taking courses in subjects in which I was already recognized as one of the nation's leading authorities was ridiculous."

Quantum Electro-Dynamics. Since then, Hewitt has been playing a constant masquerade. Though he refuses to name them, he claims to have had professorships at five campuses before coming to New Hampshire. Each time, he says, he has assumed the name and identity of some scientist working in another part of the country. Apparently it was no trick at all to send for photostatic copies of the necessary academic records, to make up plausible recommendations, and to be put on the list of the American Physical Society in New York. Wherever he went, he claims to have been a success. "I was a full professor of physics at 26, and one of the courses I gave—and only to professors —was on Renormalization in Relativistic Quantum Electro-Dynamics."