RG: And so when you applied for your masters in social worker or sociology? box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? 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. Is that your experience with it as well? The university's police did not know at first where the building was and the city's paramedics did not know how to get to it. So that was, I think later on that specific line came into question. Thats not in question. So, to cut into the interview here real quick, I wanted to add that Mackenzie is referring to a letter sent to the Rhodes Trust in December 2020. Her junior year at Whitfield, a prestigious prep school, Mackenzie showed up to school one day in a terrible state. Like there is more attention to systemic poverty and trying to keep children in their homes to begin with, I would say, which is important, because if you can keep kids in their homes, then theyre not in the system and facing that foster-to-prison pipeline. The teen said she was sent to. (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 . So Rachel had it and Penn disputed it. And like: Why are you considered an independent student? 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. 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. Like I just havent, really, there to be a lot of information about me publicly. [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. 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. That was my personal statement. "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. When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. The prosecutor eventually dropped the charges and the arrest record was expunged. [2], Almost three months later, The New Yorker ran a longer article about Fierceton, which had taken the magazine eight months to report and fact-check. But in this application they had two questions which are to determine financial aid. 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. Mother and daughter both told the same stories they had earlier; Morrison depicted her daughter as "willful and intense", claiming she had bought and read many books to try to help her understand the issues she said Fierceton had. 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. 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. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. Mhmm. There was also the part of me that was terrified. "[2], In December, an anonymous 22-page letter was sent to the U.S. office of the Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship program. Why were you in the hospital that long? They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. Margulis later told The New Yorker that he had been telling the prosecutor repeatedly that Fierceton "had no credibility and made all of this up", the same theme as Morrison's many arguments in person and over the phone to other Whitfield parents. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. We need to stay on task. 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. "[2], Fierceton answered yes. And I was in a kind of unique situation where I applied to grad school at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, because I sub-matriculated. Mackenzie Fierceton described herself as s a "queer,. Fierceton finished her Whitfield education on a scholarship while living in foster homes. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. And Penn is still claiming that those are fake journals. 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?" [2], Fierceton shared the information she had with Logan, who in turn took it to a law firm that investigated further. You have a good education and youre clearly smart. Fierceton said later that she had never used the word "poor" to describe herself or her childhood. Attached were copies of the Missouri court orders expunging Morrison's arrest and removing her name from the DSS registry. That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. Mackenzie went to a private prep school, Whitfield, in St. Louis and was an active student. Her mothers name was entered into a registry of abusers. And Im kind of one of the lucky ones where I had really expansive and thorough documentation for all the parts of this story. [Laughs.] This was about a week after. [2] They learned that SP2 had no real protocol for an emergency situation in the building. 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. so that people have the background there. And she ended up responding right away, and asked to get on a phone call. Did you go into foster care? Its just so obvious that you fit the criteria for low-income, but it seems like they feel like you dont fit it in the spirit of how they want it. 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. But I think a lot of it stems from the current policies and practices of federal and local funding and what kind of programs theyre funding for kids. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. [Laughs.]. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. I cant say how many questions are left and were close to done. Some people were very much on my side; some people were very much, I think, in that sort of cognitive dissonance of: This cant be true because if it can, then Im in danger. "[25], "I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough", Norton told The New Yorker. And she had gone to a private school growing up. You have a good education and youre clearly smart. And that was the end of it, right? Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. It didnt, though, to the University of Pennsylvania. And I ultimately didnt end up responding because I got a serious threats from Penn that if I didnt withdraw that they were going to come after my undergrad degree, and launch proceedings to revoke my undergrad degree, and never give me my M.S.W which I was supposed to graduate with in May 2021, I have not yet received that diploma if I didnt withdraw from the Rhodes and sign an NDA. And I havent been on any of the Penn websites. Thank you so much for having me. Cause then you cant think that it could be you. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but Ive never really called myself a standalone first-generation. And did you find this after The New Yorker article was published? So one of the questions that you mentioned that they asked was about your essay , which, correct me if Im wrong, but I think it begins saying something along the lines of: Youre in the hospital, you looked in the mirror, and you couldnt recognize yourself, you couldnt recognize your features. "[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. Cause Ive just wanted to go on with my life and, you know, live it. 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. And is it somewhat of a defense mechanism that people deploy to protect themselves? Because that was one of the ones that really blew my mind. Jay Caspian Kang sounded similar themes in two different New York Times newsletters discussing Fierceton's story. It's from there the story unraveled. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. Mackenzie Hargreaves is a fictional character from the Australian soap opera Neighbours, played by Georgie Stone.She made her first appearance on 30 August 2019. But the acclaim quickly devolved into acrimony as the university and the Rhodes Trust began questioning aspects of Fiercetons backstory. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. Is that your experience with it as well? She told Brandt it was her mother, and asked her to keep Morrison from coming to her room. RG: Right. So, yes, an article came out in the local paper saying that she had been arrested. 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 . 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. 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. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. Beth Winkelstein, at the time Penn's deputy provost, signed off on her application for the school, writing that "Mackenzie understands what it is like to be an at-risk youth, and she is determined to re-make the systems that block rather than facilitate success. 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. She had seen no signs of abuse in the relationship and considered Fierceton to be the dominant personality in it. [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. So that was, I think later on that specific line came into question. In other words, if you are parent who says that you are wishing your daughter well and youre telling the authorities that shes just mentally ill and its just a really, really sad and tragic case that shes making up all of these allegations of abuse and throwing herself down stairs, and beating herself up all for cries for help, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera you wouldnt then also pursue a multi-year long effort to destroy her life. 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. She, about 10 years ago, she wrote a comment I think on a Gawker post or something like that that we ended up then re-publishing as an essay at The Huffington Post about, and it was about her life in poverty, and it went viral, millions of people read it, extremely well-written piece. And so I did definitely have that kind of like: I have no idea what else is going to convince these people. Fierceton joins Ryan Grim to discuss the saga of her battle with UPenn and why the Ivy Leagueinstitution seems to have so much trouble recognizing the complexity of poverty in America. I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. And the chain of events that happened leading into foster care? I was in this private school with a lot of upper-middle class or wealthy white students. So I could imagine why at some point youd be like, you know what, Im just not going to keep taking Ls here. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [emailprotected] Thanks so much! ")[3], The OSC report also concluded that nothing in her academic record warranted the revocation of either degree. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. Like you said, theres also the cultural stereotype of like Orphan Annie and Oliver Twist of what these kinds of kids are supposed to look like that starts so early on in, and deep in the culture or media that we encounter that I think really ingrains that into people. I mean, youd been taking loss after loss, despite having the facts on your side. And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. Fellow students, their parents and Whitfield faculty also noticed signs which led them to suspect abuse. At the end of the march they were addressed by Fierceton and other FGLI students. [Laughs.] "She lies better than I can tell the truth. And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? [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. Mackenzie, for her part, was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania and, in her sophomore year, won a Rhodes Scholarship. But I just had a bad feeling and I started to try to find more information. As an anonymous letter writer revealed, however, she was also the privately educated child of a radiologist, brought up in an affluent suburb. She bounced from one foster home to the next. And its funny, cause it just made me so frustrated and I actually went back and read it. So that was what the actual poem and personal statement was about [laughs.] And back in high school, it was a similar thing. And what was the first-generation community like on campus? That is when I would trace it back to. I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. And it was a very similar situation where it took everyone a long time to get to the building. And I didnt really know any information, except for that he had had a medical emergency in class and then been pronounced dead at the hospital. Because thats not how we understand poverty. In early 2022, after stories about her struggle with Penn and the Rhodes Trust received national attention from stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New Yorker, commentators took the university, and American elite higher education in general, to task for its use of the story of Fierceton and some other recent Rhodes recipients as poverty porn and its shifting definition of an FGLI student. MF: Yeah. Thats been my understanding of it. Fierceton says she had not failed any tests; her Whitfield transcript shows she got a B+ in the class. So Im not sure how much could have been missing. Within a year of her arrest, another St. Louis-area hospital had granted her admitting privileges, and she was able to resume her medical career. Asked by the school's wellness director (who later told police she had seen insulting texts from Morrison on Fierceton's phone) about the reasons for the injuries, Fierceton said that she was "clumsy" but did not offer any details. "[2], On her application, Fierceton recounted her background and the unexpected way it led to her becoming a foster child. [2][h], In January 2020[4] Fierceton had a seizure and collapsed during a class for one of her graduate social work courses. [22], In the New Yorker article, Fierceton and others criticized Penn for its use of not only her story but another recent FGLI Rhodes awardee as poverty porn, suggesting the university had turned on her when it learned she had actually come from a privileged, affluent background and thus did not fit the narrative of having grown up in foster care recounted in its news release and the accompanying Inquirer article. This made Fierceton feel as if she were being watched for anything she did that could be used against the state's case by her mother. Have a good education and youre clearly smart a history teacher, telling them about her past what... Facts on your side to other people I havent been on any of the ones that really my... 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