Ben Carson may have lied about being 'the most honest student' in a Yale class
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As retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson defends his story about getting offered a scholarship to West Point Military Academy, other anecdotes he's shared over the years are being called into question.
The Wall Street Journal did some digging Friday, raising an eyebrow at one fitting story in Carson's 1990 autobiography, Gifted Hands. The Republican presidential hopeful had written that as a junior at Yale, his psychology professor told the class their final exams "inadvertently burned," so all 150 students would have to take a newer, harder test. Everyone except Carson walked out, he claimed, and described what happened next:
The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture. "A hoax," the teacher said. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class." [Gifted Hands]
There was apparently no such psychology class as Perceptions 301 at Yale, a librarian told The Journal. And the newspaper's archives said they had no record of a photo identifying Carson during his days as a student.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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