I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. After a teacher reported what they felt was abuse, a social worker came by and your mother was able to just charm the pants off her. "Without her trauma, she didnt matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. MF: Yeah. Not as something that is for the benefit of the MacKenzies, the people who were being brought into the school, but actually for the benefit of the university itself, its image and also for the students. Yes. But I just had a bad feeling and I started to try to find more information. And if you havent already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. RG: Nothing I have is persuasive to these people. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. But I agreed to come into this Zoom meeting and this was the last day of November 2020. So the Rhodes Trust ended up after their quote-investigation, and I submitted all the evidence, they ended up still recommending that my scholarship be rescinded, uh, but I had another opportunity to respond to their report, which I absolutely wanted to do. RG: And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. And she was shocked. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? What was the response from the readers of the paper? Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. And I think that she kind of encompassed a lot of the stereotypes that people, and also the Penn administrators have about what FGLI students are when in reality, those of us who are part of the community know that theres so many shapes and sizes of FGLI students. There were some pretty basic errors, such as my name, my birth name, and my birth place, and claiming that I didnt have a sibling, that I wasnt low-income, a lot of facts that were pretty easily disputed. Yes, it may be true that institutions like UPenn give students like Fierceton opportunities because of their story, but that does not mean her narrative is theirs for the taking. The court had ordered Fierceton and Morrison into family therapy, but the former was too afraid of the latter to do it. And I suspected that it was about this anonymous email. I have some of my own theories, but I want to hear yours. She had lived with her mother since her parents divorced acrimoniously during her childhood, and a guardian ad litem was appointed to represent Fierceton's interests in the proceeding, during which abuse allegations were made. As a result she withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship; a sympathetic Penn faculty member has paid her Oxford tuition in its stead.[2]. Just like some basic questions [laughs] and then a lot of detailed questions about my application. There was, yes, disagreement, because I said there was blood in my hair in the essay, they said there wasnt enough blood or there wasnt blood or something. Like, they want to curate a diverse experience for their well-off students, so that they can say that they had this diverse experience in college . Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . [19] The New York Post wrote that "[t]he case exposes the murky underbelly of elite schools like Penn. [2], To White, Morrison repeated her story that her daughter had fabricated the abuse allegations. So they heard from her and immediately they call you into a meeting with the deputy provost at the time, Beth Winkelstein . This definition resembles the one used in the federal Higher Education Act, which says that first-generation status depends on the education level of a parent whom a student regularly resided with and received support from.. Cause I had assumed it was her. Like one of them was describing a biological child in a house as another foster child, and something about a half-brother or something.What were those and how were those errors kind of deployed against you? MF: And with that, like you said, notion of: Well, theres no way that you went to private school and all of this could have still happened, or that you could be low-income now and this idea that socioeconomic status is permanent. The New Yorker reported it was written by an anonymous sender who displayed a great deal of familiarity with Mackenzies childhood that showed Mackenzie engaging in typical upper middle-class childhood activities, like horseback riding and going to the beach.. [2], Fierceton was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn) on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. ")[3], The OSC report also concluded that nothing in her academic record warranted the revocation of either degree. . And that feels like one of them where it feels like the system is willfully misunderstanding reality in order to bend it in their direction. I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. And we cant acknowledge that, so we then have to pick apart the other pieces of it, and say that well this, this just cant be real. Its practically half of Americans, or more. And did you find this after The New Yorker article was published? How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? RG: Interesting. I had never heard of FGLI, but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process. RG: Yeah. One trigger for the beatings was sexual abuse by one of her mother's boyfriends, Henry Lovelace, Jr., a fitness trainer and multiple winner of the Missouri's Strongest Man competition in his weight class, which her mother warned her never to talk about. I didnt encounter many of them in the two years that I was living in foster families. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. But its interesting because most of the questions are about these applications and then the second half is when it turns to these questions of the abuse. RG: I want to talk about where you think that pushback came from. [2], Morrison, no longer employed by St. Luke's, then began the process of trying to restore her reputation by having all references to it removed from the public record. Thats why Im pausing to let her catch her breath. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. "I had so much anger and grief, and I didn't want them to be affiliated in any way with this new life I was building. In addition it offered details of what its own investigation had concluded about Fierceton's childhood and adolescence that led OSC to believe it was likely that she had exaggerated or fabricated outright her claims about her mother. And MacKenzie is the only one whos allowed to answer these questions. And, in this case, almost everyone who was involved in the university administration are upper middle class or very wealthy, highly academically educated white women. RG: That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. Right. MF: She definitely asked some questions about it. I n November 2020, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton, 24, won the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. It was: Shes a spoiled little brat. Whereas a social worker comes into a poor home and looks around and sees just the normal poverty that our system has foisted on people and says: Oh, well, clearly this is somebody that needs to be stripped out of here. It called attention to claims, such as the one in her application essay, that by the time she was six she "knew every police officer in my county by their first name", a claim Fierceton herself admitted was untrue and born of her fear of her biological family when she wrote it. Fellow students, their parents and Whitfield faculty also noticed signs which led them to suspect abuse. 24-year-old Mackenzie Fierceton won the Rhodes scholarship in November 2020, but a tip-off to the prestigious committee kicked off a deeper investigation into the student's background. So Im not sure if it was Penn who reached out to her or vice versa, which I think is also an important question in all of this. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. [14], The publicity led 150 Penn students to stage a walkout from classes to demonstrate in support of Fierceton. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. RG: Right. RG: And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. January 7, 2022. Mackenzie Fierceton was named Penn's 2021 Rhodes Scholar. She told Brandt it was her mother, and asked her to keep Morrison from coming to her room. In May 2022, after a lengthy article in The New Yorker drew widespread media attention to Fierceton's story, the university dropped the charge and awarded her the degree. It seemed like there was a lack of internal emergency protocols within our grad school, the School of Social Policy & Practice. RG: And that feels like one of them where it feels like the system is willfully misunderstanding reality in order to bend it in their direction. MF: Yeah. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. Im curious, having dealt with so many people along the way, who are questioning your story, how do you feel like the boxes play into this? And she quickly got interest of a book deal because she was obviously such a great writer. Its a very under-researched field. So, I myself, had a seizure in the basement of my grad school in January, 2020, and it took over an hour to get me out of the basement because they couldnt fit a stretcher or a backboard down the stairs or the elevator. And because you were not just low-income, actually no income, other than the jobs that you were working nobody has complained about the low-income one, right? [3] The change in her living situation greatly complicated her college plans as she had no financial resources of her own. She helped SP2 assistant professor Toorjo Ghose draft and promote a petition in support of Police Free Penn, an activist group calling on the university to cut its ties with the Philadelphia Police Department over its poor relations with the largely black and Latin residents of the West Philadelphia neighborhoods around the university's campus, and rethink its own police department, the largest private one in the state. [Laughs.] Jay Caspian Kang sounded similar themes in two different New York Times newsletters discussing Fierceton's story. Mackenzie Fierceton didn't come until much later, but with good reason. And if those things are true, and youre also struggling in poverty, then something is deeply wrong with the system. And please go and leave us a rating or a review it helps people find the show. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? RG: Penn didnt respond to a request for comment, but in its response to Mackenzies lawsuit, they write: Penn denies that there are accessibility problems with the Caster Building which contributed to Mackenzies medical emergency or to [Cameron] Drivers death. And that was the end of it, right? It was more, I think, in the times after and the months after where I ended up like giving different medical records and all of these things to corroborate my account, but there were a few questions that were very specific to what had happened. Shes lying, shes a spoiled brat, this, that, and the other which looking back at the time I just felt absolutely horrible. 2020 College graduate Mackenzie Fierceton (Photo from Mackenzie Fierceton). MF: You know, I honestly dont know. Fierceton applied for the Rhodes Scholarship with assistance from Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. To me, it seems like any reader of the English language would read that in a literary sense , RG: of its self-exploration, self-doubt, trauma. And I ended up reading the comments, and the comments were just horrendous. And thats actually one of the things that, if there was any doubt whatsoever about this story, in some ways it was settled by that. But while OSC allowed that it may not have been Fierceton's explicit intent to deceive, she had still done so, particularly when checking "yes" on the question on her SP2 application as to whether she was the first in her family to attend college (Fierceton stands by her reliance on Penn's definitions of FGLI on the Penn Plus website and the applicable federal laws; the university says that question is "composed of ordinary words with everyday meanings, and it makes no reference to any term or definition appearing in any other publication. She arrives as a new student at Erinsborough High School and is connected to the . [i] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. And it started with, this paragraph-and-a-half of waking up in the hospital and then, like you said, looking at my face, not recognizing myself, and kind of describing what I felt like and what the room looked like. Or is this something thats been overlooked? And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. [2], At the beginning of the next school year, Fierceton was examined by her pediatrician, who noticed a large bruise on her arm but chose not to X-ray it, a decision the doctor later regretted. The fact that they even challenged that really does expose a lot of whats going on here because I assume in their mind, theyre saying: Well, she went to this private school; she had a nice house; her mom probably drove a nice car maybe you even drove a decent car! And so, Mackenzie, you and I were just talking offline. There was also the part of me that was terrified. [2] Winkelstein, who has a Ph.D. in bioengineering and has studied injuries,[3] then proceeded to interrogate Fierceton at length about her abuse and hospitalization, in a manner that led Fierceton to believe that not only did Winkelstein doubt her story but had spoken with Morrison. MF: I think youre right. And you experienced that yourself, right? Thats the reality of it, but we dont want to think of it that way. Its a very under-researched field. It didnt, though, to the University of Pennsylvania. "While it is possible that [she] was the cause of the alleged injuries," she wrote a month afterward, "the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented." Yeah. While Kerr noted that Fierceton's three weeks in the hospital was far longer than might be expected given the bruises that led to her admission, she also noted the absence of injuries to Fierceton's back despite having reportedly fallen or being thrown downstairs. [Laughs.]. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healing an obvious sign of child abuse.. Did you go into foster care? Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison, [1] : 63-64, 86 ) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. But the acclaim quickly devolved into acrimony as the university and the Rhodes Trust began questioning aspects of Fiercetons backstory. Uh, my lawyer. And I dont remember exactly what their statement was, but they disputed it. At first she went to a friend's home in Ohio and then returned to the Philadelphia area as May and graduation approached to live with a classmate's family. And theres also literature thats economic literature versus sociology, different fields have different perspectives on what that relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system is and what the causes are. In addition to the complaint she had made against Lovelace, a similar complaint to police that her mother was abusing prescription drugs also did not yield any evidence to support it. This can happen to someone in my community. When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. And to me, I'm like I am a household of one, so I am the only person in my family. I want to talk about where you think that pushback came from. But she says she occasionally received packages at her dorm room containing objects she suspected had come from her mother, such as a bracelet with an inscription about finding the truth, or others close to her, such as a pair of sneakers, which she believed Lovelace, who had sometimes helped her stretch before workouts, had sent. Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . Fierceton was mentioned in the complaint as having experienced similar issues following her seizure; she was deposed in the suit in March 2021, the month before the university's investigation led her to withdraw from the Rhodes Scholarship. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. I had never heard of FGLI, but we dont want to talk where... Nurse 's station should she make the attempt situation greatly complicated her college plans as she had no financial of. 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