How an Ivy League school turned against a student

Pretty disgusting. The university's behavior deserves lots of castigation, but, instead, I feel like it's time to air what is apparently one of my more unpopular opinions:

Legal parental rights in the West are way too strong. This perspective is largely informed by a long-term relationship with someone who went through the foster care system, so I'm obviously biased, but:

CPS and foster care are fundamentally garbage because they're reactive. You can layer on as many mandatory-reporting requirements as you want, but at the end of the day the only truly effective measure is to legally empower the individuals in question and stop employing men with guns as agents of child abuse. Kids should be legally emancipated at age 13, if not younger, and given a UBI to enable them to live independently while studying.

Our structures of power and privilege are inherently biased towards the powerful and privileged - bureaucracy is ripe for subversion by class allies, like Mackenzie's parent. We too often conceptualize child neglect and abuse as a pathology of the "poors" - instead, it is shockingly common and shockingly under-reported, but the effect is masked by a system that isn't incentivized to actually care for its charges but instead to conspire with their abusers. Something similar happened in the case I'm personally familiar with.

Considering the atrocities justified daily by "the kid's best interest" makes me physically ill. Except in cases of extreme mental illness, and maybe not even then, nobody but the person in question is qualified to make that call.

This is one of the areas where I think we've had a silent regression over the past century-ish: often well-intentioned structures mean that starting over fresh is basically impossible, even for kids who have done nothing wrong. We should consider the sort of damage that these systems exert on the fringes while implementing them.

This is such a horrible case of an absolute hubris. For some reason I’m not surprised at the University of Pennsylvania would so aggressively attack, under mine, and just plain be mean to one of its students. And this really makes me lose all respect for the Rhodes Scholar program.

Thats a horrible story. I dont normally like(or use) trigger warnings, but Jesus man, that was depressing. Read at your own ris :(

Shame on UPenn.

looking at her bruised face in the mirror. She described “the one who almost killed me . . . the one who is my mother. She broke me.” She concluded, “I was never broken. She was.”

Unbelievable story, so vivid and poignant. I think this story highlights that it's not white privilege per se, but money and influence that needs scrutiny. Justice be damned.