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Then there was the notorious case of Professor Joseph Ellis, who liked to regale his college history classes of malleable young minds with tales of his supposed heroics in Vietnam. I think he ‘suffered’ a year’s suspension from teaching at Mt. Holyoke, which for a professor just meant a sabbatical to pursue his own writing and research...... just a hiccup in his career, really, despite his extensive and contemptible frauds:

http://www.mobylives.com/Joseph_Ellis.html

During the war in Vietnam, he said, he wasn’t just a soldier assigned to some obscure Army base — he saw action “clearing out” the area around My Lai. He wasn’t just a grunt, either — he was commander of a platoon of combat paratroopers from the legendary 101st Airborne. In fact, he was such a good leader that he was elevated to the staff of American commander General William Westmoreland.

Not a word of it was true, of course — Ellis never left the States during Vietnam.

But the thing is, Joseph Ellis isn’t some poor slob in a bar. He’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and professor of history at prestigious Mt. Holyoke College.

And he told those stories to students in a class he taught on Vietnam. He repeated them in interviews and even on television. And the war stories weren’t the half of it.

He told the Boston Globe last year that he was repulsed by what he saw in Vietnam and joined the peace movement when he returned home. He did civil rights work in Mississippi, too, he said, and was seen as such a threat by the white power structure that state police followed him.

And, as if claiming heroic involvement in nearly all of the era’s significant historical events wasn’t enough, he told the Globe he’d scored the winning touchdown in the last game of his senior year in high school.

He wasn’t even on the team.

...... [more at link]

http://www.mobylives.com/Joseph_Ellis.html