If we review your medical records, are we going to see you had broken ribs and facial injuries? 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 . A 24-year-old Rhodes Scholar has left the prestigious program after being accused of lying about growing up poor, reports say. RG: Right. When they did, they were unable to get stretchers or backboards down Caster's stairways or elevators as there was insufficient space. Her admission to Oxford was unaffected, and she began her graduate studies in sociology there later in the year, with a Penn professor covering her tuition. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. 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.. RG: And it has, has she stuck by that? Also, there was a delay in getting the Penn Police there because they didnt know where the building was. MF: She definitely asked some questions about it. Photograph by Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. Penn claims that was meant purely for purposes of the program, to attract as many students as possible who could benefit from participation in it. Like you said, I was called into a meeting. So the students had to form a human chain from the first floor down to the basement where all our classes are to relay instructions from the paramedics, the Philadelphia paramedics, to the professor who was, to my understanding, performing CPR. And I decided to do it cause I felt like I had nothing to lose and I ended up making gratitude lists every day for years and it really was a very healing experience for me. And that is, I felt very defeated too. The Inquirer story came out in November 2020. She was an independent student when she applied. And what area of it are you going to explore with your Ph.D.? Fierceton. The reporter had assumed based on her status as a FGLI student which stands for first-generation, low-income that she had been poor her entire life. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. "[b] She considered running away but had a distant relationship with her father, and nowhere else she believed she could go. [10], Fierceton, who outside of school had also taken on a volunteer position as a birthing doula, decided during that summer to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to get a Ph.D. at Oxford University in England, encouraged by a classmate who had just won one himself and was impressed by her activism. MF: Absolutely. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? [Laughs.] And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. Whereas white parents, a lot of times, it is much harder the bar is much higher to remove them from their homes because their whiteness or possibly class privilege or whatever identities that they have that might not fit a social worker or judges or whoevers involved perception of whose kids should be in the foster system. MF: You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. So those questions really came later. And so they had to see some benefit to them in doing this. But the acclaim quickly devolved into acrimony as the university and the Rhodes Trust began questioning aspects of Fiercetons backstory. And please go and leave us a rating or a review it helps people find the show. As in her case, first responders had experienced similar delays in finding and reaching the building, and difficulties removing Driver once they did due to the same accessibility issues. Medical records, records from child welfare services, corroborating letters from detectives and lawyers and elementary, middle, and high school teachers, childhood friends, professors basically everyone who had known me. Like questioning: How much blood? I had never heard of FGLI, but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process. Later, another Whitfield parent Morrison had talked to told this woman that she believed Fierceton had done this to get admitted to an Ivy League college, an idea which she found preposterous. And so, like I mentioned earlier, I dont want to go over too much of the history that led up to your battle with Penn and with the Rhodes trust, because people can find that in The New Yorker article that came out recently, you went over that in some pretty decent length; in Katie Courics podcast in a recent interview there. 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? This could happen to me. Penn's Office of Student Conduct recommended withholding her master's degree until she paid a fine; both conditions were dropped but a notation about the investigative finding remains in her transcript. And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. Fierceton grew up in a wealthy community and attended an elite private school in a St. Louis suburb. I wrote a poem about the actual what the message was, which is so cheesy and Im cringing at my 17-year-old self [laughs], but it was about the healing power of gratitude. RG: 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? 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. Have you ever heard of her case? Thats not in question. There were definitely, Im sure. "[2], Near the end of November Fierceton was named one of 32 Rhodes scholars from the U.S. for the year. 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. 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. The show was mixed by William Stanton. And then I remembered that my teacher had told me to write a gratitude list. 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. Are we going to see these injuries? 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. "Was the problem that a child who was placed into foster care and had no contact with her biological mother wasn't actually a first-generation college student? Even though I had, again, written statements from two ICU nurses who took care of me saying: Yes, there was blood, [laughs] theres photographs, and there still was the argument of like, there wasnt enough blood or your face wasnt so distorted you could couldnt tell who you were. It's a hard scholarship to win, but Fierceton. And like: Why are you considered an independent student? Its virtually almost an unknown phenomena or to people who are working in the field, its certainly known, but theres been very little research on it, which partially complicates my Ph.D., because theres so little to draw upon. And she ended up responding right away, and asked to get on a phone call. ", 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. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but Ive never really called myself a standalone first-generation. We need to stay on task. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. She told them she felt that would be more likely to get an unbiased answer that way. University of Pennsylvania student Mackenzie Fierceton had her Rhodes Scholarship revoked and her master's degree withheld after allegations surfaced that she was lying about her. She entered foster care only at the age of 17, after making a complaint of abuse against Dr. Morrison a complaint that a court later found not to be credible. I took photos of the building and sent it to them, and I was connecting them with different people who were in my class, who were in his class. And again, people, including Penn administrators, have the perception of I think the stereotype and my friend Anea Moore, whos a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Penn who founded Penn first or co-founded it had a really great quote in The New Yorker about we arent all, quote-unquote something along the lines of like impoverished, inner city kids who go to crumbling public schools as the wider media portrays us to be. 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. In The New Yorker article, one teacher had written: She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted., RG: And then, Rachel Aviv, the reporter also quotes Sherry McClain, who was a nurse who was assigned to you, she said: She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. RG: So you applied for your masters in social work and there was a question of whether to check the, what Ive learned is called the FGLI box: first-generation, low-income. While her yes answer to "At any time since you turned age 13, were both your parents deceased, were you in foster care or were you a dependent or ward of the court?" When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. So first-generation and/or low-income, again, is the acronym. Given the pandemic, Rhodes Scholar judges interviewed candidates over Zoom. Nothing I have is persuasive to these people. And I was actually really nervous about doing any press for this reason. Or is that it separates two into one? If you havent read the story yet, I highly recommend pausing this, and giving it a read first, because I try not to go over too much of the same territory in my interview with her. You had mentioned that you actually made a transcript of your interview with Deputy Provost Finkelstein shortly after the conversation. Ryan Grim: This weeks guest on Deconstructed is Mackenzie Fierceton, who was the subject of a recent story in The New Yorker. OSC referred the recommendation to an SP2 panel to make a final determination; she has subsequently appealed the decision. I didnt encounter many of them in the two years that I was living in foster families. Her mother was a doctor and Fierceton attended a prep school, but she was. How do I do that in a succinct way when theres a very short word count and youre trying to fit everyones experience in?And so I didnt really think about: Oh, I need to say: This foster sibling who was in the foster care system. The Inquirer story came out in November 2020. Instead, I want to talk more about what this says about the system, that something so seemingly irrational could be produced by this system, and actually could be predicted to be produced by this system in some ways. RG: Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. It seemed like there was a lack of internal emergency protocols within our grad school, the School of Social Policy & Practice. She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. MF: Just a quick circling back, Im actually not sure if it was her who first reached out or if it was General Counsel Wendy White, because I later found out that they had a phone call about 36 hours after the article came out and seemed to talk pretty extensively, and then there were a lot of emails that happened. And so, Mackenzie, you and I were just talking offline. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. 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