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Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. Her mother was a doctor and Fierceton attended a prep school, but she was allegedly abused at home and ended up in foster care, with no financial support from her family. She eventually won a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Then the father of one of Fierceton’s high-school peers contacted Penn, saying that the news coverage of Fierceton’s past was inaccurate. Rachel Aviv, a New Yorker staff writer, discusses how Fierceton lost her Rhodes Scholarship and what her story tells us about the internal politics of universities as they seek to diversify their student bodies.
