Connecticut Democratic senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal has been telling veterans that he served in Vietnam when he didn’t. In fact, the Harvard grad worked the system hard, getting numerous deferments, some of which were only available to the privileged and connected.

Few people care anymore if you served in Vietnam or didn’t, as long as you’re straight up about your record. So why lie about it? A sense of generational/individual guilt? A politician’s pathology? A desire to be more manly than you are?

In any case, watching the Times video of Blumenthal saying “when I served in Vietnam,” you can’t escape the conclusion that, whatever the reason, the man is a liar.

Apparently Blumenthal learned nothing from history. But this phenomenon of lying about serving in Vietnam seems widespread enough that perhaps there’s something deeper going on here than individual failing—as I suggested above, a collective guilt that, in some individuals, manifests itself in fabrication. I wonder what other manifestations of this guilt there might be?

Lying, ambition and Harvard are a theme today: The NY Post reports (front page!) on the case of Adam Wheeler, an expelled Bowdoin student who transferred to Harvard by claiming that he was a straight-A student from MIT.

…he got away with his con for some two years because the brain trust that runs the Ivy League school apparently never thought to check on his incredible credentials, authorities said. His hubris finally did him in when he attempted to apply for prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships last September with forged documents, according to Middlesex County (Mass.) District Attorney Gerald Leone.

But the lies didn’t stop once Wheeler arrived on campus.

Once at Harvard, Wheeler played the role of a top student, winning the Winthrop Sargent Prize in English, the Hoopes Prize and a research grant worth a total of $14,000 allegedly on the basis of plagiarized writing.

It wasn’t until last September when one Harvard prof finally grew suspicious after noticing that Wheeler’s Fulbright and Rhodes scholarship applications claimed straight A’s at Harvard and were chock full of “numerous books he co-authored, lectures he had given and courses he had taught,” Leone said.

The Crimson, by the way, should be all over this story, but it isn’t. Its article fails to mention which Harvard professor found him out (surely this is reportable), which Harvard professor was plagiarized by Wheeler, and most important, why apparently no one in the admissions office ever checked any of Wheeler’s application materials. (Were budget cuts a factor?)

The Post reports this fact as coming from the DA’s office, so it couldn’t exactly have been hard to get. The Crimson doesn’t mention it. Perhaps tomorrow?

Meanwhile, on to Yale, where the topic of sex is always, um, fruitful. The Post (big day for the Ivy League in the tab today) reports on Yale’s decision to ban sex between students and professors.

Yale’s approach makes it one of the strictest such policies in the country. Many universities, particularly in anything-goes New York, have rules that are much softer.

At Columbia University, romances with faculty members are “not expressly prohibited”….

The Post wonders if Yale’s move is feasible-or even desirable.

Yale’s move has sparked a heated debate among students and experts who think the ban patronizes adult students, and that, rules or no rules, romance will prevail. Jokes one source close to top academics at Rutgers University, “Dating a professor is practically a policy here. Half of the science department seem to have left their wives and married their grad students.”

Charming.

The larger point the article makes: that this policy is one of many ways in which universities are returning to their pre-1960s role of in loco parentis, largely because of liability concerns. Is this progress? I’m not sure.