Her University Celebrated Her Inspiring Story. Then It Started Asking Questions
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
A summary of the major points:
- Mackenzie Fierceton got into UPenn as a FGLI student (first-generation and/or low income) when she wrote an entrance essay on ending up in a hospital as a result of abuse from her mother
- The Philadelphia Inquirer plugged her as some sort of inspirational story of a foster youth who grew up poor and made it to attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar
- They got an anonymous tip that Fierceton actually grew up solidly middle class and attended a private school. She wasn't 'first-generation, low income'; her mother was a radiologist.
- The university launched an investigation into Fierceton and is withholding her degree
- The Rhodes Trust had their own investigation and recommended withdrawing their offer; she voluntarily declined the scholarship after this
- What's the truth? Well, apparently she never claimed to have grown up poor - that was the work of journalists. She was very open about having graduated from a private school. While her mother was charged with child abuse, those charges were dropped and the prosecutor said he wasn't certain about the case. But she was definitely hospitalised for three weeks, and after that spent a year in foster care
- The university's objections seem incredibly petty. She didn't really have her hair caked in blood as she said in her admissions essay (one of the nurses recalls washing blood out of Fierceton's hair). Her mother didn't actually abuse her since the charges were dropped (her mother said she just tripped and fell, and I suppose she spent a year living in foster care as a ruse to get into an Ivy League university). She misrepresented herself as being a 'first generation student' (UPenn's FGLI program bizarrely has a definition of a first generation student being the first generation in their family to have attended an 'elite' university).
- Why is UPenn doing this? Fierceton alleges this is because she is one of the witnesses in a wrongful death lawsuit, and that the anonymous tip sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Rhodes Trust was from an official at the school who is trying to discredit her as a witness.