Kyle Kashuv, the well-known Parkland school shooting survivor, came under fire last month for racist and anti-Semitic comments he made online two years earlier when he was 16. In an attempt to address the revelations, he quickly gave an apology for his actions, stating that he was “embarrassed” by his comments and that they were “not indicative of who” he was. When later contacted by Harvard College, the school he was committed to attending, with a request to address the comments, he replied with an even more full-throated apology, took complete responsibility for the comments, and presented a plan to help overcome the pain he caused.
Unfortunately, his efforts to assuage the outcry were in vain. While his high school classmate David Hogg will matriculate at Harvard this upcoming fall, Harvard College rescinded Kashuv’s place, stating that they “take seriously the qualities of maturity and moral character” of their applicants.
Of course, as a private institution, Harvard has every right to allow in whomever it chooses. After all, it retracted the admissions offers of 10 students back in 2017 for similar issues. And to be honest, Kashuv’s comments were appalling, and he certainly knew better at 16 than to use such derogatory language. However, this new trend of admission offices taking into account college applicants’ “maturity and moral character” is interesting since Harvard hasn’t always been so unforgiving of immorality. Historically, it has been willing to look past such moral indiscretions as armed carjackings, espionage, and even downright murder.
Back in the 1970s, Warren Kimbro graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education after serving a 4 1/2-year sentence for not just torturing but murdering a suspected police informer while he was a Black Panther. Just a few years ago, Reginald Betts was offered a spot at Harvard Law School after serving out time for participating in an armed carjacking as a teenager back in 1996. In 2017, the university’s history department offered a doctorate seat to Michelle Jones, who served 20 years of a 50-year sentence for murdering her 4-year-old child, before higher administration rescinded it.
About that same time, Chelsea Manning was offered a visiting fellowship to speak at the university. This was only rescinded under outside pressure, after the backlash over Manning’s “aiding the enemy” became too much for the school to bear.
While I support redemption for those who have borne the consequences of their actions, within reason, of course, what is striking to me is the admissions committee’s willingness to revoke Kashuv’s acceptance for online comments he made as a 16-year-old, especially given his contrition. Harvard admissions is willing to forgive murder and grand theft auto, but Kashuv’s online behavior was apparently beyond the pale.
However, Kashuv’s incident, and the one that occurred back in 2017, do not so much evince Harvard admissions’ sudden moral clarity as they expose one more institution giving in to the pressures of high-minded mob morality.
In the same fashion as Harvard admissions caved to mob pressure, the academy pressured Kevin Hart to step down as host of the Oscars after 8-year-old homophobic tweets “came to light,” which spurred many to rally for his removal. Justine Sacco’s employers fired her after she gained horrible and undeserved worldwide notoriety from a tweet that was misinterpreted as malicious and racist. A software developer lost his job after suffering an online shaming for an overheard sexist joke at a tech conference.
Would it truly be a better world if the Heisman Trust took a lesson from Harvard and rescinded Kyler Murray’s trophy for anti-gay tweets he made as a 15-year-old as well?
Private institutions have every right to choose with whom they affiliate and whom they admit. But let’s just hope they do so of their own volition and not just to assuage a bloodthirsty mob. After all, as the doors closed on Kashuv, they may have also closed on many other potential students who could fall victim to a similar shame storm, whether sparked by racist online comments and distasteful tweets or, heaven forbid, revenge porn, Lewinsky-esque affairs, or any other type of anonymous vigilante justice.
Kevin Petersen is a student at Columbia University’s School of General Studies and a U.S. Army veteran of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan.
