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.