Did the fellow student go to the high school when this happened? And if so, shouldn’t the school have flagged this up to Harvard. Or did she just go the press after he got into Harvard?
His political views were public knowledge long before he was accepted to Harvard. If it was a case of a “leftist” school not wanting a conservative they wouldn’t have admitted him in the first place. He couldn’t have been more vocal on his standpoint on the 2nd amendment. What was not known prior to his acceptance were his racist comments.
Right. The fellow student reported his racist comments. That’s why they rescinded. At our school if someone reports racist comments (verbal or written) the offending child is suspended and therefore it would be on the record passed to the college.
If his comments were reported two years ago, they must have been on his record.
- College acceptance or denial is based on performance and character throughout all of high school. The fact that he thought and said these things when he was 16 does not absolve him. Indeed, it's highly relevant.
- If Harvard had known about this during the application process, he never would have been accepted.
They weren’t. They came out in late May.
Send him to Oberlin, they can ‘unleash’ the student body on him and set him straight. I hear there might be some open spots in the near future. 
I don’t have an issue with the rescission, but I do wonder about the motivation of the fellow student who knew about this for 2 years and just recently reported it.
As a practical matter though, Harvard probably gets dozens, if not hundreds of those reports on “fellow students”. Do the AOs track each of them down? I doubt it. Kashuv is different because he made himself a celebrity, and Harvard had no choice but to manage this PR nightmare (in either rescinding or keeping his admission). When you take a lot of celebrity admits, this just comes with the territory.
It’s not Harvard’s role to be a rehab center. They admit based on HS record and demonstrated character. If they had a probation program, lots of kids would qualify to be admitted and put on probation. The “probation” (literally, “proving”) period is the four years of HS.
Words from a 16-yo kid, who might just have listened to too many raps… I would not call him a racist.
We forgave people who had said/done a lot worse things.
If the fellow student reported knowing that Harvard rescinds for racism, hoping for Kashuv to be rescinded, is there something wrong with that?
Edited to add that we don’t know whether there is a reporting process for reporting comments such as these, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, nor do we know whether the student used the process if it exists. We know that the student made these comments public.
Yes, if the fellow student knew about it previously and was truly offended by it, the matter should have been reported at the time. Doing so only now-months after colleges decisions were made by both colleges and students- looks like the student is opportunistically attempting to sabotage Kyle’s college path, maybe to get the Harvard slot for herself. If it was a problem, and I would assume it was, then speak up-even before college app season opens. Tell the principal, the teacher, the college counselor, whatever. Do not pretend to be offended now if you played along with it then. It would have been much fairer to all if this had surfaced earlier.
“I don’t have an issue with the rescission, but I do wonder about the motivation of the fellow student who knew about this for 2 years and just recently reported it.”
Such is life in many settings. Don’t do racist - or even boorish - things in life, school, work, or otherwise, or they may come back to haunt you when you least want them to. I would assume the motivation was not wanting a racist to have nice things most people don’t get. Is that a bad motivation? I guess I’m more pragmatic and think you reap what you sow. I’m sure he heard from people who didn’t like his public comments at the time so it should be no surprise to him that people found his comments offensive.
I’m not so sure he heard from people at the time. I certainly hope so, but I bet most just went along or ignored him.
Here is a new Fox interview:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/what-were-you-thinking-fox-host-grills-kyle-kashuv-on-past-comments
He seems to be a very articulate kid.
The kid is a schmuck in my opinion. He never addresses multiple reports that he said racist things frequently. In the Fox video above, he mentions “political bias” (if Harvard had political bias they would not have accepted him to began with), goes on to talk about Harvard’s history of being owned by slave owners (in the 1600s). Doesn’t sound like the talk of someone who is truly remorseful. Not impressed.
Notice 5:25 on the video.
While true, we do not know that anybody reported this incident to Harvard. We also do not know if anybody reported it to the MSDH school administration at the time, or at any time. All we do know is that someone reported it to the Huffington Post, which published on 5/23
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parkland-teen-kyle-kashuv-apologizes-racist-remarks_n_5ce6908be4b09b23e65ead62
Harvard sent its first letter to Kyle on 5/24, so I assume (and we all know what happens when we assume) that someone at Harvard read the Huffington Post rather than any student reporting it to the university…
“Ever since I have become a public figure, I condemned racism. I have condemned hatred,” says Kashuv.
Funny how in the various discussions of this incident, nobody has come forward with evidence of those condemnations. Perhaps they exist, but I haven’t seen them, and you’d think he’d point them out to us if they existed. What I see from Kashuv instead is a defense of his racist screeds, on the grounds that his friends competed to see who could be the most racist. I do not find that defense compelling.
He said very bad things, and arguably deserves to have his admission rescinded.
However I agree with the first comment in the Harvard Crimson reporting on the story:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/6/18/parkland-student-rescinded-harvard-2023/
"Fitzsimmon’s letters to Kashuv seems to bottom the rescission on Harvard’s policy that behavior that brings into question an applicant’s honesty, maturity, or moral character can jeopardize their admission. “As you know, the Committee takes seriously the qualities of maturity and moral character,” Fitzsimmons wrote in a letter dated June 3. Kashov’s racist comments can reasonably be seen as of that nature.
But David Hogg’s public comments are also full of statements that definitely call into question his honesty, maturity, and moral character, including saying that those who disfavor the gun control laws that he favors are “The pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs.” And, to Senator Marco Rubio: “I’m going to start off by putting this price tag right here as a reminder for you guys to know how much Marco Rubio took for every student’s life in Florida.” The list of such bizarre, extreme, false, immature and immoral comments by David Hogg is long, although of a type people of a certain political bent like to hear…especially from the young.
Hogg’s many extreme public statements indicate that he is a highly immature person given to facile dishonesty. His claims that politicians he disfavors, such as Senator Rubio, sell their votes to facilitate the deaths of children are unsupported, shocking, and at least as offensive and insensitive as anything put out by the ten applicants whose offers were rescinded two years ago.
It’s very hard to see any real consistency in this rescission on Harvard’s part. The admissions office seems to be using its policies more as a fig leaf to conceal a decision made on other grounds entirely."
I’m not a lawyer, but in terms of FOS, I thought you cannot yell “fire” in a theater, “bomb” at an airport and/or “kill all the Jews” (or Muslims, Blacks, LBGTQ, etc).