Undone by social media: Harvard rescinds admissions

@prof2dad

Here’s some more legal opinions on the issue. I’m sure universities have discussions with their legal counsel before expelling students. However, I expect those closed door conversations with the university president go something like this.

What’s the probability the student will be able to afford competent legal counsel to sue us through multiple rounds of appeals? nil unless someone takes the case pro bono
If we get sued, would we lose? probably
If we lose, how large would the financial settlement be? small

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oklahoma-fraternity-explainer-20150310-story.html

“If we get sued, would we lose? probably”

I have no objection with this assessment.

Every admissions process is flawed; this is not unique to Harvard. I tend to think though that more kids suffer from imposter syndrome at Harvard and that kids with imposter syndrome are particularly prone to do stupid things when they first start college. Some of these kids are rich kids who are legacies or developmental admits and, believe it or not, are insecure about whether they “belong” at H. Some are kids from “flyover country” who are anxious about fitting in and are worried they will come across as unsophisticated. So, they do stupid things because they want to seem “cool” or want to fit in socially. It’s not entirely unlike the kids who have had very little or no booze in high school who get drunk out of their minds at the first frat party they attend.

Personally, looking at the memes that were posted only two seemed so offensive to me that they warranted rescission of admission. But H can do what it wants.

I read the Crimson article and didn’t see any mention of child pornography. Then, I looked at the memes, which you can find online, and didn’t see anything that could reasonably be construed as child pornography. We can take a bet on whether any of those students will be criminally charged?

Well Harvard exercised their free expression and said “don’t come to our school”. I applaud them for that.

"Some are kids from “flyover country” who are anxious about fitting in and are worried they will come across as unsophisticated. So, they do stupid things because they want to seem “cool” or want to fit in socially. "

That’s right!! Because all of us from “flyover country” feel that we are not sophisticated so we do stupid things to seem “cool”. Of course because a kid is from “flyover country” that’s exactly what they would do to try to fit in socially. Well, just dang it, I wish I was sophisticated!!!

“What I do want to say is that I sincerely do not believe these are bad kids. They made a mistake, who hasn’t?”

I agree that they are likely not bad kids. And everyone has made mistakes. But I also think that Harvard has the right to deny admission to applicants whose particular mistakes demonstrate that the applicants either embrace odious ideas and opinions or demonstrate the applicants’ very poor judgment and very bad manners.

Or stated another way, why should Harvard accept “good kids” who do really dumb and distasteful things over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other applicants, with equally sterling qualifications, but who are smart enough and good mannered enough to avoid doing such dumb and distasteful things.

The "one law professor " article posted above will give an excellent outline on public universities and free speech. As for SCOTUS remember that even the conservative wing of the court is very very pro free speech. The FIRE.org is a coming at free speech from the pretty conservative point of view. Free speech is where conservatives like scalia was and civil liberties liberals like me ( who believe that if you don’t protect the free speech of racist idiots we are all doomed) find total agreement.

I agree with @csfmap - this is less about free expression or specific offenses and more about character. Harvard and most colleges do have a reasonable expectation that their students behave like decent human beings. I read several of the mimes and found them incredibly vulgar and disgusting. My guess is these students posted this garbage hoping to fit into the group and garner some sort of attention. Harvard wants role models, not lemmings. What kind of roommates or classmates would they make and what would they bring to the community? I know many colleges don’t scrape social media when they vet students, but maybe they should.

Think about the backlash if Harvard did nothing and all these screenshots still got out like they have now. Harvard’s hand was forced by the poor choices these students made. The school really did not have another choice.

book smarts does not equal social intelligence nor common sense.

Oh come on. No one is suggesting that anyone is going to be criminally charged. That’s a complete distortion of the very limited point I made, which is that in a different case, involving government restrictions on free speech, there are limitations on obscene speech and on child pornography.

The article states in relevant part:

[quote]
In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. ** Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing **, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.” /quote

It was a point to consider. That’s all. It’s not as if it came completely out of nowhere or was wholly unrelated.

Basically fly over country here. Neither I nor any of my close friends would do something like share these.

Don’t stereotype.

Haven’t been here for a while, but logged back on to see what CC was making of the situation.

I am generally very alarmed by recent attempts to shut down speech on campuses. However, that doesn’t mean that I believe there is no such thing as speech that crosses a line. It is a major problem when groups draw the boundaries of acceptable discourse so narrowly that they exclude the expression of fairly mainstream (if, in some cases, minority) beliefs, or even (as in the recent Evergreen State Case, or the Yale Halloween email debacle), the nuanced reservations of otherwise like-minded people deemed insufficiently progressive.

This kind of discourse is a world away from Erika Christiakis, or even Charles Murray. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be protected - which, as others have said ad nauseum, it is, in the sense that no one is arresting the teens for it. But we aren’t talking about preserving robust debate. We’re talking about comments that were designed to violate basic and widely-agreed upon standards of decency, made deliberately in a group designed for the purpose over a period of weeks or months. Which, again, isn’t a criminal offense, but I think Harvard is well within its rights to decide they don’t want these students at their university.

To me, context is as important here as content. I’d wager that most people have at some point in their lives made a joke that they wouldn’t want publicly attached to their names.Cards against Humanity is a quite popular game with some cards that lead to formulations every bit as vile and offensive as these memes. I don’t think everyone who has ever played the game is a terrible person – nor, by the way, do I think these students are necessarily terrible people (although I suspect some are). They are immature teens egging each other on to be wilfully offensive. But there seems to me a substantive difference between a spontaneous remark, or a bunch of friends sitting down and playing an offensive card game one night, to what was happening here.

First, as others have said, it takes a special kind of idiocy to do this over social media. Beyond publicizing their views to Harvard, it also means that they’ve potentially aired their offensive statements to future classmates and roommates that I think would NOT be “special snowflakes” for having some reservations about interacting with someone they knew had posted some of those memes.

Second, this was something evidently sustained over a period of time, and that involved some effort. I don’t know enough about memes to know how much, but at minimum they had to be searching the internet for the most offensive content they could find. That strikes me as more problematic than spouting off an off-color joke that occurred to you on the spur of the moment.

Third, there seems to have been an element of peer pressure and coercion that should have been particularly worrisome to Harvard given concerns about campus climate. This wasn’t a private group of five friends who stayed in their dark corner of the internet. This was a group in which apparently aspiring members had to post something offensive to the general thread to prove their worthiness for admission, which means both that joining the group was being framed as something to be desired (and even an achievement to be earned) and that their admission practice required posting something designed for offense to a thread of people who hadn’t expressed any interest in-- and some of whom might be reasonably expected to be upset by – the kind of intentionally over-the-line content they were dealing with.

Fourth, and maybe most importantly, it says something to me that this is what these students were choosing to do in what had to be among their first interactions with their future classmates. Of all the topics that might come up – Harvard social or academic life, common interests, end of high school talk – these students, at almost the first opportunity, chose to create a group dedicated to being offensive with and in front of total strangers.That says something more about them then a joke in bad taste circulated among friends on a random day in February of freshman year.

I also want to note that we don’t know that all the members of the group had their admissions rescinded, and I strongly suspect that the memes circulating were not the only ones created. It is quite possible that only some memes were deemed offensive enough to warrant rescinding admission. Presumably, the girl who informed on the rest had posted what she considered to be “dark humor,” but which didn’t rise to the level of the Holocaust and pedophilia jokes that horrified her.

Conversations about whether imposter syndrome might have played a part is doubtful IMO.

If anything, most with imposter syndrome, especially those who don’t come from geographic regions/SES backgrounds who predominantly send their children to Ivies/peer elite private colleges are less likely to pull something like this.

Judging from similar types of behavior at other universities, this type of behavior is more likely to be perpetuated by those who already feel themselves “belong” and in a few cases, may have a desire to turn back the clock to a time when Ivies/peer elite schools practically only admitted people like themselves.

The legacies/developmental admits* who participated are much more likely to have done so due to a feeling they “belonged” with the confidence, entitlement, and associated cockiness. Not because they felt “imposter syndrome”.

None of the legacy/developmental admits I knew of at my HS and heard about felt they didn’t “belong” to the Ivies they attended. If anything, some I knew of from their own admission or from HS classmates who had similar encounters with some legacy/developmental classmates felt their admission was a birthright.

  • A Boston Globe article already reported one rescinded applicant is a D of some major Harvard donors.

I believe in second chances for teenagers who should know better but for whatever reason do not. And I say that because I know many teenagers who have done far worse and gotten away with it – no consequences whatsoever because no one ever found out.

I would have told the 10 of them to take a gap year, grow up and re-apply in the Fall. No guarantees but a another chance so the admissions committee can consider how they spent that year.

I didn’t see this as the First Amendment freedom of speech issue that so many of you make it out to be. Each college has the right to place certain conditions on its admissions policy, and Harvard is simply exercising its right. It stated long before the rescinder: “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.” Sure sounds to me a behavioral issue that called into the question of moral character.

“The Tab was sent images from the thread by incoming freshmen. The memes, which include jokes about the Holocaust, pedophilia, suicide, racism, school shootings, and bestiality, were apparently among those linked to the rescinding.”

I haven’t seen any memes linked to this story which depict suicide or school shootings. We really don’t know the full extent of the memes or the comments. I find any jokes about those subjects disturbing.

@MaterS If you look at one of the Tab’s articles, they have the actual images. There is a school shooting meme and a a suicide one. Google “the tab harvard rescinded” and it should be the first news article.

Why give second chances to students who don’t respect others? There are 1000’s of kids wanting a first chance at Harvard.

I am frankly shocked that anyone would think these students shouldn’t be rescinded. It’s a sad world we live in.