She was an Ivy League student with an inspiring story. UPenn Disagreed.
January 10, 2022 12:06 PM   Subscribe

Story about a UPenn student who wins a Rhodes Scholarship -- (archive link). She claimed she was a first-generation, low-income student who had suffered severe abuse at the hands of her mother that landed her in the hospital and then bouncing between foster homes. Penn received an anonymous email claiming that she had falsified her background (they claim that she may have been abused but exaggerated the extent of it and exaggerated her first-generation low-income bona fides) and then launched an investigation and recommended that Rhodes rescind the award. Student claims that this was retaliation for standing up for a classmate who had died. Ends up withdrawing from the program and files a lawsuit against Penn. Definitely a crazy story and a wild ride. Curious to hear what others think of UPenn's response and the student's claims about her background.
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover (76 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not inclined to click a link to a URL shortener I don't know.
posted by tclark at 12:15 PM on January 10, 2022


It's an archive link to chronicle.com not a shortener
posted by Lanark at 12:18 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


tclark, it goes to https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dredging , which is a story posted Friday, Jan. 7, 2022, at The Chronicle of Higher Education (which, in turn, is a web newspaper about and for higher education).

The Chronicle is paywalled, so OP used an off-site archive for non-subscribers.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:18 PM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]


Thanks. I've not seen archive.fo as a domain before now.
posted by tclark at 12:23 PM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


Thanks for posting: I read this article a day or two ago and also thought it would make for a good metafilter discussion. It's a bad art friend-style longform journalism piece with much to chew on.

My two cents: I think it's very possible, more likely than not, that Fierceton was abused. Lots of rich people have terrible, abusive childhoods. It's a well-chronicled thing. The "I was the first person in my family to go to college because I have cut my mother out of my life and thus am a family of one" just doesn't wash for me, and neither does the "I'm first generation because my mother, a high-powered doctor, isn't an ivy league graduate." It's the class version of Doloziel transracialism. You can have had a miserable childhood and overcome incredible personal adversity without belonging to that particular group and having that particular story, and her framing her experience in that way isn't helpful to anyone.

Fierceton deserves compassion, understanding, and support--including compassionate accountability. Based on the story this article tells I think the Rhodes were right to set in course a process that led to her withdrawing from the scholarship.
posted by sy at 12:26 PM on January 10, 2022 [28 favorites]


The "I was the first person in my family to go to college because I have cut my mother out of my life and thus am a family of one" just doesn't wash for me, and neither does the "I'm first generation because my mother, a high-powered doctor, isn't an ivy league graduate."

The thing is, Penn does appear to accept those definitions, so is she wrong for following them and self-identifying accordingly?

(Also, there's a big difference between cutting your mother out of your life, and accusing your mother of physical abuse and ending up living in the foster system as a result, I don't see how you can possibly argue that doesn't fit the University's "a strained or limited relationship with the person(s) in your family who hold(s) a bachelors degree” definition)
posted by firechicago at 12:36 PM on January 10, 2022 [13 favorites]


All education should be free. None of this bullshit about essays and quantifying your trauma to see how much your future is worth benefits anyone. None of this should have happened.
posted by bleep at 12:40 PM on January 10, 2022 [141 favorites]


I've always wondered whether I count as "first generation" for university education; neither of my parents went to university. My mother's parents went to university, but I don't think my grandmother graduated and I think my grandfather left with a 2-year degree. BUT my great-grandmother (his mother) did graduate with a four-year degree, about the same time as her son didn't. (Yes, she was awesome.)

Weirdly, I still felt like a first generation student, because I didn't have the immediate parental or sibling connection - and I didn't know the more recent relatives who had gone (a couple of aunts and uncles) well enough to talk about university, and the aunts I was close to hadn't gone to college or university. (I was lucky to fall in with someone who did have a strong family background in academics - otherwise, I don't think I would have ever navigated the system. I didn't even know that I could have taken 2nd year courses when I was in my first year because they weren't listed in the special first-year truncated course catalogue).

But that probably describes 99% of undergraduates - after all, even if their parents had gone to university, things change so much over 20 years.
posted by jb at 12:43 PM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


Also, whoever this anonymous person is who reported this to the school and the Rhodes committee loves drama and is probably eating this up.
posted by all about eevee at 12:43 PM on January 10, 2022 [18 favorites]


I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt because when you're a 17-year-old applying to colleges, the forms are pretty confusing. Penn's definition includes her, she checked the box.

As for the extent of her injuries? If her mother's story were true, her essay would be an outright fabrication. But it's 100% understandable if she included some rhetorical flourishes or if details didn't quite line up due to memory issues. It's undisputed that she was in the hospital for 21 days. Going after the details for not being perfect means someone has an axe to grind.
posted by explosion at 12:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [16 favorites]


Here is a Pastebin of just the article text, for anyone who doesn't want to go to TFA for whatever reason. Note that you lose the photos this way.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:47 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


16 universities (including UPenn) were accused of colluding to fix prices in an antitrust lawsuit filed yesterday.
posted by schmod at 12:51 PM on January 10, 2022 [21 favorites]


The box she checked was on her master's application--I'm assuming this was near the end of an ivy league political science degree, not an undergrad application written as a 17-year-old (the Rhodes application would also have been written in the summer between junior and senior year.)

If Penn defines "first generation" to mean "first generation, also people whose parents went to state school, also people whose parents are absent or abusive," then that's their right, though I think it's sociologically irresponsible. Students who graduate from elite private schools with bad parents and students who grow up in poverty have pretty different experiences. One difference is that private school kids have larger networks of support and cultural capital formation that allow them to get into places like Penn. It may even be a bit cynical of Penn to expand their definition to make it look like they're creating more class mobility than they are.

That doesn't mean that growing up with socioeconomic privilege and family trauma is hunky dory or easy or doesn't deserve compassion. It's just a different thing.

I'm not a counselor or a sociologist but I've definitely taught students with both of these profiles and they're different groups.

Also, I'm pretty sure the Rhodes doesn't stipulate this capacious definition, and they rightly felt hoodwinked.
posted by sy at 12:52 PM on January 10, 2022 [37 favorites]


The hard paywall at Chronicle.com was the reason this was deleted on the last attempt. From the article, it looks like every party did something wrong, but for (perhaps) understandable reasons. Penn and Rhodes will be deep in CYA mode over this for some time.

My partner is a [Name] scholarship recipient: maybe not as prestigious/racist as Rhodes, but up there. For many years she reviewed batches of scholarship applications for the org, and it was clear that all of the applications would've dragged themselves through fire and broken glass while still being the smartest person in the room to get that scholarship. Only a tiny percentage of applicants got it, though. There were thousands of rejections for every one success. One of the details on the application was an affirmation that the information was truthful, including a requirement on the applicant's school and letters of recommendation that they understood the application to be truthful.
posted by scruss at 12:53 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


It seems to me that available info (aside from the other foster kids she wrote of) has been corroborated at least enough to say that there appears to be little or nothing outright fabricated aside from the "first generation" bit, and even that is arguably put up to Penn's idiotic ambiguous definition.
posted by tclark at 12:54 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]


None of this bullshit about essays and quantifying your trauma to see how much your future is worth benefits anyone.

Elite universities like Penn will ask, "What are we supposed to do? Admit everyone?" No, they can't, but they could approve all qualified students (which would be at least several times as many as they do now) and then admit a random subset of them. That would at least make explicit the existing randomness in the process. (Spoiler: This would never happen, because whichever school tried that would then become less selective, thus less prestigious, and then the most competitive students would stop applying there; lather, rinse, repeat.)

Oh, and if they really gave a damn about diversity, they'd stop giving legacy preference.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:56 PM on January 10, 2022 [14 favorites]


Yes, she should probably not have claimed to have been raised low-income or be "first generation". But being in foster care and estranged from your family during the last bit of high school and applying for university? and then going through university without family support (financial or emotional) - that's really not easy. I paid my own tuition, but my mom provided room, board and massive amounts of emotional support - I couldn't have finished without her.
posted by jb at 12:56 PM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


This jumped out and poked me in the eye:
Read as journalism, her essay [about being hospitalized] falls short. But what if it’s viewed as an impressionistic piece of writing — a poem, as she has called it?
My third kid just finished his final college application this weekend. He produced essays, a short video, all sorts of things. The writing prompts were to tell us about yourself, or talk about what moves you. True, they didn't specifically prohibit an "impressionistic" style, but I doubt that most readers in the Admissions staff are going to approach it that way without being prompted to do so.

Now, my son has a great story and is an amazing kid. He showed me his essays, and we laughed at the thought of what he could write if he removed the constraint of factual accuracy: we live about 20 minutes drive from one of the schools, and I reminded him, "It's very possible that someone who sees your application actually lives in our town!" And so he was careful to write and say things that were verifiably true.

Do I disbelieve this young woman? Not exaaaaaactly: I imagine it was a chaotic time, and traumatic in the immediate aftermath. But by the time she was applying for a post-grad program like Rhodes, she should have processed it well enough to be fully aware of the difference between a "poem" and biographical information.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:59 PM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]


I can see how "First generation college student" might get conflated with "First Generation Ivy League," particularly when a person is busy gilding the lily on their applications.
posted by surlyben at 1:00 PM on January 10, 2022


Also, whoever this anonymous person is who reported this to the school and the Rhodes committee loves drama and is probably eating this up.

Want to bet it was her mom? But then, somebody who changes her name to “Fierceton” probably has a big personality and therefore an enemy or two. (Incidentally, I have a lot of questions about the process of getting a judge to say “yeah but I bet this lady didn’t really do a child abuse.”)

There’s a bit of a donut hole for upper-class children with abusive parents when they start out in life. I feel bad for her and for everybody who has to commoditize their trauma. None of this was necessary to find out whether she could have been a Rhodes scholar.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:01 PM on January 10, 2022 [21 favorites]


Yeeeeah, I feel like this is a structural problem that comes from artificial scarcity and the need to weaponize one's experience to get a scholarship. I look back on myself at seventeen, with a stable, safe, academically successful high school career (lot of bullying but I wasn't going to put that in an essay) and wonder if I'd have been able to get into college at all. I wrote my essay about how working in a summer job where a co-worker had a breakdown about an unplanned pregnancy changed my understanding of class, which it did.

Also, look, I personally would not be inclined to interrogate too closely the exact details of a teen's memories of a hospital stay after her mother (almost certainly - taking gum out of her hair, forsooth!) pushed her down the stairs. I had an extended hospital stay as a teenager and while I have a broad sense of what happened, I'm sure that my medical records would not exactly match my account of events. Like, she was in the hospital, a nurse remembers her specifically because she was in a bad way, she was in foster care for a year and severed her relationship with her mother - that's not some cunning child who decided to pretend that her mom was abusing her.

It sounds like her depiction of her late teens was not perhaps scrupulous, but under the circumstances a young adult might feel that they had to take care of themselves by whatever means necessary.

Again, I lied a lot when I was in college. Some weird stuff happened in my teens and I missed out on a huge, huge amount of very normal everyday stuff, so I told a lot of lies to cover up. Eventually I was able to build up my sense of self and stop lying but I did really just sort of...lie when I felt that I didn't have a lot of good options.
posted by Frowner at 1:04 PM on January 10, 2022 [65 favorites]


This blog post has some background that's a bit inside Philly news baseball (with a pretty strong point of view).

It does seem rather fucked up the way a high school kid can be removed from her home by the state, create her own life independent of her abuser and still not escape the abuser.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 1:05 PM on January 10, 2022 [27 favorites]


According to the article, her hospital records from the time of the incident with her mother indicate she had seizures, and Fierceton herself says she had a seizure at Penn.

And there is at least one case in the literature of seizures leading to memories of things which did not happen and were indistinguishable from memories of things that did, leading to PTSD in the patient—and there are lots of anecdotal accounts of similar problems including one from Quora where a person who had grand mal seizures "every day" developed memories of living in the 19th Century and being hanged.

I wouldn’t make that a basis of my claim against Penn if I were Fierceton, but I’d think Penn might have given it some weight in deciding whether to accuse her of lying.
posted by jamjam at 1:08 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Man, this is tough. I've never been entirely comfortable figuring out whether to claim to be first generation. One of my grandparents went to college at the usual age and had a professional job. (He died long before I was born and turned his kid out cold.) My father nearly completed a semester of college before dropping out. In the past, I've checked the box and then explained it. I got a free university education and some other benefits, probably in some part due to that checkbox. I was a hell of a lot more privileged than some of my peers. But, I also don't meet many colleagues whose parents don't have graduate degrees, so I don't worry too much about it.

The whole "independence" thing in the US is absolutely awful, though. Claiming independence even though you give money to your parents isn't allowed, or at least that's what I was told when I tried to do it. I suspect I had a worse case then her. We really should just tax all people's wealth and pay their spoiled kids to go to college like everybody else.
They’re largely identical, though in one version she says her foster friends referred to themselves as “the fab five,” and in another she says it was “the fantastic five.”
I don't know who is right. I'm pretty sure these pedants are wrong. But, then, nothing says, "commitment to historical truth and justice" like the name Rhodes.
posted by eotvos at 1:10 PM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


She also told the court that Fierceton was a difficult child, had long struggled with anxiety, and could be defiant.

Yeah… “defiant” seems to be one of those dog whistles that conservative or evangelical abusive parents use.


Having a materially well-off but emotionally and physically abusive childhood is indeed different from growing up in dire economic circumstances. But I’m not sure a scholarship institution named after a notoriously violent colonialist really gets to be the moral authority in much of anything. And it sounds like Penn was basically trying to exploit a disadvantaged student for PR purposes, and is taking their institutional embarrassment out on the student. I’d certainly be annoyed if someone misrepresented their socioeconomic background in an interpersonal interaction with me, but I’m with bleep, there are fundamental underlying structural problems that led to this situation that are definitely not the student’s fault. Plus, it sounds like she was a successful, high achieving student who would have had a good shot at a Rhodes scholarship even without the personal backstory? And if her story was a bit embellished, who did it hurt? It sounds like only two big, very rich, powerful institutions who don’t need our sympathy and support in this matter.


Also, whoever this anonymous person is who reported this to the school and the Rhodes committee loves drama and is probably eating this up.

My money’s on the abusive mom. Because of course she would be keeping tabs on the daughter as much as she could.
posted by eviemath at 1:11 PM on January 10, 2022 [47 favorites]


Students who graduate from elite private schools with bad parents and students who grow up in poverty have pretty different experiences.

Not just "bad parents." It seems pretty clear to me that there was abuse. 22 days is a LONG time to spend in the hospital. And for a, yes, wealthy, white doctor to have her child put in foster care - that doesn't happen lightly.

I'm honestly just baffled at the ferocity with which UPenn pursued this. Surely they have bigger fish to fry during a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on educational institutions and students? Surely there's a more humane way to handle something like this? Why are they acting like a kangaroo court?
posted by lunasol at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2022 [30 favorites]


mandymanwasregistered's link to the blog post confirms the anonymous tipster was the abusive mother.
posted by all about eevee at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2022 [22 favorites]


Also, whoever this anonymous person is who reported this to the school and the Rhodes committee loves drama and is probably eating this up.

Want to bet it was her mom?


Her mom certainly benefited from the whole investigation. A judge used it as evidence in expunging her record.

I'm a little doubtful of her mom's abuse explanation too: "Morrison was trying to remove the gum, Fierceton jerked her head back, went down two or three steps, and then sat."

And for this she ended up 22 days in the hospital?
posted by eye of newt at 1:15 PM on January 10, 2022 [17 favorites]


That blog post makes me lean in the "yes this is retaliation" direction.

I know I'm drawing a lot on my experience, but when I was in college, there were administrators and faculty who really didn't like me. I was a loud person, I was weird, I had weird hair, I think I was actually pretty difficult - but the big thing was that I was very left wing on a conservative campus. In my head, the situation was "oh, they may not particularly like me, but they are adults and professors, they'll be fair" and only later did I realize that not everyone was - that they really let a nineteen year old get to them. It would not surprise me a bit if Fierceton was pretty visible on campus, annoyed the shit out of the administration and when they had the chance to rules lawyer her application materials they went for it.

Someone in my union was denied - by my nice, liberal university - the option to continue to work remotely while she cared for her terminally ill cancer patient mother. There are lots of great, compassionate people at universities and lots of people with strong common sense, but the institutions themselves are not nearly as nice places as I used to believe.
posted by Frowner at 1:17 PM on January 10, 2022 [37 favorites]


College admins love their kangaroo courts & treating students like dirt. Couldn't even get my tiny 500 student liberal arts college to care that students had nothing to eat, no money and no way to get food. That was my experience and what comes up over and over in stories about sexual assault - the victim loses her future & the perpetrator is protected. The entire system has to go.
posted by bleep at 1:19 PM on January 10, 2022 [18 favorites]


Those investigators sound ridiculous. If you even have to respond to an anonymous email, once they corroborated she was put in the hospital and foster care, why wouldn't that be the end of it? Why all the "well, actually" questioning of every detail of medical records unless they have ulterior motives?
posted by starfishprime at 1:30 PM on January 10, 2022 [25 favorites]


mandymanwasregistered's link to the blog post confirms the anonymous tipster was the abusive mother.

In other words, Penn and the Rhodes committee let themselves be used for harassment and abuse by proxy.
posted by eviemath at 1:40 PM on January 10, 2022 [40 favorites]


I've always wondered whether I count as "first generation" for university education; neither of my parents went to university. My mother's parents went to university, but I don't think my grandmother graduated and I think my grandfather left with a 2-year degree. BUT my great-grandmother (his mother) did graduate with a four-year degree, about the same time as her son didn't. (Yes, she was awesome.)
This may vary by institution, but at the one where I work, you would count as first generation. We define first gen as any student who doesn't have a parent or legal guardian who has completed a bachelor's degree. Your grandparents and great-grandparents are only relevant if they had legal custody of you. You're not required to search your family tree for college graduates who might disqualify you.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:49 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]


This story is horrific to me. In my mind, UPenn and Rhodes are continuing this young woman's abuse at the hands of her mother.

Mackenzie was 15 or 16 when she was in the hospital. She was having seizures. She was there for three weeks, put into foster care, and subjected to a police investigation. Is it really so shocking that she'd misremember minor details from an extremely traumatising time in her life? We know that trauma interferes with memory. (And it turns out that some of the things she's accused of lying about actually did happen, like the blood in her hair.)

It is really disgusting to me that those two committees thought they had any right whatsoever to judge whether or not one of their students had been a victim of child abuse.
posted by Stoof at 1:57 PM on January 10, 2022 [35 favorites]


The blog post that mandymanwasregistered linked mentions more about the Cameron Driver incident and why UPenn might want to retaliate against Fierceton:

"As part of her investigation, Fierceton "took measurements and photographs of the entrances and exit doors, stairwells, hallways and elevator in the Castor Building," the lawsuit states. Fierceton presented all of this information to Driver's widow, whom, the lawsuit states, "was unaware of the true facts and circumstances surrounding her husband’s death, which had been concealed by the Penn Defendants."
posted by Stoof at 2:09 PM on January 10, 2022 [24 favorites]


Stoff, I was just opening with "this is horrific." Also, the idea that medical records are infallible is LAUGHABLE. My hospital system makes notes accessible via their online system; I always check them afterwards because I'm curious and want to make sure I understood the doctor correctly. There's almost always a small detail wrong, and sometimes very large details wrong. When I got a concussion, the doctor wrote that I had no nausea following my injury, when in fact the only reason I went to urgent care after hitting my head was because of the continued nausea (my partner was there and can confirm I said this multiple times). Many doctors have written that I have fibromyalgia when I told them I have dysautonomia. My partner has been referred to as my mother multiple times (!?). The ENT has told me that my neck muscles are extremely tight and that I'm very congested, and then written in the nose/neck sections of the note that everything is normal. I could go on and on.

I can't talk about how horrible this entire situation is, as an "actual" first generation child abuse survivor. It's too much. I'll just say that out of everyone in this story, including the author of this piece, Mackenzie has the least to be ashamed about.
posted by brook horse at 2:12 PM on January 10, 2022 [43 favorites]


Yeah, witness testimony is generally unreliable, not because people are liars but because most folks do not have perfect recall. That goes double for trauma victims. They dig into her story of her hospitalization and the best they can come up with is "she maybe didn't actually have blood on her face" and "that machine didn't do what she said it did"? That's actually a pretty low level of inconsistency for a victim's story; people are routinely convicted on the basis of much more muddled recollections. All evidence suggests her representation of her experience was pretty damn close to reality and that the few inconsistencies are well within the range of imperfect memory (or, in the case of the blood, possibly imperfect medical records, since she also has a secondary witness on that, and, y'know, doctors can fail to report salient details as easily as anyone else).

It's hard to come up with any sort of argument she was deliberately deceptive about that event, and that Penn's trying to do so is pretty disgusting.
posted by jackbishop at 2:13 PM on January 10, 2022 [14 favorites]




The blog post highlights a detail from the Chronicle article that was a little buried but evident in retrospect, namely that it sounds like all of the particularly egregious inaccurate representations of Fierceton’s background were made by the UPenn administrators and the author of the original article about her Rhodes scholarship, where it sounds like people who read too much poverty porn without knowing much about the reality of such situations jumped to conclusions and made bad assumptions. I’ll be interested to read the coming essay in the Chronicle by Fierceton’s professors critiquing UPenn’s ideas around meritocracy - it seems like not wanting to believe that even relatively disadvantaged students need to have some advantages going for them in order to succeed at a place like UPenn is also part of this whole mess.
posted by eviemath at 2:25 PM on January 10, 2022 [16 favorites]


(Ideefixe, that link was already posted upthread.)
posted by eviemath at 2:26 PM on January 10, 2022


There’s a bit of a donut hole for upper-class children with abusive parents when they start out in life.

I was never abused or upper class but my parents did well in their careers and in school. But they were neglectful about passing the skills they learned (as first-generation graduates) on to me, and I couldn't hack school at all. I barely passed high school and didn't start undergrad until I was 35. (I was supposed to be gifted because I had a psych report commissioned by my mom when I was about 11, to prove it to my teachers...) Hoo-boy, I struggled.

So the question of privilege is interesting and multi-dimensional. I had everything I needed except that. Some of my poor friends had nothing they needed, except that. It's weird the way those advantages shake out.
posted by klanawa at 2:28 PM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]


On reading that blog post this is a horrifying, egregious story. The college is simply retaliating against a student who brought to light a terrible, pointless, utterly predictable tragedy in one of their rickety old piece of shit buildings. All of these places are the same, they hate their students and they love their ugly old buildings and giving themselves raises. It's so gross.
posted by bleep at 2:48 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]


From the pastebin: "Writing about personal trauma in your college application is common enough that there are guides on how to do it. In an op-ed published last year by The New York Times, a high-school senior confessed to mixed emotions about the pressure to “sell your pain” in your essay, as if suffering was somehow a prerequisite. While admissions officers at highly selective institutions will insist that it’s not necessary to highlight the darkest aspects of your upbringing, the need to set yourself apart is real."

Yup. I remember seeing that kind of thing a lot.

I'm not sure what to say on the "first generation" thing. Heck, my parents didn't go to 4-year-school and I don't think any of my grandparents did (aunts and uncles have gone to college), but my mom would be all "I went to community college!" and then dropped out to get married without finishing. I didn't claim it but kind of wondered if that counted or not. It sounds like Penn loopholed that one on their own, actually.

But really, this just feels like a retaliation story. They found a chink in the armor and went for it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:56 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


The really sad thing for me is how an abusive parent manages to reach out and ruin things for their child even after the child suffered pain and hardship to free herself.

There seems little doubt that the poor girl was physically and psychologically abused by her mother, which left her without emotional or financial support halfway through her junior year of high school. I'm not a doctor, but I also have to wonder if the seizure she suffered while at Penn had something to do with the injuries that got her taken into foster care?

Expending so many resources to dig down into the details of one kid's framing of her past on an application struck. me as an egregious error in judgement on the part of UPenn until I read the blog post, but now I think it's simple retaliation. I hope that retaliation turns out to be an error in judgement, too.
posted by rpfields at 3:15 PM on January 10, 2022 [15 favorites]


This story makes me angry.

Taking a person's failure to remember precise details of a traumatic event they experienced as a child as an indicator of lack of integrity is counter to everything we now understand about trauma and memory. It's not like there's no objective corroboration that something went seriously wrong in her family life. She was in the hospital for nearly three weeks (and maybe they were having trouble finding somewhere to discharge her to, but she wasn't taking up an ICU bed for a few days for that reason!). She went into foster care--from the demographic where it's almost impossible to end up there if you have a living close relative. Without some evidence of deliberate falsification, who cares whether she actually had blood in her hair or just how swollen her facial features were?

With respect to the "first generation" issue, yes, people do use the term to mean different things. (I've even seen it used, in the grad school context, to describe people whose parents don't have graduate degrees.) Lacking an explicit definition on the application, an applicant is likely to google on the school website to look for one. This hardly sounds like someone seeking a Secret Loophole to rules-lawyer. Especially since someone who is doing spectacularly enough in college to win a Rhodes would hardly need whatever "boost" she'd get on her grad school application. If you're doing well enough to win a Rhodes, you're doing well enough to get into almost any grad school program you meet the basic admissions criteria for, to say nothing of an MSW program at a school you already attend. Again, perhaps an unfortunate misunderstanding, but nothing to question her integrity.
posted by praemunire at 3:32 PM on January 10, 2022 [14 favorites]


Re: paywall, it may not be universally accessible, but if others prefer to read stories on the sites that reported and wrote them, I was just able to access the Chronicle of Higher Education story without issue across at least two devices.
posted by eponym at 3:36 PM on January 10, 2022


Wow. So much skullduggery and pain.

Reading the story made my head spin, and I think no one knows what really went on, but you don't usually get removed from a mother without something radically wrong. Maybe she wasn't raised in poverty, but thrown into poverty or unmoored even for a year is not nothing on a perseverance scale.

All the First Gen talk - I can't put down a judgment on that right now, but I think that unsupported or 'new to this' behavior includes not knowing to hang up on that first Zoom call and get a lawyer to talk for you. When the people who confer degrees have their knives out they are going to damage your ability to make a living forever. I wouldn't have hung up, but many of my friends would have known to.

This was a thing taken away that was awarded, that is different in my mind from raising a flag during the application process. Penn puts in writing things they could not know - calling an account 'fictitious,' etc. I don't know how this helps Penn in any way. I won't be encouraging my kids to apply there.
posted by drowsy at 3:42 PM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


Do I disbelieve this young woman? Not exaaaaaactly: I imagine it was a chaotic time, and traumatic in the immediate aftermath. But by the time she was applying for a post-grad program like Rhodes, she should have processed it well enough to be fully aware of the difference between a "poem" and biographical information.


I can't really find myself able to blame a 22 (ish?) year old for not having fully processed her abusive mother's putting her in the hospital for 3 weeks and then ending up in foster care. It isn't entirely clear to me what she wrote specifically in the Rhodes applications, as I assume the admissions essay that was more creative-nonfictiony was to Penn.

And it does seem that, according to how Penn defines it, she was first generation -- and surely she counted as low income at that time?
The university’s student-conduct office obtained three versions of the personal statement she submitted to Rhodes, including one she used to apply for a scholarship. They’re largely identical, though in one version she says her foster friends referred to themselves as “the fab five,” and in another she says it was “the fantastic five.”
This is just looking for something to be mad at.
posted by jeather at 3:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [11 favorites]


This is just looking for something to be mad at.

Of course it was - the school was looking to harm her for the "sin" of providing a grieving widow evidence of the school's lack of maintenance leading to the death of her husband.

Careers need to end over this. All the people involved in this farce need to not have jobs anymore.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:24 PM on January 10, 2022 [7 favorites]


This sounds like it could get very expensive for the University and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
posted by interogative mood at 4:24 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


Also, the Chronicle of Higher Education's little lie of omission regarding Driver's wrongful death lawsuit is an act of journalistic malpractice. It's clear that the school intended to retaliate against her, and hiding that salient detail changes the story. (And given that a lawsuit has been filed, it should not have been difficult for the Chronicle writer to find out about it.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:41 PM on January 10, 2022 [14 favorites]


Mod note: Made the main link the Chronicle link and put the archive link right after it, to make it a little more clear.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 4:42 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]


This sounds like it could get very expensive for the University and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

One must hope.

Also, the Chronicle of Higher Education's little lie of omission regarding Driver's wrongful death lawsuit is an act of journalistic malpractice. It's clear that the school intended to retaliate against her, and hiding that salient detail changes the story.

I wonder about this as well. It's all kind of reminding me about the Kidneygate story, with another journalist deliberately framing things in a way that grows less and less justifiable with every piece of excluded information that comes to light.
posted by rpfields at 4:45 PM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


I'm an employee at UPenn (for the next couple of weeks, anyway -- I'm moving on to the next thing next month), and while I have absolutely no knowledge of this case, I did find this quote from the blog post, taken from two Penn professors, to be interesting:
"Still, in selecting Rhodes candidates, Penn officials had heard what they wanted to hear, and told Mackenzie’s story in the way that they wanted to tell it," the professors wrote. "The Philadelphia Inquirer had done the same when reporting on her Rhodes award. As the media buzz grew, Mackenzie’s high school time in foster care was made to sound like a lifetime in foster care, despite the precision of Mackenzie’s own statements and her subsequent efforts at correction."
Like I said, I have no personal knowledge as to the accuracy of these professors' interpretation here. But I can say this is quite representative of some of the worse aspects of the culture of this institution that I've encountered. Penn is a large and multifaceted place, and I've had wonderful professional relationships with many brilliant, hardworking, honest academics here. But there's also a culture that not only tolerates but encourages overselling and exaggeration in many forms. I don't think this culture is unique to Penn but is endemic in much of "elite" higher education. I do not know anything about the specific individuals involved in this story, but the type of behavior described in this quote is definitely something that would not surprise me to encounter at an Ivy League school, based on my time working at one.
posted by biogeo at 4:51 PM on January 10, 2022 [33 favorites]


But there's also a culture that not only tolerates but encourages overselling and exaggeration in many forms.

And this justifies retaliation against a whistleblower (which is what your employer is currently engaged in)...how, exactly? The reality is that UPenn went after Fierceton after she supplied Driver's widow with testimony and details for her wrongful death lawsuit (because apparently UPenn maintains buildings that cannot be accessed by emergency personnel in a timely manner.) Any other issues pale in comparison to that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:36 PM on January 10, 2022


The Chronicle seemed to be trying to decide whether to do a "both sides!" argument or what seems to be the "wow did Penn ever fuck over this student" one, and I'm curious what internal reasons have pushed them to the former.
posted by jeather at 5:41 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


As the media buzz grew, Mackenzie’s high school time in foster care was made to sound like a lifetime in foster care, despite the precision of Mackenzie’s own statements

Yeah, there was a reference to an AP story which described her as "bouncing around" foster care. If she used that phrase or one like it then that would have been a pretty deceptive framing of her experience, but I'd be willing to bet, absent specific evidence to the contrary, that she didn't. Some reporter or Penn media rep probably heard "in foster care" and decided to jazz it up with a hackneyed phrase that describes some (but not all) children within the foster system.
posted by jackbishop at 6:13 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


And this justifies retaliation against a whistleblower (which is what your employer is currently engaged in)...how, exactly?

What part of biogeo's comment was attempting to justify UPenn's behavior?

I attended an elite institution and I perceived very little tolerance for "messiness"--or at least ongoing messiness. A lot of classism, mental health stuff was hush-hush, and if you were demonstrating "weakness" it was very necessary that you still be achieving at a very high level even with it. That's the only way to be messy and acceptable.

So to me them going after her is symptomatic of their disdain for active messiness. For students who caused difficulty. They're embarrassed. That's on top of the sensitivity of "elite" schools to accusations that their students are privileged and exaggerate their accomplishments and didn't truly earn their place. The institutional version of imposter syndrome, except there is some truth to it. A messy student whose messiness is tied to overstating her accomplishments? What could be worse? I could see them doing this even without the whistleblower issue.
posted by Anonymous at 6:24 PM on January 10, 2022


I'm pretty sure the Rhodes doesn't stipulate this capacious definition, and they rightly felt hoodwinked.

I actually strongly, strongly disagree with this.

Schools all use different definitions of first-generation students, the more expansive the better to be able to advertise how many they have. I'll bet they have that definition and do hope that it includes more people so they can seem more diverse, and that they're doing this to this young woman is absolutely monstrous and I wish there was somewhere to send her a support letter.

bUt wErE yOuR rIbS rEaLlY bRoKeN, come the fuck on Penn.
posted by corb at 6:28 PM on January 10, 2022 [18 favorites]


I think biogeo was talking about the Penn administrators upselling and exaggerating their student’s story, not Fierceton herself. Which is what I also noticed from both links.
posted by eviemath at 6:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]


Still, in selecting Rhodes candidates, Penn officials had heard what they wanted to hear, and told Mackenzie’s story in the way that they wanted to tell it," the professors wrote. "The Philadelphia Inquirer had done the same when reporting on her Rhodes award. As the media buzz grew, Mackenzie’s high school time in foster care was made to sound like a lifetime in foster care, despite the precision of Mackenzie’s own statements and her subsequent efforts at correction."

When I graduated from undergrad I won one of the university's high prestige awards/scholarships. The university newspaper (the one put out by the university itself, sent to alumni, used for press and fundraising etc. , not the student paper) did a pull out profile on the award winners. They interviewed me and hired a photographer to take pictures of me and my professors.

When the little pull-out came out, I was kind of horrified. I mean the things in the profile were technically true, but they made it sound like I walked on water (I do not!). And I was embarrassed because I thought "people I know are going to read this and they're going to think I'm the one who presented myself this way to the interviewer." And I told this to one of my professors and she explained to me that the purpose of the article was not to make me sound good, but to make the University sound good. Students who walk on water make the university look good.

So Penn bragged about her and embellished her story when it was to their benefit and then when she was costing them money they sought to discredit her and attempted to punish her for helping a grieving widow.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:59 PM on January 10, 2022 [38 favorites]


But there's also a culture that not only tolerates but encourages overselling and exaggeration in many forms.

They did give a degree to Trump and to three of his kids, so that does seem to track.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:06 PM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


NoxAeternum, I think you may have misread my comment. The professors are accusing Penn administrators of exploiting and exaggerating Fierceton's story to advance the university's reputation and interests, then turning on her when their exaggerated version of her story was questioned. This is the behavior my comment was addressing, and it was a criticism or condemnation, not an attempt at justification.
posted by biogeo at 8:31 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]


If only I had a penguin… I was similarly profiled three times for various college and newspaper publications because they were very excited to have pictures of a student in a wheelchair to plaster everywhere. Every single time I was egregiously misquoted at least once, among other misrepresentations. It did take me three tries to learn to stop doing them.
posted by brook horse at 8:41 PM on January 10, 2022 [21 favorites]


the article is a little stomach-turning in the way it appears to (and I think does) present the facts, factually, but in between every line is whisper-screaming self-dramatizing cluster-B fabulist in a way I suppose the author thinks is subtle. I think it is unsubtle and despicable and I do not care that she renamed herself something extremely silly with the word "fierce" in it. who fucking cares. she lightly embellished; she did not invent. you know what kind of accused abuser denies the abuse? all of them. innocent people deny it and guilty people deny it. and guilty people frequently deny it while admitting it: I never hit him, he just ran into my fist. just as this woman's mother did.

incidentally, you know what kind of person tends to embellish every real misfortune they suffer and make every true story just a little bit better and play dramatically to an ever-judging audience as if life without kind judgment is death? people who've been abused and had their suffering denied or ignored by their parents for most of their lives.
posted by queenofbithynia at 10:45 PM on January 10, 2022 [26 favorites]


Let's say there was a person who was maybe abusive towards their child, accusations are out there, but I'm not really sure about them.

Then let's say this person finds out about some major accomplishment their child has made and goes to special effort to reach out and destroy that, in a clearly vindictive fashion.

So now am I thinking, "Well, that parent has really vindicated herself"?

Or is it more, "Well, that person really confirmed 1000% what an abusive parent she is."?
posted by flug at 12:17 AM on January 11, 2022 [28 favorites]


Shoulda taken the easy way to get Penn degrees and do what I did:

Wallow in unmedicated mental illness until your mid 30s, have a series of heart surgeries that firmly implant the reality of your own mortality in your brain, quit your restaurant job with a vague plan to 'go back to school', get a job at Penn making very little money as a personal assistant to an asshole department chair, use the backdoor staff undergrad school (LPS) to get admitted despite not having the academic bonafides, convert that into a submatriculation in the fancy engineering school that would never have accepted you, complete both degrees at the same time in four years by taking 4 classes / semester and 2 every summer so you only ever get charged undergrad tuition rates, pay for it all by using the tuition benefits from your jobs + federal loans, burn out so hard from 80 hours a week for four years that you develop a seemingly permanent oromandibular dystonia and air hunger, graduate with a bachelors in cognitive science and a masters in computer science, move to the netherlands, hang out with horses, look for a job.

easy peasy
posted by lazaruslong at 12:17 AM on January 11, 2022 [19 favorites]


Medical records are intended to be tools used in treatment and not infallible records of all the stuff that might have happened. For instance, if head injury has already been ruled out, maybe the blood in the hair doesn't get documented. Ideally it should since this was also evidence of a crime but medically it might just not get written down. We anyway have witness testimony from the nurse who helped to wash it out.

The "I was the first person in my family to go to college because I have cut my mother out of my life and thus am a family of one" just doesn't wash for me, and neither does the "I'm first generation because my mother, a high-powered doctor, isn't an ivy league graduate."

I agree with the second point, the "non-elite" qualification is there to recognise that people who have one parent with a year of community college are not the same as people whose parents met at Yale and nobody who has a doctor as a parent should qualify for that. However on the first point, Penn themselves defined it that way as indeed they are entitled to and in the absence of an unambiguous official national definition, she was entitled to use that same definition.

Generally, it basically looks like she has put the most helpful spin on her experiences which is something that literally everyone does, but that the fundamental thrust of her story is true. It's clear that something very serious happened between her and her mother, as a result of which she spent extended time in the hospital. That part of the reason for the length of her stay was the profound mental shock of what happened rather than physical injury doesn't take away from that. Did she spend time in foster care? Yes, that's not in dispute either.

Or is it more, "Well, that person really confirmed 1000% what an abusive parent she is."?

Hell yes. While we don't know exactly what happened on the fateful way or before, this is behaviour that is so clearly malicious and cruel that it tells you exactly what kind of person this.

I genuinely think that her personal statements are no less truthful than typical for someone applying to an elite institution now. You always emphasize the challenges and if there's trauma, that's even better. I happen to think the whole valorisation of trauma is tremendously distasteful but that's the culture and that's the game. A bit rich for Penn to now pretend to be horrified about it.

It's also so clear that this is retaliation. Nobody audits the exact details of these personal statements. I didn't put in mine that I like to spend my time playing video games and jacking off as well as reading non fiction books about scientific discovery, somehow I don't think I would have gotten in if I'd been rigorously honest about my real personality and interests as a 17 year old.
posted by atrazine at 3:41 AM on January 11, 2022 [19 favorites]


I grew up poor (duct tape on my shoes during middle school, free lunch and breakfast gang and never thought twice about it), but my father did go to college at the local colleges and did get two masters degrees. I would feel conflicted on writing "First Generation" on my college application (and I didn't back in the day) because although I grew up in a working poor/welfare house, I did not grow up in a house where higher education was an impossibility.

But I'm now of the mind that the best way to offer prestigious ivy league or Rhodes scholarships and admission is sortition. Once you whittle down through qualifications to a good base pool of applicants, just randomly select the Rhodes scholars, because I think that would be more fair than whatever we have now, where students go through elaborately curated structures to appear as the person that Oxford or whomever wants the most. Just randomly pick. Some will get it, others wont, and let both know that it was chance that finally divided the haves from the have-nots, even in a supposed meritocracy.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:35 AM on January 11, 2022 [11 favorites]


incidentally, you know what kind of person tends to embellish every real misfortune they suffer and make every true story just a little bit better and play dramatically to an ever-judging audience as if life without kind judgment is death? people who've been abused and had their suffering denied or ignored by their parents for most of their lives.

I mean. Yeah. You kind of have to learn to, honestly; my gut impulse is to minimize everything I've survived, in part because I'm used to not receiving support for any of it, and that has absolutely not served me well. People who are acutely struggling usually can muster the outrage and surprise at unfair and painful treatment to identify things as unfair and confidently demand better. If you are chronically struggling and that's become your normal, especially if you've been there since childhood, and no one seems to notice or care.... well, you either accept that this is how life is or you develop skills to make people care, often while struggling with worrying you are overexaggerating the entire way. You struggle with identifying what will register to other people as unfair enough to justify lifting you up and giving you any support at all.

I come from a pretty wealthy family, and I went to a state college on HOPE scholarship (free in state tuition, at least theoretically available to anyone capable of keeping a 3.0 at a state school) specifically because I did not trust my parents not to threaten my tuition to control me, and I was acutely aware of how vulnerable I was if they chose to try to crush me, and how little provocation would inspire my mother to try. At the same time, I was and remain acutely aware of the privileges I had because my parents are who they are and value certain things, like advanced education, the way that they do. It's hard to figure out where to fairly place my own struggles in relation to others: everything I have survived "feels" very minimal to me, because minimization is a strategy for remaining sane, but the process of receiving support or validation for any of it requires me to frame my experiences deliberately to emphasize that I have struggled. It is hard to know what is "fair" because none of it is fair. At the same time, we all need validation occasionally, and I am not an exception.

Abusive and very wealthy parents who remain invested in controlling their children are also a looming threat even when you are no longer a legal child, even when you do not rely on parental financial support, even when you have divested yourself from their safety net. After all, who knows when your parents might seize an opportunity to try to crush you by cutting you away from support sources, or try to use whatever their professional connections are to stalk you.

I routinely receive legal threats when I talk about my mother in venues she can find (i.e. on Twitter, where my full name is on my profile so I can network with other professionals in my field; certainly on Facebook if I could use that without dissociating). My spouse, whose father is Canadian military, used his professional networks to stalk them and disclose information about them to employers in the past. I'm lucky in that my mother is not a skilled communicator or very good at manipulating people who aren't predisposed to like her; I know quite a few people whose abusive parents may have fewer tangible resources when lashing out at them but who are also better at framing situations to win support from people who do have more resources. Because there's really quite a lot that a parent can do to hurt you if they're still emotionally bound up in your existence and invested in you in adulthood, even if you are careful to emphasize boundaries.

I just... I wonder what children of wealthy and abusive people are "supposed" to do about any of it. The institutions should be ashamed of themselves, but it really is with them that power truly lies, and of course they have as vested an interest in controlling the narrative as anyone.
posted by sciatrix at 7:06 AM on January 11, 2022 [24 favorites]


The more I hear about these so-called 'elite' universities, the less I respect them and the degrees they confer. The 'investigations' described were nothing short of a witch-hunt against someone doing exactly what every single student has been forced to do to gain admission.
posted by dg at 4:30 PM on January 11, 2022 [5 favorites]


I work in a newborn ICU and, surprisingly to most people, the vast majority of what we see gets better in a few days and just needs very limited support, (nasal cannula, antibiotics, fluid) often the kind of support that used to be offered at a lot of special care nurseries attached to labor and delivery units. It's not unusual for us to do literally nothing, just observe for 6-12 hours and send back to the nursery across the street. Almost every parent, however, is terrified and justifiably so, this is often their first exposure to inpatient health care and this is also one of the highest stakes times in their life so far. So when I hear people talk about how their baby almost died from transient tachypnea of the newborn, I just accept it as their reality because... well the fact that it's the truth to them is probably all that matters?

Also, I was not a first generation college student, but I grew up with my mom who had a job that didn't require any education at all and generally learned a lot more about college from my brother in law but was too dumb to really ask for his help and kinda stumbled my way through... everything. Through much of my life I've felt more comfortable with people who were first generation and related hard to JD Vance in his book (man, remember when we didn't really know how much JD Vance sucked?). That being said- I grew up in a stable home, and having a history of working with kids who don't have a stable home, that is clearly 100x more impactful on how kids do navigating the rigid structures of educational institutions than the fact no one told me how financial aid worked, or knew that grad schools had application deadlines, or whatever other trivial issues I could complain about.

I'm not sure how to connect these thoughts. I feel like attempting to distinguish how different levels of trauma affected someone while they are still an adolescent is critical but also impossible? Like would it just be easier and just as valid if everyone checked through a list of Adverse Childhood Events and took a picture of the house they grew up in and call it a day?
posted by midmarch snowman at 5:04 PM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


This story was kind of triggering for me, and I haven’t really come to terms with it yet because it brought up things I haven’t thought about for a long time.

In my ~900 student senior class at an almost all white high school serving an upper middle class section of a major US city, I had the the highest SATs, the highest achievement test scores on each of the three tests I took, the highest aggregate score among 12 National Merit semifinalists despite having the lowest score in the English grammar section, the highest score in the state on a chemistry test for a full scholarship at a technical college in the state (which I wouldn’t have attended under any circumstances), and the highest AP test scores. My parents didn’t know any of this because I didn’t tell them, and I hid almost everything that came from the school, although my mother did find the College Board booklet with my SAT and achievement test scores printed on it behind a dresser drawer in late April (she was very hurt; so was my father and I had a hard time explaining myself, but I still didn’t tell them about any of the rest).

I applied to only one in-state school, and I turned the application in a month and a half late because I had mistaken the date the application was supposed to be complete for the due date. And I crossed out all the sections that asked for my personal history, extracurricular activities, interests, charitable activities, vision for the future, personal statement and so forth, mainly because I always hated that stuff and thought it was stupid, but also because I thought they had no right to ask such personal questions. I got in but I didn’t get any kind of scholarship or other financial aid, my parents made it clear they didn't have the money to send me (which I already knew to be true), and when I went to the office of financial aid to ask about the possibility of getting some, the counselor looked over my records and blew up at me, asked what the Hell I thought I was doing there, and ordered me out of his office.

I didn’t feel mistreated by any of that and I still don’t, but I have wished I’d found it a little easier to do what other people expected of me.
posted by jamjam at 7:42 PM on January 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm not shocked that the journalist who wrote this felt the need to embellish the story so that it appears there is some nuance in this conflict between a poor college kid and a billion dollar institution when the rather obvious facts show bureaucratic bullying of a student in response to third party legal concerns... but the irony of that choice isn't lost on me.
posted by RajahKing at 12:21 PM on January 12, 2022 [9 favorites]


The Chronicle of Higher Ed article takes pains to present the story in a measured tone, but by the end I felt that the evidence pointed towards pretty heinous overreach by Penn. But then with the additional info and context presented in the Big Trial blog post...JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. I hope this story gets blown wide open from every angle. Gross.
posted by desuetude at 6:35 PM on January 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


jimjam, your story reminds me of a guy in my sister's class in our upper middle class high school who got the highest SAT scores in her class (near perfect). It surprised people because although this guy seemed smart enough, he didn't hang out with the 'smart' kids and seemed to be more of a 'tradesman' kind of guy than a college bound person. Nevertheless he decided that just maybe he should go to college after all. This all infuriated his abusive father. He ended up taking his life.

I think for many people it may be hard to imagine parents not wanting their kids to excel and trying hard to hold them back.

So you get lots of pats on the back from me for persevering in spite of life giving you lots of difficult, unnecessary hurdles.
posted by eye of newt at 4:29 PM on January 14, 2022 [2 favorites]


« Older Cakes, they are glorious   |   Electricity, ee-lec-tricity Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments