Ben Carson: Grifter, Delusional, or Delusional Grifter?
(1970): Simply Off the Record (January 15): "The Yale Record yesterday presented a parody issue of the Yale Daily News...
...announced in the substitute News that a series of Psychology 10 exams were destroyed and stated that a makeup would be held at 7:30 PM last evening. A false exam held in 203 WLH was attended by several students not aware that the replacement exam was a hoax. The exams distributed to the group closely resembled the psychology exam given on Monday morning. The only identification of the parody's source was on the masthead, located on page 2 of the paper. The copyright was attributed to the Yale Record Inc. Despite published reports to the contrary, The Yale Daily News did publish today. You're reading it...
Ben Carson Gifted Hands: "Two experiences... at Yale reminded me that God cared and would always provide...
..>During my sophomore year I had very little money. And then all of a sudden, I had absolutely no money—not even enough to ride the bus back and forth to church.... “Lord,” I prayed, “please help me. At least give me bus fare to go to church.” Although I’d been walking aimlessly, I looked up and realized I was just outside Battell Chapel.... I looked down. A ten-dollar bill lay crumpled on the ground three feet in front of me. “Thank You, God,” I said....
The following year... not one cent on me, and no expectations for getting any.... Lack of funds wasn’t my only worry.... The day before I’d been informed that... the final examination papers in a psychology class, Perceptions 301, “were inadvertently burned.” I’d taken the exam two days earlier but, with the other students, would have to repeat the test. And so I, with about 150 other students, went to the designated auditorium....
As soon as we received the tests, the professor walked out of the classroom. Before I had a chance to read the first question, I heard a loud groan behind me. “Are they kidding?” someone whispered loudly. As I stared at the questions, I couldn’t believe them either. They were incredibly difficult, if not impossible... a brilliant psychiatrist might have trouble with some of them. “Forget it,” I heard one girl say to another. “Let’s go back and study this. We can say we didn’t read the notice. Then when they repeat it, we’ll be ready.”
Her friend agreed, and they quietly slipped out of the auditorium. Immediately three others packed away their papers. Others filtered out. Within ten minutes after the exam started, we were down to roughly one hundred. Soon half the class was gone, and the exodus continued. Not one person turned in the examination before leaving. I kept working away, thinking all the time, How can they expect us to know this stuff? Pausing then to look around, I counted seven students besides me still going over the test. Within half an hour from the time the examination began, I was the only student left in the room. Like the others, I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice, and I couldn’t lie and say I hadn’t. All the time I wrote my answers, I prayed for God....
Suddenly the door of the classroom opened noisily, disrupting my flow of thought. As I turned, my gaze met that of the professor.... With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture. “What’s going on?” I asked. “A hoax,” the teacher said. “We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.” She smiled again. “And that’s you.” The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill...
Ben Carson: Facebook: "On Saturday a reporter with the Wall Street Journal...
...published a story that my account of being the victim of a hoax at Yale where students were led to believe the exams they had just taken were destroyed and we needed to retake the exam was false. The reporter claimed that no evidence existed to back up my story. Even went so far as to say the class didn't exist. Well here is the student newspaper account of the incident that occurred on January 14, 1970. Will an apology be coming. I doubt it.
: Ben Carson's Psychology Test Story Gets Even Weirder: "Carson's account is substantially different from the parody...
...He says the class was Perceptions 301 [not Intro. to Psychology 10]. He says 150 students showed up [not several]. He says everyone eventually walked out [because they were dishonest, not because they saw it was a hoax]. He says the professor showed up at the beginning, and then again at the end. He says the professor gave him ten dollars. None of that seems to have happened. And yet—it certainly seems likely that this is where Carson got the idea for his story. He remembered the hoax, and then embellished it considerably to turn it into a testimony to the power of God... added a bunch of bells and whistles to make it into a proper testimonial.
I have a feeling that posting this news clip won't do Carson any favors. Before, he could just... call the media a bunch of liars. Now, he has to defend the obvious differences between the actual hoax and what he wrote.... His supporters will believe him utterly (just take a look at the comments to his Facebook post), but no one else will...
