Anonymous wrote:Let’s turn the page and put the spotlight on Penn in this matter:
1. UPenn first promoted a student for a Rhodes Scholarship. Then after she received it, they backpedaled and attacked the student. In this process, they have lurched from one extreme to the other. At the very least, they least they convey the impression that they don’t know what they’re doing.
2. Penn’s position is that mistakes were made. Despite their full participation in the first phase of promoting the student as a Rhodes applicant, including feeding a narrative to the press and making numerous public statements of praise for her, beginning with the university president herself. After lauding the candidate before condemning her, they have admitted no mistakes on their part in this process and have taken no responsibility for any mistakes that were made.
3. UPenn immediately upon receiving potentially embarrassing information about their candidate launched a full investigation into the candidate. However, to date they have announced no investigation into their own process that led to this situation. No heads have rolled for failing to do due diligence in preparing their nomination. They have instead painted their fabulously wealthy and highly resourced institution as a hapless victim, exploited initially by a homeless teenager and then again by this same individual after having received a Penn education up to the master’s degree level. Some educational outcome if you believe their allegations!
4. In their efforts to present themselves as the victim, UPenn repeatedly misrepresented the facts and violated their own policies by failing to disclose basic information to the student. Their first misrepresentation was their claim that they had been alerted to the student’s past in St. Louis by an anonymous e-mail. The truth was that they had received 2 e-mails, one anonymous and one whose identity was known, the father of a former prep school classmate. They then immediately contacted the student’s estranged biological mother about her educational status. In this process, UPenn failed to disclose the identity of the known e-mailer to the student nor did they disclose their communication with her mother. This was a clear violation of policy and possibly of law.
5. After their initial contacts, UPenn then proceeded to conduct a secret investigation without notifying the student involved. UPenn claimed that the secrecy was required in order to protect the privacy of witnesses. They lied. There is no such right to privacy to participants in a university sponsored investigation of one of their students. And they failed to notify the student of the investigation, to whom they do have a responsibility and who does have rights. These “protected wutnesses” were in reality collaborators in an orchestrated smear campaign by UPenn.
6. After concluding their investigation, UPenn wrote a letter to the Rhodes Foundation about the student, informing them of the results of their faux “investigation”. Instead of informing the student of their actions and sending her a copy of the report per normal procedure, they kept this secret from her for the better part of a month.
7. While claiming that this investigation was necessary for them to learn the real facts of the student’s background, the truth is that the student had never misrepresented her background. All the way back to her initial application to Penn and the accompanying transcripts, the student was fully transparent about the fact that she had attended a privileged private school for rich kids. At no point in their efforts to hype up their Rhodes nomination or in their process of seeking publicity to celebrate it did UPenn contact the prep school and seek any information about their student’s background. In fact, it was the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote the Rhodes Scholar story who falsely reported that the student had “grown up poor”, something which the student herself had never claimed. Furthermore, in a blatant conflict of interests, the editor who assigned the reporter to this story, gave her her marching orders with regard to the story, and oversaw the final version that went to print, is married to Penn’s information director whose job is to hype stories like this. This editor obviously should have steered clear of the story, but instead he involved himself in it.
8. UPenn never submitted a list of people whom they interviewed in St. Louis. They never submitted any opinions or information which were obtained in this sham “investigation”. Instead they submitted a slanted, one sided report to Rhodes, failing to include any information they obtained which contradicted their main thesis that they were the victims of a student intent on scamming them. Yet we know that there were in fact information and witnesses who contradicted this thesis.
9. Then, while they were keeping the student in the dark about their investigation or it’s results and unable to defend herself or even have knowledge of what she was being accused of, UPenn scheduled her to be interviewed by the Vice Provost. According to the faculty member who sat with the student during the interview, the interview was conducted as an interrogation without regard to the interests of the student. A grievance was later filed by multiple faculty members alleging that the interview was conducted in violation of university procedures. Clearly this entire interview process was conducted with complete disregard for due process.
10. The Vice Provost then wrote a hastily constructed letter to the Rhodes Foundation which contained blatant errors as basic as her place of birth and birth name. In addition, the Vice Provost falsely accused the student of misrepresenting herself to her recommenders without even checking with the recommenders. In other words, she lied and invented a false charge. These errors represent one more instance of Penn failing to do its due diligence with regard to basic facts in this case.
11. To further pursue their goals, UPenn bullied the student into withdrawing her Rhodes Scholarship application by threatening to rescind her bachelor’s degree. Their tactics of intimidation continued. They have withheld her master’s degree for which she was notified in writing by the university that she had satisfied all the requirements, until they receive a letter of apology from her in which she admits to all of the allegations of the university. This behaviour is patently absurd. If there are ethical and character grounds for revoking her first degree and withholding the second, those are not ameliorated by withdrawal of an application or by writing a letter. Those claims are clearly just a smokescreen for attempted blackmail and extortion. And in the end no formal charges were ever brought against her for violating Penn’s Code of Academic Integrity, which would be the normal process if any such violation(s) existed.
12. Penn then launched its OSC investigation. After 3 months their only conclusion was one inaccurate statement, which was her checking the first gen box on her master’s application. In arriving at this conclusion, OSC failed to acknowledge Penn’s own confusing multiple definitions of first gen, or the fact that Penn’s own undergraduate admissions office initially classified her as first gen, or the fact that one of their own administrators in SP2 advised her that when in doubt to pick what better positions her for better financial aid, or the fact that the practice across the country is to classify students who age out of the foster care system as first gen.
I have gone to the trouble of laying out the facts of this process to show that UPenn’s behavior throughout this process has been characterized by sloppiness, ineptness, lies, misrepresentations, secrecy, disregard for their own procedures and for due process, conflicts of interest, ethical failures, and failure to take responsibility for their own missteps. They hold their student to a standard which they do not even meet themselves. Throughout, they showed no concern for the welfare of their student, which should be their first concern. This is hypocrisy of the first order. They should finally be held accountable in court.
Those who are outraged by the student’s lies and misrepresentations by the student should be equally outraged when the same behavior is demonstrated by the university. In fact, it’s eminently reasonable to hold them to a higher standard.
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