Search Results for: Harvard

Harvard’s About-Face on Michelle Jones’s Acceptance

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In a collaboration between The New York Times and The Marshall Project, journalist Eli Hager recently published an investigation into Harvard University’s eleventh-hour flip-flop on its acceptance of ex-convict Michelle Jones to its doctoral program in history. Jones, who spent more than two decades in prison for the murder of her four-year-old son — conceived non-consensually when she was 14 — became a stellar academic and published scholar while incarcerated. She was set to attend Harvard this fall, but after her acceptance, two professors questioned whether she had adequately portrayed her crime in her application — something that was not required — and also whether the former prisoner was up to the challenge of an Ivy League environment.

Jones was supposed to be released in October, but received a two-month reduction of her sentence so she could start a Ph.D. program on time this fall. She applied to eight, with Harvard her first choice because of historians there whose work on incarceration she admired.

While those historians embraced her application, others at Harvard questioned not only whether Jones had disclosed enough information about her past, but whether she could handle its pressure-cooker atmosphere.

“One of our considerations,” Stauffer said in an interview, “was if this candidate is admitted to Harvard, where everyone is an elite among elites, that adjustment could be too much.”

Alison Frank Johnson, director of graduate studies for the history department, dismissed that argument as paternalistic.

“Michelle was sentenced in a courtroom to serve X years, but we decided — unilaterally — that it should be X years plus no Harvard,” she said. “Is it that she did not show the appropriate degree of horror in herself, by applying?

“We’re not her priests,” Johnson added, using an expletive.

Jones will be attending New York University instead.

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Housekeepers Versus Harvard: Feminism for the Age of Trump

Longreads Pick

In 2013, the same year that Harvard Business School alum Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, which encouraged women to tell their employers exactly what they needed in the workplace, the sixty housekeepers of the HBS-owned Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Suites presented their unionization petition to their manager.

 

Source: The Nation
Published: Mar 8, 2017
Length: 23 minutes (5,900 words)

The Fire on Harvard Avenue

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Source: The Intercept
Published: Mar 5, 2017
Length: 53 minutes (13,360 words)

Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard

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An investigation of Patrick Henry College, an elite evangelical school in Virginia where students say administrators have engaged in victim-blaming and cover-ups when it comes to reports of sexual assault:

“Basically, my issue was swept under the rug, and the assaulter received little else but a reprimand,” says a young woman who attended Patrick Henry between 2004 and 2008. The student fell asleep at an off-campus party where there had been drinking and was awoken by a male PHC student assaulting her. She says she reported the incident to Patrick Henry. “The administration encouraged me to not go to the police and said that, because alcohol was involved and I was violating the rules there, they hinted that I could be expelled if I brought light to the incident,” the student says. “The focus was the alcohol. I drank. I sinned. I deserved to be assaulted in the middle of the night.”

Published: Feb 18, 2014
Length: 29 minutes (7,279 words)