Sinedu Tadesse, a junior at Harvard, stabbed her roommate of two years, Trang Ho, 45 times while Trang lay sleeping in her bed. After the murder, a fierce debate erupted over whether Harvard should establish a scholarship in the name of both girls or only in Trang's.
The previous year, Harvard rescinded its admission offer to a student who turned out to have murdered her mother. Five years before applying, Gina Grant bludgeoned her mother to death, stuck a knife through her throat and twisted her lifeless hand around it to make it look like a suicide. Grant later implicated her boyfriend in the murder, served a mere six months in a juvenile detention center, and never publicly confessed to the crime or expressed remorse. Her later application to Harvard stressed that she was an orphan, her father having died of cancer when she was eleven years old. She answered no to the question whether she had ever been disciplined or put on probation, and when a Harvard interviewer asked about her mother's death, she said it was an accident.
Nevertheless, Derek Ho, a junior at Harvard, criticized his school's decision: "If they are serious about recognizing different life stories, then she is an exemplary story we don't often see at Harvard," he told the Harvard Crimson. "Harvard has lost the opportunity to admit someone who would have added to the class of 1999." Other commentators pronounced her doubly victimized, first by her allegedly abusive mother, then by Harvard. "In exchange for her dignified silence," wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich, "she got no rewards, only a smear campaign by Harvard." Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith caricatured Harvard's response to Grant's past: " 'Ick. Yuck. Phooey. She's tainted. She doesn't deserve to walk our musty, hallowed halls because she's not 100 percent pure, honest, and upstanding.' " Smith concludes: "Meanwhile, here on earth we realize that human beings are fallible."
