Colleges rescinding admissions offers as racist social media posts emerge

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/us/racism-social-media-college-admissions.html

by mancerayder • 6 years ago

48 90 6 years ago

ralmidani2• 6 years ago

Part 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.

knolax2• 6 years ago

These are 17/18 year olds you're talking about.

rocketpastsix• 6 years ago

are they not responsible for their actions? Are you assuming they will grow out of these racist tendencies?

hammock• 6 years ago

If colleges are places of credentialing, rather than of education, then this trend makes perfect sense.

gumby• 6 years ago

Even if education is the objective, someone who disrupts the experience for other students is probably not welcome.

mirimir• 6 years ago

OK, 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.

walterbell2• 6 years ago

Juvenile criminal records are expunged. Should juvenile speech be expunged?

https://criminal.findlaw.com/expungement/expungement-basics....

gruez4• 6 years ago

Expunged... 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?

walterbell2• 6 years ago

Similar to "redlining" and other forms of discrimination. Expunged records can't be used to deny opportunity.

klipt• 6 years ago

EU has this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

virtuous_signal• 6 years ago

I think you're touching on a more general trend. People are waking up to the fact that punishments and jailtime are often excessive for criminals. And also that for too long people got away with saying terrible (but not illegal) shit. We're course correcting, but it does make for some strange comparisons. For instance, I would guess that many of the same people who pile on when someone's old tweets are found, (essentially ensuring that they lose/never get a good job again) would also be in favor of ban-the-box laws or donating money indiscriminately to bail funds.

alexpotato• 6 years ago

I 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.

controversy3• 6 years ago

It 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.

toomanyrichies10• 6 years 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?

controversy3• 6 years ago

I 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.

testfoobar4• 6 years ago

Children, 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• 6 years ago

Completely agree with this comment. Well put.

pranjalv123• 6 years ago

They'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!

manigandham7• 6 years ago

Then 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?

testfoobar4• 6 years ago

Debate 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.

faitswulff2• 6 years ago

And oftentimes, children learn the best from the consequences of their mistakes.

akhilcacharya3• 6 years ago

Completely agree. All of the above examples have pretty severe consequences in many cases. No reason why "experimenting" with racist language should be any different.

testfoobar4• 6 years ago

Consequences should be calibrated and at least for children their records expunged where sensible. Online posts that are never expunged and can be screenshotted and shared do not lead to calibrated consequences.

jasonshen• 6 years ago

Top colleges are incredibly competitive. Plenty of valedictorians and budding star athletes, artists, scientists, inventors are not admitted. To admit someone who's said racist remarks is to spit on the talented and hard-working "just missed it" applicants who presumably have the judgement not to hold (or at the very least say) such awful things.

gbronner• 6 years ago

Parents should be wise to educate their children in never posting their feelings to social media. Thoughtcrime is real.

cbsks• 6 years ago

Maybe 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”.

gruez4• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

The 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.

rdiddly7• 6 years ago

What'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.

nujabe2• 6 years ago

College 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.

rdiddly7• 6 years ago

Fair 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!

msla3• 6 years ago

College 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.

If they have a racist home life where all their influencers are racist, this is impossible, or close enough to it you can't rely on it happening. Denying them the ability to move on with their lives by "proving" to them that the outside world will always hate them for saying the things they were raised to say is the absolute most perfect way to make sure they never want to change.

Yver• 6 years ago

If they didn't learn that at home [...]

And if someone comes from a dysfunctional home then tough luck. Be born in a better home next time.

Same thing for people who've been arrested for anything violent or threatening. Wouldn't want to be forced to interact with someone with a criminal past. They need to do some soul searching, which can be done from a prison cell.

akhilcacharya3• 6 years ago

A college education is exactly what they need.

I'm sure they can get that out of community college.

toomanyrichies10• 6 years ago

A college education is exactly what they need.

Avowed anti-Semite and white supremacist Richard Spencer has a BA from the University of Virginia, a Masters from the University of Chicago, and would have earned a PhD from Duke University if he hadn't dropped out on his own.

Your argument does not hold water.

rdiddly7• 6 years ago

OK no college for them. We'll use your idea instead. What is it?

neonate• 6 years ago

The argument doesn't need to apply in every case to hold water. I think it's a good point.

ulisesrmzroche• 6 years ago

That’s such a stupid comparison in the first sentence

collegiateaway• 6 years ago

I 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.

lsiebert2• 6 years ago

Admission 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• 6 years 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."

lsiebert2• 6 years ago

You 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.

dabbernaught4203• 6 years ago

Your friends sound like they probably believe that admission is a privilege - it's just that they also believe they deserve and have earned that privilege.

salawat• 6 years ago

I wish people here were more sensitive and sympathetic to the folks who are genuinely hurting.

What makes you think people aren't? Disagreement on the virtues of Universities using a political hot button issue as a means to discriminate doesn't mean people aren't sympathetic. At most it means there's are differences in prioritization of what should come before what in regards to how the "System" operates.

...and less worried about the loss of privilege that people face for their own bad choices.

Now who's being unsympathetic? And for that matter, wasn't it the Left who have been pounding the "higher education is a right" the last few years?

This is what bugs me about this shift to the use of social media mob tactics, and the undying record created by freezing in time every detail of everyone's life via private social media companies.

Instead of a People united in the understanding we all screw up, and change over time, always trying to better ourselves day after day, we've turned the social media presence of a person into the ultimate scapegoat and tool of prejudicial dismissal. The very thing that the Liberal movement of my youth was dead set against. You didn't judge someone by what they'd done, but by how they'd changed, and the changes they're trying to realize.

Furthermore, the purpose of a University is not to provide a safe space for the academic elite. It is an intellectual battleground, upon which the very foundations of human thought are broken down, relaid, and broken down again on a day to day basis. It is where the hard, but necessary questions are asked and answered. It is a place where the very fibers of a human being can be ripped asunder and rebuilt through the gaining of new perspective and through learning the art of transformational learning, research, and rhetorical communication. If you cannot see why it is not in a University's best interest to turn away sharp, inquisitive minds of any shape, and to not feel pause at the weaponizatiom of admission into an institution of higher learning as some sort of political virtue signaling mechanism, then I don't know what to say to you other than I'm disappointed you feel that the sacred mission of a University to sharpen, redirect, and hone young minds is unimportant enough to be wielded as little more than as some sort of brand.

We need to be fair to the people who haven't done anything wrong except be born with the wrong skin tone.

The poster opines on other's racism, as he makes a value judgement on the basis of life with a particular skin tone. There is no wrong skin tone, just other people more than willing to tell you there is one. If I had any advice to anyone reading this, it is to ignore such people. To listen, and give weight to it is to even acknowledge that such a state of affairs has legitimacy through the sheer populations of other people that indulge in it. Grit your teeth and push on through. You'll come out the other side that much stronger for having done it on your own, and will never have to entertain a second thought that anything you earned was unjustly given.

david38• 6 years ago

Anything can be hurtful. By definition free speech will insult someone at some point. There is a big difference between someone who has accomplished something and someone who has not crossed anyone. Looking for talent is one thing, lack of faults is another.

So race is the safe space right now. What next? Shall we deny admissions to anyone who used the term “bitches”?

Since we’re denying for racism, will we be denying admission to any minorities who post hateful comments about whites? Racism is racism. What if those whites are Jews? Are they protected then? What if they’re Christian? Immigrants from persecution? But you can’t tell that by the color of the person’s skin. All most people will see is “white” or worse “white patriarchy”. If they’ve had direct family members killed, does that give them enough suffering points to compete with historical injustices?

What if they are already attending classes? Do we expel them? Now we have restricted speech on campus, campuses where liberals frequently shout down ideas they don’t like at non-mandatory events instead of simply not attending. If we don’t expel them we’re sending the message that punishment for social transgressions as a minor are more severe than as an adult. That an institution will punish you more for an unwritten or at least unadvertised rule than later, when they have the opportunity to make it super clear.

Unless this is only exercised in the most extreme cases, it’s nothing more than pandering to the current movements because you’re selecting those who are ignorant enough to post stupid shit online.

Don’t get me wrong, some people are incredibly stupid in their conclusions (often from selection bias) and their actions (posting said conclusion on FB), but since I doubt it will applied equally, I’m not a believer.

All kinds of people hurt for different reasons. Why is everyone’s responsibility to be concerned about other people’s hurt?

I’m a minority and immigrant. My birth country has gone through such massive amounts of murders and fairly recent genocide I doubt most Americans can even contemplate such numbers. I see racial slurs against where I’m from and the people don’t even know it’s a slur, that’s how common it is.

Is it everyone’s responsibility to be aware of my feelings? No. Funny thing, if I’m insulted because of a lie related to my birth country, I’m a minority and have the right to be angry. If I’m insulted because of a lie related to me being a guy, it’s male fragility. Gatekeeping at its best.

applebeesfan• 6 years ago

Say aren't college admissions boards the same people that take race into account when choosing who to admit in the first place? Weird.

toomanyrichies10• 6 years ago

It'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• 6 years ago

Fighting 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.

manigandham7• 6 years ago

Racial discrimination is discrimination, regardless of which race is targeted.

dzonga• 6 years ago

people 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• 6 years ago

Whataboutism. 15 year old black kid being tried as adults is not right, so is this.

gremlinsinc5• 6 years ago

These 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.

msla3• 6 years ago

This 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/

(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?)

dabbernaught4203• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

Like 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'.

manigandham7• 6 years ago

Nobody 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.

gremlinsinc5• 6 years ago

So 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.

manigandham7• 6 years ago

Rape 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.

Colleges rescinding admissions offers as racist social media posts emerge

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