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. The article by reporter Rachel Aviv was called How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student, and it tells the story of an extraordinary battle between Mackenzie and the University of Pennsylvania. "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? And those other people are kind of like the orphans that we think of in Dickensian novels. She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. But when you're filling out a box where it's "yes" or "no" and there's no more information or "kind of!" 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. But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. [1]:115 As to her previous involvement with the child welfare system, Penn says Fierceton told them she was not certain, but she was referring either to the guardian ad litem appointed for her during her parents' divorce or an earlier incident when she and her biological parents were still living in Connecticut. And so can you talk a little bit about your research? She also called herself a first-generation low-income student. "[2], In December, an anonymous 22-page letter was sent to the U.S. office of the Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship program. At the University of Pennsylvania, she received a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in social work through a combined five-year program. So they heard from her and immediately they call you into a meeting with the deputy provost at the time, Beth Winkelstein . Enough bruises? MF: Yeah. She was an independent student when she applied. I want to read from The New Yorker article again, it says: The Web site of Penn First Plus, a university program founded in 2018 to support F.G.L.I. Or is that it separates two into one? "[1]:119, 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. And so that was when it really transitioned, the second half of it, into these really intimate questions about my abuse until the point where I was sobbing and couldnt answer the questions anymore. In any event, The University of Oxford, where Mackenzies doing her Ph.D., has remained supportive, and in the wake of The New Yorker investigation, and the resulting protests from students and faculty, Penn lifted the hold on her degree. She didnt even know what building he had died in. And so I was like, of course, Im going to respond again. Her mothers name was entered into a registry of abusers. She was one of only 32 high school students selected from a pool of 2300 applicants. And they were the ones I believe and this is public now because Penn attached it to their response to the lawsuit I filed and I believe they were the first ones to mention that I had gone to private school and that they were questioning if I was low-income. Thats the reality of it, but we dont want to think of it that way. After her mother left, Fierceton got out of bed, found a spare set of keys and drove herself to school. You didnt grow up in crumbling projects your entire life. And youre getting instruction from a university official that that's how you're supposed to fill it out, that's what the definition says online. 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". And I was actually really nervous about doing any press for this reason. MF: So to me it was pretty clear that it likely came from them. But once I got out of the hospital and I learned that information, I remembered that a classmate had died in the same basement about 16 months earlier. [2][3], Fierceton had initially expected it would be easier for her to transition to college life than it was for other students, since she was not leaving a family behind at home. [14], The publicity led 150 Penn students to stage a walkout from classes to demonstrate in support of Fierceton. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. In retrospect, I just honestly wish I had never written about those people, but it was kind of one of those things where I was like: OK, I need to make my point. Our focus is not on the debate it reviews over Mackenzie Fierceton's accounts of her life, though we affirm her integrity. And we have this idea of what a person looks like who commits a crime or who gets arrested for child abuse. She lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, where she spent three days in intensive care. 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. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but I've never really called myself a standalone first-generation. [3], After the interview White emailed Morrison about how it went; she wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. Fierceton had also brought her mentor, a staff member at the university's Civic House, into the meeting; at the outset Winkelstein told the woman she could not speak or she would be disconnected immediately. And I told them I only have a half-hour, because Im working, Im in class, and were going to go through all of this. But it was definitely something I saw happening sort of this funneling of kids from the child welfare to criminal justice system. Right. 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. [1], Shortly after Penn filed its response, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the story. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. "It is seven years later, and I am still having to prove and prove and prove what has happened to me." ", 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. Like, I dont have the precise statistics in front of me, but if you asked people to guess at the number of people who will experience, say, two years of poverty in their life, people will miss it by magnitudes. 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. Penn filed a 130-page response two weeks later, denying all her allegations of wrongdoing and saying that the university officials and co-defendants who had investigated the case were unaware of the Driver lawsuit when they did. First of all, thats one box? Its practically half of Americans, or more. Fierceton. Like what does Penn say when you tell them: Hey, the Penn official who helped me fill this out said that these are the categories that I fit. 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. And in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. She entered foster care only at the age of 17, after making a complaint of abuse against Dr.. They didnt respond, though Mackenzies biological mother has denied the allegations of abuse. [2], Local police were called. And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. After her graduation summa cum laude, political science professor Anne Norton invited Fierceton to stay with her and her partner in their large house in Northwest Philadelphia for as long as she needed to in order to complete her master's over the next year. Yeah. 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. RG: And how much did she challenge your medical condition after that beating? If youd like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. So, yes. Mackenzie told the police her mother had pushed her down the stairs and struck her in the face. And so, yes, if the student, then, is no longer useful, I could imagine it turning. Mackenzie went to a private prep school, Whitfield, in St. Louis and was an active student. Is it as well explored territory as a school-to-prison pipeline? They took photographs of Caster's staircases and elevators, and interviewed witnesses and some of the Penn paramedics who had responded. 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. She has a bachelor's degree in political science from Penn and was working on a master's in social work. woman who won a coveted scholarship in the US to study at Oxford after claiming she was poor, overcame childhood abuse and grew up in foster care lost the opportunity after it emerged she was. But they just assumed theres no way that it could have happened. She petitioned the court, and was able to successfully have her name removed, with a judge ruling that there wasnt enough evidence to substantiate the abuse allegations specifically, saying, While it is possible that Petitioner was the cause of the alleged injuries, the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented.. Is that just an interpretation or did they say anything that suggested to you that the fact that you had gone to a private school and grown up in an upper-middle-class situation meant that you could never at any point consider yourself low-income? And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. This could happen to me. And thats again, like not because there isnt abuse or neglect going on in families that looked like mine, or biological families that looked like mine. 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. And one of the main things they pointed to was that she had gone to this private school . RG: And what was the first-generation community like on campus? Or do you think that the wheels were already in motion before that? 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. And I asked again and just said: Ive had different experiences of harassment for the last four years at Penn. And so I did definitely have that kind of like: I have no idea what else is going to convince these people. 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. 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. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]. "I think that we could contribute to the community, the broader Philadelphia community, and the West Philadelphia community more positively, instead of doing things that are not only undermining them but are actively policing them, and end up creating and perpetuating more violence," she told The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's student newspaper. Asked about Lovelace's alleged sexual abuse, specifically an incident the year before where Fierceton, having fallen asleep in her mother's bed, woke to find him caressing her breasts, Morrison expressed amusement at the possibility that her boyfriend could have mistaken her teenage daughter for her; Lovelace, interviewed separately, denied all the allegations. He died after a medical emergency in a basement of UPenn's Caster Building in 2018. Cause then you cant think that it could be you. Because processes become Kafkaesque very quickly. 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. And Im kind of one of the lucky ones where I had really expansive and thorough documentation for all the parts of this story. There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. Mackenzie is currently suing the university. Its a very different lifestyle. 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. Fierceton clarified the details in question and Ruderman said she understood better. And she was shocked. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of. 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. Just like some basic questions [laughs] and then a lot of detailed questions about my application. (Photo from Mackenzie Fierceton) Penn student Mackenzie Fierceton was selected as one of 32 American recipients of the 2021 Rhodes Scholarship, becoming Penn's 31st Rhodes scholar since the scholarship's inception in 1902.. Fierceton, a 2020 College graduate, is currently working on her . MF: Yeah. And especially, again, like these stereotypes of black and brown, low-income families, the knee-jerk reaction is like: Oh, well, theyre unequipped to be a parent. And I think I just share that because I think its a powerful example of if that is as far as theyre going to go when theres literal documentation from child me and that accusing me of that being faked, I really am like: I dont know, short of a video montage of instances of abuse from 6 to 16, what would convince them. So, yes, an article came out in the local paper saying that she had been arrested. And because poverty and abuse are so pervasive in society and particularly in a country that has such a minimal social safety net and has so much violence. 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. So I was like: OK, fine. 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