Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe Columnist
Harvard Has a Thing about Teenage Killers
Talk about cold-hearted. Three months after making an offer of early admission to Gina Grant, a bright and affable senior, Harvard has yanked it back. And why? Because 4 ½ years ago, when Ms. Grant was still living in her hometown of Lexington, S.C., she killed her mother by bashing in the woman's skull thirteen times with a lead crystal candlestick. How petty. How unfair.
What kind of reason is matricide to jeopardize the future of this engaging young woman, who is described by her school's administrator, Ruby Pierce, as "caring, loving, giving of herself at all times"?
Okay, so Ms. Grant-who Ms. Pierce fondly likens to the "Ivory Soap girl"-committed a grotesque and brutal crime. Okay, so she tried to make the killing look like a suicide by getting her hooligan boyfriend to jab a steak knife into her dead mother's neck and wrap the victim's fingers around the handle. Don't we all mess up once in a while?
It's not like she hasn't paid her debt to society. The judge in South Carolina made her spend a full six months in juvenile detention. Only then did he let her take off for Massachusetts, where she has an aunt and uncle.
Yet for some reason Harvard is in a snit. The university objects to the fact that Ms. Grant lied on her college application, answering "no" to the questions about whether she has ever been disciplined or placed on probation. It cites a policy of reconsidering offers of admission to students who engage in "behavior that brings into questions honesty, maturity or moral character." Moral character? Who gave colleges the right to take that into account?
If Harvard wants to know about Ms. Grant's moral character, all it has to do is read a profile about her that was published in the Boston Globe Magazine a week ago Sunday--the one that described how remarkable it is that Ms. Grant, "an orphan," has her own apartment, cooks her own meals and tutors biology to sixth-graders. True, she dissembled about the circumstances of her mother's death, waving off the topic by claiming that it was too painful to discuss. She did, however, chat about how tough and independent she is. "Life," she observed," doesn't stop when your parents die."
Well, it does for your parents. Especially when one of them gets her brains beaten to jelly by her Ivory Soap daughter.