The Review: The Strange, Noirish Saga of Mackenzie Fierceton vs. Penn

An interview with Tom Bartlett. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Earlier this month, The Chronicle published Tom Bartlett’s “[The Dredging]( an investigation into the strange, sad story of Mackenzie Fierceton’s battle with the University of Pennsylvania. The story hinges on a conflict between Fierceton and the university over the veracity of her college application essay, in which she described a profoundly troubled childhood plagued by severe abuse at the hands of her mother (including a beating so bad it resulted in a lengthy hospital stay) and time in foster care. Fierceton’s life story, as well as her self-identification as a “first generation” college student, came under scrutiny by the university when an anonymous email alleged that Fierceton was not who she said she was. The details are almost noirishly complex. Fierceton did spend time in foster care, and she was hospitalized after a confrontation with her mother, although the court was unable to determine whether her mother harmed her. She was not “first generation"; her mother, in fact, is a radiologist. But her supporters say, perhaps with justice, that the university went too far in its investigation and punishment. Fierceton’s exaggerations, if that’s what they are, have had real consequences — a Rhodes scholarship was withdrawn, and her receipt of an M.A. from Penn remains in limbo. What exactly happened here? I spoke with Bartlett about what this story means. Here’s some of that conversation. There’s so much going on in this story, and some of the essential facts remain grippingly unresolved — what really happened between Fierceton and her mother, and why she was hospitalized for so long. But I think the story has resonated with our readers for reasons to do with something else: It has the quality of an allegory or a fable about the kinds of self-disclosure teenagers are asked to perform in the admissions process at elite colleges. If you listen to admissions officers, they will say, “You don’t need to sell your pain.” They’ll say they’re not necessarily looking for these stories of trauma. At the same time, competition to get into these elite schools is extremely stiff. These are students with off-the-charts test scores, with 4.0 GPAs, and they’re looking for opportunities to set themselves apart — and this is one of the ways that they feel as if they can do that. There’s a pressure to stand out and, rightly or wrongly, there are students who feel like emphasizing the many obstacles they’ve overcome is a way to get a leg up. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that’s what Mackenzie Fierceton was doing in this case. But that’s a real dynamic. “Writing about personal trauma,” you write, “in your college application is common enough that there are guides on how to do it.” I was reminded of an [essay]( the Review ran by Matt Feeney a little while ago, in which he compared the admissions process at elite colleges, especially the essay portion, to the kind of institutionalized soul-formation effected by things like Catholic confession — mechanisms designed to draw out and produce the deep interiority of a subject. In his view it’s both true and truly weird that college-admissions professionals are now one such institution — not the professors themselves who might be involved in soul-formation during the educational process, but the admissions officers at the point of application, or even the guidance counselors at fancy high schools. This makes me think about whether, as some institutions are moving away from standardized tests, they’re potentially putting even more emphasis on the personal essay. In the Penn undergraduate application, the essay prompt asks you to describe a transformational event in your life. They could have asked a different kind of question. If what they’re looking for is simply a writing sample, they could ask about something more general and less probing. You could argue it’s an invitation for confession. Not that there’s anything wrong with that necessarily, but it raises broader questions in the culture, beyond college admissions: What’s acceptable for a personal essay when it comes to how facts are framed and what context is left out? Are the rules the same as journalism? What genre does this sort of writing fall into? Those prompts are meant to elicit a certain sort of answer, and it’s not surprising to me that a student might focus on trauma. One of the most surprising things I learned from your piece was that “first-generation student” can be defined, at places like Penn, as the first in one’s family to “pursue higher education at an elite institution.” Penn would point out that that quote is from a student-run campus organization. The other quote we include in there, about how students can qualify as first-generation if they “have a strained or limited relationship with the person(s) in your family who hold(s) a bachelors degree,” is actually from the Penn First Plus, the university’s official organization for first-generation and low-income students. It’s probably worth asking whether it makes sense to stretch the definition of first generation in this way. Maybe they need to find another descriptor or category. At the same time, if that’s the definition offered on the university’s website, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that some students are going to embrace that term, even if their parents did, in fact, go to college. SPONSOR CONTENT | the university of queensland [Learn how globalization and sustainability are connecting our present to our past.]( ADVERTISEMENT SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access and save 50% for the first year with this limited-time offer. The Latest REVIEW | ESSAY [We’re Looking at Merit the Wrong Way]( By Rebecca Zwick [STORY IMAGE]( Our focus on individual excellence leads admissions astray. ADVERTISEMENT REVIEW | ESSAY [This Is the Way the Humanities End]( By Brian Rosenberg [STORY IMAGE]( A recent book review by Louis Menand carries the field further along the path to oblivion. 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If Whitman loafs and gropes in the grass, and Dickinson scrutinizes robins in the garden, Melville can feel stuffed up in the library, sick with over-reading.” At Boston Review, [Gillian Osborne on the poetry of Herman Melville](. (From 2019.) - At his blog, Justin E.H. Smith on the [mysterious 1991 murder]( of the Romanian scholar Ioan Petru Culianu. Also: Proust, Dreyfus, and the cultural politics of the present. And at Lingua Franca, Ted Anton’s [account]( of the Culianu murder (from 1992). Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | the university of sydney [Combatting addiction with 'the love hormone']( Addressing the urgent need to find solutions for those affected by drug use disorders, learn how two new approaches to managing substance abuse are revolutionizing the treatment of addiction. 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