concur with bksquared.
In addition to the social norms, there is a potential legal issue with this type of person. If a college knowingly admits racists/anti-semites, the college could be found for enabling a de facto hostile education institution. (Is if fair to Jewish kid to have to room with Kashuv?) Similar to admitting acknowledged misognynists. I’m guessing both are federal no-no’s, but under different Titles of the federal code.
I would hope that any private college that had prior knowledge would not accept and if informed after the fact, would rescind.
A good amount of #16 sounds like wish-casting. And last I checked, the Nondorf era had produced enrollment numbers similar to Harvard’s in terms of racial diversity.
The ATL comment about UChicago and “low handing fruit” sounds like a dig on Geoff Stone. According to Mr. ATL in some of his other posts, it’s never ok for a white person to use the N word. Never. But it’s implied that black people can have different rules. This is bizarre and twisted logic. As to #17 - Mr. ATL demeaned the white community? The guy sounds angry and conflicted.
(“The profs at the U of C knew that a lot of polishing was required to shape us up.”)
- "Not the profs job here."
Wrong, @doschicos. Here is @Marlow1’s statement again, for your edification:
“Is it really true that to be brash, discourteous, and offensive in high school was disqualifying in any kid who came to the University of Chicago? I knew plenty of them, I may well have been one of them myself. The profs at the U of C knew that a lot of polishing was required to shape us up. The question was whether the raw material was good enough to warrant the effort. I myself was constantly being admonished to think through the implications of extreme positions, consider the counterarguments and evidence, and tone down the prose. That was the hallmark of a Chicago education.”
The question of course is whether Young Krashuv was “merely brash, discourteous and offensive” or outright racist and anti-Semitic, given his documented remarks (sorry, but the gossipy “reports of similar comments” doesn’t count). Regardless of that question, Marlowe’s point is valid: many arrive on campus - whether it be Harvard, UChicago or elsewhere - sounding brash and discourteous because, for instance, they haven’t mastered the skill of being able to conduct an intelligent conversation. If the profs are doing their job properly, the students emerge sounding more intelligent than when they came in. Sadly, many students don’t - and that’s a critique of higher ed but also beyond the scope of this discussion. As for UChicago, one of the main purposes of the Core - particularly Hum/Sosc/Civ - is to teach the students to read, write, and think critically and intelligently and UChicago students really “get” the value of those requirements once they have completed them and get out into the world. So UChicago grads gladly acknowledge how ignorant they once sounded and how the education and the professors changed them for the better. Guessing that at least some Harvard grads do and feel the same regarding their institution.
Getting back to the original question: IF it happened at UChicago… here are my thoughts.
I dont think he would have been accepted to UChicago. Well, maybe if he applied ED1. But since he was clearly going for Harvard, he would never have done that.
If for some reason he was accepted, would he have gotten a rescission? I think he would have, however not without a huge public debate about people’s capacity to change, UChicago’s ability to change him for the better, and UChicago’s tradition of open debate. Arguments like “He can not be an antisemite since he is a jew and a son of two people who migrated to the US from Israel”, “He was 16”, etc will be rehashed 10x more than what is happening now at Harvard.
I guess, thinking about it, I am glad it did not happen at UChicago because it would have turned into a sort of a “crisis” about the identity of the school.
The thought experiment posed by l’affaire Kashuv leads me to a more general question. Several commenters on the Harvard board wrote about a certain ideal in a Harvard student. That concept was expansive but it did seem to involve some idea of civic exemplariness and leadership potential. That seemed intuitively correct to me given Harvard’s history and sense of mission as often stated on this board and elsewhere. Kashuv broke that mold just too egregiously.
Chicago has, however, historically had a different educational mission and a different student ideal, one that privileged originality and even eccentricity and that gave the greatest weight of all to intellectual potential, attainment and ambition. Aristotle Schwarz was the poster boy at Chicago, threatened though he has always been by the forces of homogenization. Could one imagine such an ideal - or even such a debate - taking place anywhere but Chicago?
If there is such a thing as a Harvard ideal and such a thing as a Chicago ideal, those ideals overlap both in the qualities of individuals and in the shaping of the respective student bodies. Yet a difference remains. Regardless of where you stand on the matter of this particular rescission, don’t you have to see differing priorities and values at work that might have led to different results?
A past president of Harvard once notoriously declined to change Harvard’s admissions policy because “that would make us no different from the University of Chicago.” Doesn’t the sense linger on that these two great universities do things just a bit differently? Whether that generic difference would have made a difference in this case we can’t know, but the principles in play would not have been precisely the same.
^ This “ideal” in a Harvard student obviously changes with the times, since at one point you were excluded if you weren’t white, privileged and male. UChicago has never changed its ideals or standards like that. It never needed to.
Is an institution of higher learning a country club or a place of intellectual or personal growth? I see UChicago making a statement condemning this young man’s words and leaving it at that. What the young man does upon learning that his school has just sent a harsh public condemnation would be up to him.
BTW, additional precedent: Zimmer came out and condemned Richard Spenser’s speech a couple of years ago when Spenser was hoping to finagle an invite to come on campus. But was Spenser actually “barred” from campus? I don’t think so (please correct if this is wrong). Choosing not to show up because you don’t think you’ll have a welcome reception isn’t the same thing as being “disinvited.”
Another tangentially-related example of how the two schools differ in the ideals that they might be looking for in their students:
During the high school protests across the county in the wake of the Parkland shooting last year, Harvard and other elite colleges put out a statement that candidates for admission wouldn’t be penalized for skipping school to participate, even if your high school docked you. In contrast, University of Chicago informed candidates for admission that they were absolutely free to participate in demonstrations and protests; however, they were still expected to comply with their high school’s requirements for completion of work, attendance and so forth.
So - that C in APUSH because you were too busy attending rallies in the spring of 2018 to complete your assignments presumably wouldn’t be held against you in an admission decision with Harvard. UChicago - different story.