Penn student who aged out of foster care wins prestigious Rhodes Mackenzie Fierceton has been named a 2021 Rhodes Scholar. [2], Some of those Morrison talked with did believe her; a classmate of Fierceton's recalled people likening her to the protagonist of the film Gone Girl, about a Missouri woman who disappears in order to avenge herself on an adulterous husband, whom she makes it appear killed her. Again following the advice of her college counselor, she did not identify her parents on her application, since she was estranged from both of them (she describes them both as "biological"[3][2]). His mother went to Oxford. She bounced from one foster home to the next. At Oxford University, Mackenzie Fierceton will conduct research on the "foster care-to-prison" pipeline. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]. In 2019, Fierceton testified in a court hearing that, in September 2014, her mother allegedly pushed her down a set of stairs and hit her in the face several times. Overcoming the Obstacles of Abuse | by Laurie B. Timms - Medium Her account was not completely inaccurateshe described as a foster child one sibling of hers who was actually the biological child of her foster parents, for instance, which she attributed later to not having developed her essay at length. 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. A friend passed me the link to this article last week.. And now they have to face the fact that someone who looks like them, who shares all these identities with them, could be the source of all of this harm. The 23-year-old planned to use the scholarship to go to Oxford to pursue a Ph.D. in social policy. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of. [1]:111112, Penn's investigators asked Fierceton why she had pretended to be asking on another's behalf when she made her queries within the university. Mackenzie Fierceton: The Problem with Elite Colleges, The - Reddit According to Fierceton, her mother pushed her down the stairs and then beat her extensively at the bottom. A Rhodes Scholar recipient at the University of Pennsylvania saw her scholarship candidacy revoked when the truth rose to the surface: Her life story, as told to the Rhodes committee, was falsified.. Mackenzie Fierceton wrote a compelling story, starting with her application to University of Pennsylvania, known as Penn colloquially, where she claimed that she survived being a foster child. [2], Fierceton was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn) on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. Fierceton believes it was likely sent by Morrison or one of her close relatives. He explained that Morrison had had no prior criminal record, Fierceton's complaints about her mother's boyfriend and prescription drug abuse had been unsubstantiated, her cousin had witnessed no abuse while living with the Morrisons at a time prior to the incident, and he had learned that Fierceton "had regular temper tantrums, beyond the normal range for an adolescent". Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison,[1]:6364,86) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. A former St. Louisan who shared a story of a childhood spent in foster homes has lost her 2021 Rhodes Scholarship. ", However, in its report, Penn notes that Fierceton had, in an essay (which it allows may not have actually been submitted) for her application for a travel, The Rhodes report acknowledged her documentation of an email she wrote to a reporter at the, Penn's investigation noted that even if Fierceton had been referring to the Chesterfield police rather than the. Its account focused on the Rhodes controversy, discussing her and Driver's suits near the end, and recalling some other recent instances of academic dishonesty, including one 2009 Harvard student whose largely fabricated high school records were only discovered when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. Dismissal of mother's charges and expurgation of records, Role in wrongful death suit against university, In its response to Fierceton's suit, Penn quotes Fierceton as telling police as soon as they entered her hospital room after her later injury about her diary and that it would tell them everything they would need to know. According to the Dailymail, 24-year-old Mackenzie Fierceton described herself as a low-income, queer, first-generation student at the Pennsylvania school. Volume 67 Number 21 | University of Pennsylvania Almanac The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Mackenzie Fierceton claims that Penn officials targeted the grad student for retaliation after she became a key witness in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the university. Massachusetts : Harvard University : Shera S. Avi-Yonah : Lincoln, MA . And yet, Fierceton is still attending Oxford University. Another girl told me that she was low-income because her dad makes $400,000 a year, and that's "New York poor." Each . While the investigators understood, they also wrote that the limited information she provided may have been more likely to elicit an answer favorable to her. A 2021 Rhodes Scholar for Penn | Penn Today She found Fierceton's diary at the house and read it, then interviewed teachers and administrators at Whitfield, learning of Morrison's insulting texts to Fierceton. In between those placements, she slept at friends' houses for long periods. [2], Teachers noticed that Fierceton often seemed physically uncomfortable in her mother's presence, and a close friend noted that she was often injured. [14], Fierceton and her faculty supporters have suspected that Penn's investigation of her, and its determination to cast aspersions on her credibility, may be related to her role in fomenting a wrongful death suit filed against the university in August 2020, before she had been announced as a Rhodes Scholarship winner. Gathering outside Caster, whose renovation they also demanded, they marched toward College Hall, where Winkelstein had taken over as interim provost following Gutmann's departure, and chanted for her ouster as well. ", Morrison said. 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. The stunning colours and quality of light of the Provence-Alpes-Cte d'Azur region have seduced the globe's greatest artists for many generations, fostering a fertile hub of. Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Rhodes Scholarship Revoked: White Woman Grad Student Lied She - NewsOne [2], Shortly after the Rhodes investigation began, Rafaelle was informed that Penn was proposing to revoke Fierceton's bachelors on the grounds of her apparent self-misrepresentation. Did This Rhodes Wannabe Lie About Her Background? - Gawker Or was the real issue that Fierceton did not really fit the profile of a suffering student who needed the benevolence of an Ivy League school?" Her mother was a doctor and Fierceton attended a prep school, but she was allegedly abused at home and ended up in foster. [2][g], The packages she says she received were supplemented by hangup calls, which a faculty member Fierceton occasionally lived with recalled her receiving in the months preceding the trial of her mother's lawsuit against DSS later in her junior year. She retained two lawyers to represent her pro bono; they talked to Morrison themselves, who told them she still loved her daughter and wanted her to come home. [2], Over the middle of 2020, Fierceton became active in the Black Lives Matter protests at Penn. After the second stay, which lasted three weeks, state officials placed her in foster care and arrested her mother under child abuse charges, which were later dropped. [3], Before that happened, Fierceton withdrew from the scholarship on her own. The court granted Morrison a protection order against her former husband; Fierceton had no relationship with him from that time onward. It's because Fierceton was accused of being . "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. but she had also criticized UPenn. [3], After the interview White emailed Morrison about how it went; she wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. "She was falling apart under the academic stresses at school and was exhausted, and I believe looking for an out." Rhodes scholar denied honor after 'dishonesty' about life story Mackenzie Fierceton, a 2016 graduate of Whitfield School in Creve Coeur, lost the . Brandt, the Chesterfield police detective who had originally investigated the case, said later that the prosecutor never explained to her what that new evidence was. Her blonde hair, well-manicured appearance, and distinctive smile made . The dean of SP2 told Penn otherwise, but Fierceton noted that the school had never shared what its definition was. She feared that her mother had inflicted the injuries, perhaps out of jealousy that Lovelace was attracted to her, even as it seemed to Fierceton that Morrison was "offering [her] up to him on a silver platter". [2] Afterwards Morrison changed her daughter's last name to her own. [2], Two weeks after the New Yorker article was published, Fierceton gave an interview to The Intercept's Ryan Grim for an installment of the Deconstructed podcast. Moreover, she has kept some of the media on her side. Mackenzie Fierceton - Wikipedia he asked in the first. "[1]:119. But when you're filling out a box where it's "yes" or "no" and there's no more information or "kind of!" It, too, alleged that Fierceton was misrepresenting herself as having been poor and grown up entirely in foster care, with many photos of Fierceton as a little girl on the beach and riding horses, and other activities usually associated with affluence. By the end of the year she was in a third foster home. ", When Penn's Office of Student Conduct confronted Fierceton with the discrepancy between her statement on two of her applications that she ", The exact definition of FGLI relevant to forms Fierceton filled out is a key point in the Rhodes Trust and Penn investigations of her. "[4][2], Winkelstein followed up with a letter to Elizabeth Kiss, the trust's CEO, alerting her that the university had been investigating Fierceton's story, found it to have seriously diverged from the reality of her life, with the abuse allegations quite possibly fabricated. A Wednesday report from the Daily Mail stated that 24-year-old Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a $750,000 home in Missouri with her mother a doctor and attended a $30,000/year private high school. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? Mackenzie Fierceton: An Ivy League And Rhodes Scholarship Scandal This is what most likely impressed the University of Pennsylvania. 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. [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. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. Fierceton, according to Penn's response, had learned during her parents' divorce how to make calls to the child-abuse hotline and that teachers were mandatory reporters. The notation in her transcript remains. Supporters of Fierceton's mother called Mackenzie an emotionally manipulative girl who would injure herself and fabricate abuse indicators to be an appealing candidate for admission to an Ivy League college such as the University of Pennsylvania. She applied to a program at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice (commonly referred to at Penn as SP2) that would allow her to begin graduate studies while still an undergraduate, so she could graduate with a master's degree in the field a year after completing her undergraduate degree. She ")[3], The OSC report also concluded that nothing in her academic record warranted the revocation of either degree. [c] Chewing was difficult as well, and she had a feeding tube inserted. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. Professor Walter Licht, a Penn historian who runs the program, recalls her as the sort of student who would "[ask] a question that makes everyone stop and brings the conversation to a different pitch." Backstories By Tom Bartlett January 7, 2022 O ne Monday morning in the fall of 2020, Mackenzie. [24], In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university said the New Yorker article "did not accurately reflect" the university's investigation of the issues raised by the Rhodes Trust. Fierceton beat out more than . A cousin who lived with the Morrisons for a while did not see any signs of abuse and believed it was possible Fierceton could have inflicted the injuries herself. "She has become emboldened over time, and has been successful with her evolving tale for 6 yrs. Senior Penn admin. asked to deliver testimony in Mackenzie Fierceton's In the presence of her mother that night at their house, Mackenzie repeated the same story to a visiting caseworker, who appeared to accept it. Fellow students, student's, and Whitfield faculty noticed the signs that led them to suspect Fierceton's abuse. Fierceton had apparently made much of her status as a 'first generation, low income' student, an abuse . 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. [23] In mid-April, Penn released Fierceton's master's degree. The situation was further complicated by a lack of cell phone service in the basement, requiring students to team up and verbally relay information from the 9-1-1 operator to a professor performing CPR on Driver and back to a student posted just outside the door. "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." ", "Inside Mackenzie Fierceton's ongoing legal battle with the University", "Mackenzie Fierceton Sets the Record Straight on Losing a Rhodes Scholarship Over Accusations of 'Dishonesty', "Penn community rallies in support of former Rhodes Scholar Mackenzie Fierceton", "Universities must stop fetishizing trauma", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mackenzie_Fierceton&oldid=1144986758, controversy over representation of childhood and abuse, This page was last edited on 16 March 2023, at 16:53. [2], Morrison's arrest had been reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,[6] where commenters on the online version of the story took her side, speculating that Fierceton was "an entitled brat" who had vengefully fabricated charges that had the potential to end her mother's medical career. Doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, telling her the head injuries that had resulted in her earlier hospitalizations may have been a contributing factor to her developing it. Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. An investigation by both the Rhodes Trust and Penn concluded she failed to correct statements and impressions made in her application essays. [2], Fierceton refused, and a week before she withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship, Penn's Office of Student Conduct (OSC) notified Fierceton it, too, would be investigating. Rich privileged white girl Mackenzie Fierceton lies about being poor [9] In a news release, Penn's then-president Amy Gutmann, a daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who had herself been the first in her family to attend college,[11] spoke admiringly of Fierceton as "a first-generation low-income student and a former foster youth. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship. box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? Mackenzie Fierceton, 24,. Another local Rhodes Scholar is 21-year-old Jamal Burns, who went to Duke University after graduating from Gateway STEM High School in St. Louis. Laura Newey | Did she lie? LRB 15 February 2022 - LRB Blog PDF District 1 - Rhodes House First, Morrison had tried to send Fierceton some jewelry during her freshman year and contacted the university to find out how to get in touch with her; when Fierceton was informed of this she said she had a, "Regardless of the actual reason for her name change," Penn's lawyers write in their response to her lawsuit, "Fierceton effectively fastened a buffer of separation between her real life story and the false story she had cultivated for Penn and others. Rhodes Scholar loses scholarship over falsified past Penn, she claimed, had leaked that information to the Inquirer whose editor-in-chief was married to Louisa Shepard, the university's news director, whom she named as a defendant along with Finkelstein, White, and the university's board of trustees. She began to realize that she had no sense of identity. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. A trial was held in early 2019 at which she, Fierceton, a psychologist and a DSS investigator testified. [2], In July the OSC concluded its investigation with a 31-page report sent to provost Wendell Pritchett examining Fierceton's background more extensively than the Rhodes Trust had. "You can't couch-surf in a pandemic", Norton said. It recommended that Fierceton's master's be withheld until she paid a $4,000 fine and that her academic transcript carry a notation that she was sanctioned for her "objective inaccuracy" in answering the first-generation question on her application. In addition to reiterating many of the themes of comments made by her and her supporters in the previous articles, including criticism of the Rhodes and Penn investigations (the former of which Grim noted she was putting air quotes around when she mentioned it), she expressed a belief that her story had triggered a defensive anxiety in women like Finkelstein and White:[4]. "We would never have believed any of it if we weren't living it." Student Misleads With Story of Poverty and Abuse and Wins Rhodes Others echoed the criticism. "Once you do something that the University sees as undermining its quest for power and prestige, it will not think twice about discarding you, humiliating you, and retaliating against you, which is exactly what they did" said one SP2 student in support of Fierceton. 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. She had seen no signs of abuse in the relationship and considered Fierceton to be the dominant personality in it. After the trial ended with Morrison prevailing and the agency ordered to remove her name from the child-abuse registry, Fierceton resolved to change her last name. Sunday Reading: The Misfortune of Mackenzie Fierceton This is derived from language in the federal Higher Education Act, which ties first-generation status to the educational attainment of the parent the student "regularly resides with and receives support from". 1,232 likes, 160 comments - New York Post (@nypost) on Instagram: "In November 2020, #Penn graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton won the prestigious and highly compe." New York Post on Instagram: "In November 2020, #Penn graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton won the prestigious and highly competitive #RhodesScholarship to study at #Oxford. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. Rhodes Scholar accused of lying on applications loses scholarship Her supporters at Penn have called for the university's acting provost, Beth Winkelstein, to be held accountable for her role in the investigation, characterizing it as a continuation of her abuse. Dishonesty in Application- Rhodes Scholar : r/ApplyingToCollege - Reddit [3], By the end of the interview Fierceton was crying. 'Rhodes Scholar' sues U of Penn after being accused on 'blatant Ms. Fierceton earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the College of Arts . In an ongoing personal injury lawsuit filed on Dec. 21, 2021, Fierceton a 2021 School of Social Policy & Practice and 2020 College graduate accused Penn of discrediting her status as a first-generation, . Fierceton told the story that, according to her diary, her mother had told her to tellthat she had tripped while playing with the family dogs and bruised herself on the corner of a nearby table. . She was then admitted to Penn on a full scholarship where she identified as a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student despite her background of parental estrangement and lack of financial support. [1]:64, In February 2015, before presenting the evidence against Morrison to a grand jury for an indictment, the St. Louis County district attorney's office dropped all the charges against Morrison over Brandt's objections. [H]onestly, first-generation is never something I've really identified with fully. [2], "Family is not the people you are related to by blood," she wrote in the diary. STL woman lost Rhodes scholarship for 'blatantly dishonest' Another program official that year recalls Fierceton as seeming more vulnerable than she let on; after picking her up from the hospital following bone surgery that year, she noticed that Fierceton had a very light winter coat and few other possessions. Mackenzie Fierceton, 24, had her Rhodes scholarship rescinded last year after a source told the Trust she was not 'low income' or a 'first generation' student Fierceton, who was born.
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