Harvard's trials and tribulations | South China Morning Post

WHEN she applied for a place at Harvard last year, 19-year-old Gina Grant seemed almost too good to be true: she was captain of her school tennis team, a cheerleader, popular with contemporaries and exceptionally bright with an unblemished academic record. An orphan, she had overcome a grim background in South Carolina and seemed set for a stellar academic career.

She even spent her spare time teaching biology to underprivileged children in the neighbourhood where she lived with an uncle and aunt. Harvard barely hesitated, and awarded her early admission to the university, a mark of distinction offered to only a handful of candidates.

Then, earlier this month, the university received an anonymous package containing faded newspaper clippings dating back to 1990, which painted a very different picture. The cuttings told how, at 14, Ms Grant had bludgeoned her alcoholic and abusive mother to death with a candlestick.

Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she spent six months in a South Carolina juvenile detention centre before being released on parole to re-invent her life as a straight-A student.

Harvard promptly rescinded its offer of a place, setting off a storm of debate over questions of privacy, clemency and redemption and leaving the Ivy League university embroiled in one of the most embarrassing scandals in its 359-year history.

Last week, Harvard students held protest rallies on campus claiming that Ms Grant had paid her dues to society, had proved her intellectual worth and should now be admitted. One Harvard alumnus has stated he will no longer make donations to the university; others have written to newspapers roundly condemning the university's action. A New York Times editorial, accusing the university of acting with 'unseemly haste', called on Neil Rudenstine, the Harvard president, to 'order a full review and reconsideration' of Ms Grant's application.

'Harvard has an obligation to behave in an educated way,' the newspaper opined. 'In the matter of Ms Grant, it has not.' Harvard has so far refused to comment on or change its decision, and other universities, including Columbia and South Carolina, have capitalised on the furore by offering to consider an application from Ms Grant. 'If every other university in the world should turn her down, that means we sentence her to a life without education,' John Silber, Boston University's president, declared on television.

Ms Grant is now in hiding, but last week she issued a statement declaring her 'deep disappointment' at Harvard's decision and pleading: 'It serves no good purpose for anyone else to dredge up the pain of my childhood.' The precise circumstances of that childhood are now being hotly debated.

Ms Grant's father died of cancer in 1987, leaving her in the care of her mother, Dorothy Mayfield, an emotional, alcoholic wreck.

At the time of her trial, defence lawyers argued that Ms Grant had been subjected to years of emotional cruelty by her mother.

A psychiatrist who examined Ms Grant in 1991 concluded that she had 'suffered the worst kind of psychological abuse'. But South Carolina prosecutors portray her as a rebellious and violent teenager who was enraged at her mother's refusal to let her go out with her then boyfriend, Jack Hook, a 15-year-old with a record of juvenile crime. According to autopsy reports, Mayfield, 42, was in a stupor and utterly defenceless on the night she was beaten to death.

After the killing, Ms Grant and her boyfriend tried to make the death look like a suicide. The 14-year-old calmly told a string of lies to police after she was taken in. She first insisted that her mother had been murdered by burglars, then that she had fallen downstairs before finally settling on the claim that Mayfield had killed herself after an argument.

Harvard has offered 'absolutely no comment' on its decision to reject Ms Grant's application, although university officials say privately that the acceptance was withdrawn because Ms Grant had hidden her criminal past and misrepresented the circumstances of her mother's death. But her supporters point out that it does not require an IQ half as high as Ms Grant's to realise that admitting matricide on a university application is not the best way to ensure a bright academic future.

As Professor Richard Gelles, an expert on family violence at Rhode Island University, put it, Harvard 'has proved why Gina Grant was right in the first place' to conceal her secret history.

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