An interesting story on an Ivy League student and would-be Rhodes Scholar in The Chronicle of Higher Education

That’s a false choice.

First of all the judge did not clear the mother. In his closing statement, he specifically said that it is still possible that the mother inflicted the injuries. In believing the judge, all we can say is that there was not sufficient evidence to find the mother criminally liable.

Second, the alternative is not to believe “those with a personal interest in or relationship to the disputing parties.” The “objective professional expert opinion” that you trust from the judge is from someone whose expertise is in the law, not in child abuse. We all trust his opinion with regard to how the law should be applied in this case.

The objective professional expert opinion in this case is the opinions of the D.S.S. professionals, both psychologists and social workers, who determined that abuse had occurred and were so certain of that conclusion that they removed the child at that time from the mother’s custody.

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Um, no, DSS removed her immediately upon the student’s admission to the hospital, as is routine in such cases. DSS does not conduct lengthy investigations prior to that action; it is done on any suspicious circumstance to preserve the health of the child and the evidence, not a finding of abuse. No professionals can make a conclusive determination immediately upon hospitalization. Custody was removed that day, prior to any investigation by DSS ( as is correct and routine).

Maybe time for some users to grab some lunch as an alternative to me slowing the thread. Because if the same users,who say they don’t want to debate, continue to dominate the thread, I’m putting on slow mode with no further warning or additional explanation.

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I’m really trying not to debate and just to insure that correct information is posted. But I’ll stop.

Thanks for the civics lesson. We’re never going to agree on this. You are assigning the presumption of higher credibility to a group of people who are no more perfect or ethical on average than others. Some are amazing, some are terrible, some are judicious, some are corrupt. It is your personal judgement from working with them that they are better than average, Other people have had different experiences. There’s certainly endless examples of the fallibility of the system and the people who serve it. We could pick any one of them and demonstrate the potential for abuse or mishandling here. I neither presume or nor discount it.

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Just pointing out that we as a society have turned over this type of decision-making to that group of people. I am certain many object to our form of government and that branch entirely. It appears the majority of the citizenship does not.
In any event, none of this bears upon the review of the accuracy and merit of the student’s application. That is not subject to judicial review

I don’t agree. We have turned over legal decision making to this system. That’s not the same as reality, perception or opinion. All are independent of the legal process, though the latter two somewhat influenced by it (as your own opinion demonstrates). Reality is not connected to it at all. Some innocent people are convicted or lose a judgment, some guilty people are not. Either way, what they did or didn’t do happened or not regardless of judgments. Opinion is only connected to it to the extent we choice to let it and everyone’s influence in that regard is different. You clearly choose to highly correlate them, which is your prerogative. That doesn’t make it any more or less correct.

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Deciding on our very own version of reality(used to be called opinions) is what this case is all about. Had student caveated her application by stating the claims set forth was her version of reality and did not necessarily match the court-determined facts, or was factually disputed by others, all of this could have been avoided.
The Rhodes committee doesnt spend a lot of time on applications with subjective versions of reality

Conflating again. Reality is a separate category than opinion. Reality is the boyfriend sexually touched her or he didn’t. Opinions are some of us believe he did and some of us believe he didn’t. A legal ruling isn’t strictly related to either of these, except to the opinions of the judge or jury. Sometimes a legal ruling may align with reality, sometimes it may not. Sometime opinions will align with reality, sometimes not – but in many cases there’s no way to know. It’s unlikely in this case any of will even know if your opinions about what happened between her and her mother are real. But a judge’s ruling also has no connection to that reality.

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That is fine. If she had so stated in her application, lots of trouble could have been avoided

Article about today’s rally at Penn:

It isn’t at all related to the decision of the Rhodes Trust, which explicitly said it wasn’t opining on the allegations of abuse, but recommending withdrawal of the scholarship based on misrepresentations in her application. That seems to have been lost along the way, perhaps unsurprisingly since no one has actually challenged their findings.

At this point, with Penn having granted her degree and withdrawn any threat of a fine, it’s unclear to me what her lawsuit hopes to accomplish. All she seems to be suggesting now is a desire for the incoming president of Penn (who won’t even arrive until July) to “start her tenure by making changes — listening to survivors and other marginalized communities”.

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It is necessary to go back to her original court submission to see what she wants.

First, her history of abuse is central to her case because Penn made the case that she falsely represented that history, passed that conclusion on to Rhodes, and Rhodes picked it up. I think that is why we’re now seeing so much public focus on that history and reports to substantiate it. She submitted 80 documents to the OSC at Penn to substantiate her history, but they ignored those documents and doubled down on the conclusions of their initial report that she had fabricated that history.

Second, she asked the judge for injunctive relief to force Penn to issue her MSW. Penn has now capitulated on that issue, so the MSW is now moot. However, she seems to also want a statement from Penn retracting all of the allegations which the university used as the basis for that action.

Third, she asked for money to compensate for financial damages and punitive monetary compensation for emotional pain and distress. I suspect that the cost of her Oxford studies will be central to this.

Fourth, she is asking the court to take action that goes beyond monetary compensation. It isn’t clear what that is, but going back to my first point, I think that she is going to want the court to force Penn to submit a plan to handle FGLI cases differently in the future. Listening to her Katie Couric interview, reading the letter to the editor by her professors a couple of months ago, and reading between the lines of other articles, I think that is her agenda. She seems to see herself as fighting for a cause.

Here is the link to her original court filing, which was already posted earlier in this looongggg thread:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/documents/21174415-fierceton-complaint

The original article waaaaay back said that the Penn investigator’s recommendation was to issue her master’s and maybe at a note on her transcript.

In my opinion Penn’s entire investigation was out of fear this thing would blow up after she arrived in England and make Penn’s handling of FGLI students look bad. Once the Rhodes scholarship was rescinded Penn just wants her to go away.

I think she would like some money to go away because she now has the cost of Oxford and perhaps some lawyer fees.

Correction: Alleged abuse, about which there is considerable doubt, to the point that the criminal records against her alleged abuser have been expunged.

And given that, in a fair world, Penn wouldn’t be dragged through the mud like this. Instead, they would be commended for investigating a deceptive application.

But we don’t live in a fair world. Far too many of the students admitted to elite colleges lack critical thinking skills to look at both sides of an issue. Instead, as I predicted, the students at Penn reflexively support her as she got to frame the story. How many, I wonder, actually looked at the fact that all the charges against her mother were expunged?

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Your correction is inaccurate. The judge’s ruling applied to only one incident. There is far more than that in her history to the point that D.S.S. deemed the situation so serious that they removed her from the mother’s custody.

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Nobody is denying that DSS, based upon what they believed at the time, removed her from the house.

Likewise, nobody can deny that after later information came out, the records against the mother were expunged. You seem very ready to discount how unusual this is. Here is a quote from a relevant article:

Note the key words “ethically obligated to drop the case” by a person whose primary job is to put criminals in jail. What did he know that DSS did not?

The full article is here:

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This is the part that doesn’t make sense. If there is no dispute about the accuracy of the Rhodes Trust’s decision to withdraw the scholarship, based on MF’s misrepresentations in her Rhodes application, then why would anyone be liable for paying the “cost of her Oxford studies”? I do agree she wants some money to go away (and her lawyers certainly do), but I’m not seeing any basis on which Penn could be held liable for the loss of her scholarship.

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The criminal record against her mother (and I’m not sure what the criminal accusations were, assault maybe?) were expunged, but the dependency and neglect were not (or there is no record of that happening). The D&N action is civil. It may or may not be sealed, but I doubt it is expunged.

Makenzie would not have brought criminal charges. Those are brought by a DA or other law enforcement person. The mother’s ex-boyfriend is dead, as I understand it, so no criminal matters can be brought against him and if any ever were and he died before they were completed (through the appeal process) those would be dismissed and no record of conviction would be available. His part in the civil D&N would be there.

I’d be interested in knowing if anyone objected to the mother’s criminal record being expunged. The DA may not have cared that much, The victim, MF, wasn’t there to object (probably not even to the dismissal of charges), social services doesn’t usually have the man power to even show up to a hearing (if they even had an interest in the actions at that point).

How mean must the mother be to contact Penn years later and say that the application and essays were all lies (how would she know?). What did the mother gain by all this, except to further ruin her daughter’s life? She might think she was clearing her own name, but to who? I still think she was horrible, others may think she should be sainted, most will think the truth is somewhere between. Couldn’t she have just let it go, wished her (former) child well? MF had changed her name, lived far away, was going to Oxford…no one in St Louis really learned anything from the newspaper stories.

Why do you assume the mother contacted anyone? The student’s classmates in St. Louis learned from the Philly article that their physical and emotional support to her was ignored and that she had misrepresented her background, which they did not know previously. I would like to think those who expose fraud are called whistleblowers.

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