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Colleges rescinding admissions offers as racist social media posts emerge
- ralmidani 6y agoPart of me has reservations about depriving ignorant people of an opportunity to get educated, but another part of me thinks not booting them will probably result in more racists in positions of power.
- knolax 6y agoThese are 17/18 year olds you're talking about.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rocketpastsix 6y agoare they not responsible for their actions? Are you assuming they will grow out of these racist tendencies?
- PlasticTank 6y agoLet's just ban people who think differently from education, that will surely be a great boon to the country... It doesn't matter if they grow out of it or not, who are you to decide who gets education and who doesn't, I thought education was believed to a be universal right.
- gruez 6y ago>I thought education was believed to a be universal right. It is. Getting an education at a top tier college? Not so much. There's always university of phoenix.
- dabbernaught420 6y ago>It doesn't matter if they grow out of it or not Especially true considering that some of these people accused of wrongthink might actually be onto something. It's not a good idea to assume that popular views are certainly the correct ones.
- knolax 6y agoYeah??? I remember so much of the media targeted towards me when I was that age involved being racist "as a joke". Most people grow out of it with age. I mean look at these 1920s racial stereotypes being pushed in a game made a couple of years ago[0] or this song made by a popular children's entertainer[1]. A 17 year old can not vote in national elections, can not drive without restrictions, can not enlist in the military, can not drink, and can not marry. Clearly society has decided that they have not finished developing as people. [0] https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vadim_Bobrov https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vadim_Bobrov [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B****_Lasagna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B****_Lasagna
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> Are you assuming they will grow out of these racist tendencies? Yes? Did you leave college with the same beliefs you had when you arrived?
- leephillips 6y agoAlthough some of my beliefs were certainly refined and adjusted, for the most part, I would say, yes, I left college with the same beliefs I had when I arrived: racism is wrong and racist slurs are unacceptable. Let these racist brats work at McDonald’s.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago... Thereby ensuring that they will never even be exposed to any different ideas,and sticking them at the bottom of the social/economic latter so they can spend their lives blaming someone else (who will definitely be their in-group, right?).
- leephillips 6y agoIt’s a reasonable point of view—that universities perform a social good by admitting these racists, because the university experience might reform them. I guess that would mean that they should seek out more racists, and recruit them—because then they would be reforming more people, and helping society even more. But at some point you might get too many racists, and the normal students would be overburdened in their task of helping to expose them to different ideas. It will be difficult for the admissions committees to find the right balance: you want just the right number of racists.
- rdiddly 6y agoThey're not responsible enough that we consider them adults, or let them vote, or let them join the military without parental consent. And if a high school kid can't grow out of racist tendencies, what is the point of all the marching and speeches and protesting and educating then? By that logic, not one mind can ever possibly change because racism is hereditary and permanent.
- ralmidani 6y agoProtests are inconvenient, that’s part of the reason they’re effective at getting people to question the status quo. Similarly, having admission rescinded is especially inconvenient for the people involved and will stimulate some of them (and those around them) to question their racist beliefs. If people renounce their racism, I am all for giving them a second chance. But giving racists the privilege of a top-tier education, often at the expense of non-racists who were denied that same privilege, all while the racists are unrepentant? Nope.
- mancerayder 6y ago> are they not responsible for their actions? Are you assuming they will grow out of these racist tendencies? Your alternative is to what, eliminate them from the Earth? As if the "racism" has become this permanent quality? This entire comment thread is extremely spooky to me. There's such a willingness to be mean-spirited in the name of equality it's downright terrifying. They're teenagers. You want to punish teenagers for comments, and have the consequences follow them for the rest of their lives? Is that just?
- hammock 6y agoIf colleges are places of credentialing, rather than of education, then this trend makes perfect sense.
- gumby 6y agoEven if education is the objective, someone who disrupts the experience for other students is probably not welcome.
- mirimir 6y agoOK, so TFA is about racism, or rather about what's currently considered racism (which will undoubtedly keep changing). But more generally, these are just object lessons in poor OPSEC. In particular, the failure to adequately compartmentalize casual social media activity and professional life.
- walterbell 6y agoJuvenile criminal records are expunged. Should juvenile speech be expunged? https://criminal.findlaw.com/expungement/expungement-basics.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/expungement/expungement-basics....
- gruez 6y agoExpunged... how? If you said some nasty stuff when you were 17, and now it's "expunged" because you turned 18, does that mean I can't say that that you did those things? Doesn't that violate my right to free speech?
- walterbell 6y agoSimilar to "redlining" and other forms of discrimination. Expunged records can't be used to deny opportunity.
- gruez 6y agoIf the law is "once you're past 18 you can't be discriminated on the basis of what you said before turning 18", then it wouldn't have helped much for most of the students, since they were probably didn't turn 18 in between them saying the racist thing and the college discovering it. I guess you can reapply a year later, but that's already a year of your life wasted. Not to mention that there's nothing preventing the college from publicly rescinding the offer (unless that's also outlawed), and letting other colleges make some inferences. If the law is "you can't be discriminated on the basis of what you said under 18, including when you're under 18", then it would effectively outlaw admissions essays, which are literally designed to discriminate people on the basis of their speech. It'd also mean that you can be a racist all the way up to 18 with zero consequences, although you might we up for a rude awakening once you turned 18. This is as opposed to the juvie system, where you'd still get punished, but there's no records of it once you turned 18.
- klipt 6y agoEU has this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
- alexpotato 6y agoI would imagine that the intersection of: - People who have done incredibly positive things for their family, town, state/province, country, humanity - People who have said, not done but only said, things that they probably shouldn't have is much bigger than most people would like to admit. Once you factor in that modern research has established that a young person's brain isn't fully developed till they are 25, we should, as a society, really consider what kind of trade offs we should make around actions of teenagers. Especially so when most of the people making these decisions would most likely not pass their own current criteria.
- controversy 6y agoIt will be interesting to watch our new language lords evolve. We’ve already seen backlash against Rowling for being a TERF. However TERF ideology was fine just a few years ago. Who knows what will become the new taboo.
- toomanyrichies 6y ago> our new language lords > TERF ideology was fine just a few years ago > who knows what will become the new taboo I'd like to understand the point you're trying to make in greater detail. Do you object to anti-TERF ideology in particular, or evolving cultural standards in general?
- controversy 6y agoI object to hypocrisy. Those pushing speech limits are the same who pushed for freedom. Why was did gay rights win the day? It was due to a cogent argument that freedom is better than hiding in the shadows. Rather than suppressing gay speech, people said they had a right to make their case. Now there is a wing that attacks as immoral anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They have become the thing they fought: fundamentalist.
- yodon 6y agoThe right to free speech gives you a right to speak. It does not give you a right to be respected for your words. Respect must always be earned.
- controversy 6y agoI agree with your sentiment. I agree with the general idea. My problem is that the people behind cancel culture are hypocrites. Fundamentalists and even society in general 30 years ago said homosexuality was morally abhorrent. They tried to cancel gays. People spoke up. They said that canceling someone was wrong. Through this the far left gained traction. Now they’ve turned around and established the old norms with a new boss. The promise made in the late 90s was that the gays wanted a live and let live policy. What they did in their home life shouldn’t matter to anyone. If someone want to take issue with their life style, they could as long as the gays’ day to day rights were respected. The truce seems to be broken. There are those within the LGBTQ+ community that are seeking retribution. They are seeking to establish their own courts in the public discourse to revile those who took their forefathers to legal ones. Ultimately this is going to end with the left eating itself. Their hypocrisy will run smooth after awhile. In the meantime there will be many hearts removed on the alter of their cause. To the question below about canceling over intolerance, I see little benefit in that since the things which we are to tolerate keep moving as do those which we should abhor. Kevin Hart lost the opportunity to host an awards show because of some old jokes. Golden Girls had an episode removed because they wore mud masks. There was a fight at the BBC over a Faulty Towers episode with the N-word. Heck John Cleese is in self imposed exile because of the thought police in England. To destroy a young man or woman’s future because of foolish indiscretions in their teens is unconscionable. That is the way of fostering the next generation of hate. We will continue to live in a truly racist world because of actions like this. To deny the children entry on these grounds is to say they have no value. They will take this with them into life. They will raise their children in the soil of animosity.
- testfoobar 6y agoChildren, that is who we are talking about here, learn from making mistakes. It is easy for children to follow a crowd and do all sorts of things they will later regret: experiment with drugs, alcohol, smoking, unhealthy relationships, sexual flings, etc. Included in this list is experimenting with racist language. It is the responsibility of parents, teachers, adults and mentors to guide children away from mistakes towards the ability to make healthier choices. Children also learn from their environment. Many of my college friends had never had anything spicy beyond a hint of black pepper due to their upbringing. Some thought spicy food was foul, unpleasant and foreign. It took them a few times visiting Indian, Caribbean, Thai, and Korean places to get hooked and completely change their world view. We shouldn't mark kids as racist. Everyone has the capacity to grow and learn. Children especially so.
- gallego2007 6y agoCompletely agree with this comment. Well put.
- pranjalv123 6y agoThey're also being admitted for their actions as children. By the logic of "they're just kids", you shouldn't have a college admissions process at all!
- manigandham 6y agoThen is speech the same as action? And do actions balance out to a net positive or negative, or do you expect no negative at all?
- testfoobar 6y agoDebate team? The question really is what is redeemable vs what is not? You can decide for yourself. What instantly disqualifies a child vs what does not? IMHO, educational institutions at all levels should be more generous and more forgiving because they are in the business of producing educated healthy adults. If anything, we should focus more resources towards kids that are saying racist things. They are still kids. We can show them a better way. Forgiveness is divine.
- gbronner 6y agoParents should be wise to educate their children in never posting their feelings to social media. Thoughtcrime is real.
- cbsks 6y agoMaybe they could teach their children to not be racist? But seriously, that’s why social networks like Snapchat took off. Not leaving a permanent trail online is very valuable especially to young people who are still making stupid mistakes for the first time. I certainly said a lot of stupid stuff in my youth that I am glad is not on my “permanent record”.
- gruez 6y ago>Thoughtcrime is real. The implication with "thoughtcrime" is that the state is using its monopoly on violence to punish you for thinking the wrong way. I don't see how that's anywhere close to people refusing to associate with you based on your beliefs. eg. a die-hard libertarian getting kicked out of the campus communist association.
- orblivion 6y agoThe Kyle Kashuv one was especially bad. It was done in a private conversation. IMO he doesn't owe anybody an apology, other than anyone in that conversation who he may have offended. His supposed friend should be the one to apologize for making it public.
- rdiddly 6y agoWhat's next, restaurants refusing patrons for being hungry? A college education is exactly what they need. Not only to get some history and some different perspectives, but also to potentially have a brown person as a prof, a roommate or better yet a project teammate, and have their grade depend on working with them. Maybe even experience having that person carry them on the project for the super mindblow. Sending them back to their childhood bedroom and shitty hometown retail job, notsomuch.
- nujabe 6y agoCollege is not the place to teach racists to become humanists. If they didn't learn that at home or at school, they certainly aren't going to learn that in college. They need to do some soul searching, which can be done from home. Plus I don't it's fair to minority students, who already face their own challenges on college campuses, to be forced to interact and cohabit with known racists.
- rdiddly 6y agoFair enough on burdening minority students further. But, counterpoint, they're the most qualified to educate white people about it, and maybe it's never too early to put them in a leadership position where they can do that. Definitely have to take exception to the first sentence though, since a college literally has a department called the Humanities!
- toomanyrichies 6y ago> maybe it's never too early to put them in a leadership position where they can do that. Whether or not they're put in that kind of "leadership position" should be up to them, not anyone else. It's not the responsibility of under-represented groups to educate white people about the history of racial and economic injustice. If we want to learn, the resources exist for us to learn on our own. If we don't want to learn, no amount of prerequisite classes in "Humanities" will motivate us to do so.
- 6y ago
- collegiateaway 6y agoI was doing the whole college application process almost 10 years ago (wow, yikes). This happened back then, too. My middle/high school years spanned the decline of MySpace and the rise of Facebook. Plenty of kids got wrist-slaps for having things like pot leaf gifs on their MySpace pages, and by the time we were nearing the end of high school most people understood that the things you publicly say online don't disappear. Colleges even warned us about it in admission seminars: "be careful what pictures and statements you put online, because we'll be watching..." That was a decade ago, but I guess high-quality video cameras are in everyone's pockets these days. At the time, most kids seemed to see it as just another selection criteria: "can you avoid sticking your foot in your own mouth so badly that it could get you fired from the sort of job that you hope to hold one day?" It might be harder when you're a teenager and every word you say ends up on Snapchat/TikTok/Instagram, but this is nothing new.
- lsiebert 6y agoAdmission is a privilege. It's not punishment to withdraw a privilege from people who do harmful things. Racist speech and actions are harmful and hurtful, and preventing people who have demonstrated such extreme disregard for others from attending a college serves to protect people attending and working at the school. There is a legal, and I would argue a moral, obligation that schools have to prevent racial harassment of their students and staff. There's also their own reputation to consider. I wish people here were more sensitive and sympathetic to the folks who are genuinely hurting, and less worried about the loss of privilege that people face for their own bad choices. Black people see family members, friends and members of their community denigrated, insulted, harassed, oppressed and even killed by racists and racist systems. Having Black people I'm close to in my life, I can honestly say that many White people have no concept of how horrible things are, and quite a lot don't want to know. One thing I've always appreciated about my fellow hackers is a sense of fairness, an ideal of justice, a desire for truth and a willingness to face criticism and learn from mistakes. We need to be fair to the people who haven't done anything wrong except be born with the wrong skin tone.
- vulcan01 6y ago> Admission is a privilege. Can someone say this to my friends? They tend to see it as a right. "Look at all my achievements that I worked so hard for. I must be admitted."
- lsiebert 6y agoYou can say it to them yourself. I feel like one thing I learned as I got a little older is that, even if it's uncomfortable, it's important to tell people when they could do better.
- toomanyrichies 6y agoExactly. If they can't expect to hear hard truths from their friends, who can they expect to hear them from?
- dabbernaught420 6y ago
- applebeesfan 6y agoSay aren't college admissions boards the same people that take race into account when choosing who to admit in the first place? Weird.
- toomanyrichies 6y agoIt's almost like being on the giving vs. receiving end of hundreds of years of enforced racial and economic disparities are two totally separate concepts. Weird indeed.
- tuesdayrain 6y agoFighting historic racism with some kind of new age racism that goes in the opposite direction isn't the answer. It's what creates a cycle of hate.
- manigandham 6y agoRacial discrimination is discrimination, regardless of which race is targeted.
- toomanyrichies 6y agoTrue, and that would be relevant to the discussion if "affirmative action"-based admissions decisions were equivalent to reverse racism. But they aren't. Many arguments against affirmative action are based on the idea that we should judge people on their merits. And I'd agree with that- we absolutely should. The problem is that this is neither current practice, nor historical practice, nor even achievable, at least in American society. It's been demonstrated that CVs from people with ethnic-sounding names are binned to a greater extent than people with white-sounding names in job hirings, admission decisions, etc. There's a non-trivial difference between someone who loses out on a college admissions decision because of affirmative action, vs. someone who has been systematically subject to racist policies at a micro and macro level all their lives.
- manigandham 6y ago
- dzonga 6y agopeople that are saying they're 17/18 year kids. do you know that 15 year old black kids, are usually tried as adults by the criminal system. most of these kids end up going in and out of prison their whole lives. yet nah, white kids should get a slap on the wrist for hateful speech ? we should stem out racism and also have a justice system that reintegrates troublesome black kids. but nah, america has to run a private prison system i.e slavery.
- whataboutism11 6y agoWhataboutism. 15 year old black kid being tried as adults is not right, so is this.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoThese don't even equate, one is literally destroying a life, and one is just slapping them on the hand and making them go to 'oh no community college' the horror.
- msla 6y agoThis is, ultimately, just another form of rich privilege: Being non-racist (or being accepted as non-racist) tracks with education[0], which tracks with family wealth. If you're from a poor family, you're more likely to trip the "racist alert" in some college's admissions process, denying you the ability to gain more education. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883053/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883053/ (A part of me wonders how sensitive these alerts are to dogwhistles. For example, if someone expressed a desire to see more stable two-parent families, will that be seen as playing into nasty racist stereotypes? How about if someone castigated a place for not being diverse enough?)
- dabbernaught420 6y agoI don't think universities should only be for people who share popular views. Seventy years ago universities had very different views. If they had had an effective way of screening out students whose views they considered dangerous or harmful, then perhaps we would have a worse society than we do now. These are powers that make me uneasy.
- siemprenocasa 6y agoLike most things, this should be taken with a grain of salt. There's a difference between intention and ignorance. If kids are getting on social media at 9 or 10 years old now (which is not like it's difficult given I see kids with smartphones around 9 years old), then there is a considerably high chance a 9 to 18 year old is going to do something that will look stupid when they are older. 10 - 14 year olds are like the prime example of "knowing just enough to be dangerous to themselves and others". There's got to be 11 year olds out there that just learned about all the swear words and bad words and think "wow, I need to use these". Now, all of that exists forever on the internet in indelible ink to come back to bite them in the ass as they grow up and become more learned (and hopefully wiser). If someone truly grasps what they are doing with full intention, that qualifies for a rejection. However, I think it would be hard to separate "this person was just a dumbass at the time" from "this person means what they said" at an age when solving 3x=6 was considered 'smart'.
- manigandham 6y agoNobody is completely innocent. The people who want such perfect morality from everyone else are usually the ones with the most to hide. As much as the college has the right to revoke their invitation and nobody is entitled to acceptance, there needs to be a much deeper discussion about how to engage with people instead of shunning them for any transgression, especially ones defined in the future in retrospect.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoSo if they raped someone would that be okay? Where's the line you draw in the sand that maybe we shouldn't be making these people think anything they do is okay, they can get away with being a piece of shit? The reason we have shitty cops is because precincts and unions ENABLE them. If we enable these kids to keep doing what they do without consequence then they will keep pushing the envelope of what is acceptable until they are a horrible human being and either a felon or a lawyer/politician/cop. Aside from that college admissions is a very long process w/ tons of essays, etc and character evaluation is the whole reason, the words you say when nobody's looking can have huge impact on your 'character assessment' so best to not say it or be damn sure nobody's recording.
- manigandham 6y agoRape is a serious and terrible crime. Did these kids rape someone? Are you actually confused about whether that should be over the line? If you have to create a strawman with the very first sentence than what's there to discuss? There's a difference between reckless speech when young and vile criminal actions. I already said that admittance can be revoked but it's the standard of character and the filter of morality that I'm questioning. I don't see how this solves anything when you're taking a few posts that apparently now overrule the entire admissions process which you said was for determining character. So what's the point of the process then? Was it inaccurate? What about when the definition of offensive changes in 6 months? What about those who have no social media but are truly bad? I'm afraid all I see is the overreaction to a political climate and, at best, trying to treat a symptom than actually approaching anything representing real issues.