
Colleges rescinding admissions offers as racist social media posts emerge - mancerayder
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/us/racism-social-media-college-admissions.html
======
testfoobar
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.

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

~~~
testfoobar
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.

~~~
faitswulff
Maybe these kids can do something extra to atone and make a case for
themselves in their next application. Until then this _particular_ consequence
seems well calibrated.

------
alexpotato
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.

------
lsiebert
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
> 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."

~~~
lsiebert
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.

~~~
toomanyrichies
Exactly. If they can't expect to hear hard truths from their friends, who
_can_ they expect to hear them from?

------
collegiateaway
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.

------
siemprenocasa
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'.

------
msla
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/](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?)

------
controversy
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.

~~~
toomanyrichies
> 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?

~~~
controversy
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.

~~~
yodon
The right to free speech gives you a right to speak. It does not give you a
right to be respected for your words. Respect must always be earned.

~~~
controversy
I agree with your sentiment. I agree with the general idea. My problem is that
the people behind cancel culture are hypocrites. Fundamentalists and even
society in general 30 years ago said homosexuality was morally abhorrent. They
tried to cancel gays. People spoke up. They said that canceling someone was
wrong. Through this the far left gained traction. Now they’ve turned around
and established the old norms with a new boss.

The promise made in the late 90s was that the gays wanted a live and let live
policy. What they did in their home life shouldn’t matter to anyone. If
someone want to take issue with their life style, they could as long as the
gays’ day to day rights were respected. The truce seems to be broken. There
are those within the LGBTQ+ community that are seeking retribution. They are
seeking to establish their own courts in the public discourse to revile those
who took their forefathers to legal ones.

Ultimately this is going to end with the left eating itself. Their hypocrisy
will run smooth after awhile. In the meantime there will be many hearts
removed on the alter of their cause.

To the question below about canceling over intolerance, I see little benefit
in that since the things which we are to tolerate keep moving as do those
which we should abhor. Kevin Hart lost the opportunity to host an awards show
because of some old jokes. Golden Girls had an episode removed because they
wore mud masks. There was a fight at the BBC over a Faulty Towers episode with
the N-word. Heck John Cleese is in self imposed exile because of the thought
police in England.

To destroy a young man or woman’s future because of foolish indiscretions in
their teens is unconscionable. That is the way of fostering the next
generation of hate. We will continue to live in a truly racist world because
of actions like this. To deny the children entry on these grounds is to say
they have no value. They will take this with them into life. They will raise
their children in the soil of animosity.

~~~
toomanyrichies
They didn't say that "canceling someone" was wrong. They said that "canceling
someone for being gay" was wrong. Do you really not see the difference between
that and "canceling someone for being intolerant"?

------
rdiddly
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.

~~~
nujabe
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.

~~~
Yver
> 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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Your argument doesn't hold water because simply put there are hundreds of more
applicants w/ just as sad background as any other kid. I mean the only way it
wouldn't is if they completely did away w/ applications altogether and just
went w/ a blind lottery.

What you did in high school matters. If you got straight F's you're not
getting into Harvard, but using racial slurs w/ a 4.0 should? Just give their
seat to the next person who worked just almost as hard as they did. I'm sure
there's long lines of people just as deserving (more so probably) waiting to
get in, why should their accomplishments not be rewarded also?

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

[https://criminal.findlaw.com/expungement/expungement-
basics....](https://criminal.findlaw.com/expungement/expungement-basics.html)

~~~
gruez
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?

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

~~~
gruez
If the law is "once you're past 18 you can't be discriminated on the basis of
what you said before turning 18", then it wouldn't have helped much for most
of the students, since they were probably didn't turn 18 in between them
saying the racist thing and the college discovering it. I guess you can
reapply a year later, but that's already a year of your life wasted. Not to
mention that there's nothing preventing the college from publicly rescinding
the offer (unless that's also outlawed), and letting other colleges make some
inferences. If the law is "you can't be discriminated on the basis of what you
said under 18, including when you're under 18", then it would effectively
outlaw admissions essays, which are literally designed to discriminate people
on the basis of their speech. It'd also mean that you can be a racist all the
way up to 18 with zero consequences, although you might we up for a rude
awakening once you turned 18. This is as opposed to the juvie system, where
you'd still get punished, but there's no records of it once you turned 18.

------
orblivion
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.

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

~~~
cbsks
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”.

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

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

------
dabbernaught420
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.

------
mirimir
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.

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

~~~
gremlinsinc
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.

------
manigandham
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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
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.

~~~
manigandham
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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
There's a difference between a kid flailign his arms listening to music
weighing 140 lbs because he has autism and a hardened criminal as well, didn't
stop cops from killing him for the crime of being black.

Had these kids been kicked to the curb and shunned early in life who became
cops maybe they'd still be in shitty dead-end jobs, and not killing people and
getting paid for it. So yeah, it does matter what you say on social media when
you're 17.

Otherwise, lets completely end the whole application process why do grades
matter, or accomplishments in school? Because they seem to think character
matters.

I'm not saying there is as I don't have statistics backing it up, but it seems
highly likely if you did a study of rapists and home abuser overlay that on
top of racists you'd have a venn diagram w/ some major overlap.

But the fact of the matter is, why risk a kid coming to school being racist
and disenfranchising other students, when there's 10 others of similar merit
on the waiting list? They could maybe be less 'vocal' about it, so maybe it's
not all over the news and really ruin records, but they can say 'sorry we
decided to go a different direction'.

~~~
manigandham
What does that example have to do with this? Why are you talking about cops?

You entire argument relies on these kids already being hardcore racists
instead of being misjudged reckless teenagers. If they smoke weed when young,
are they hardcore drug abusers too? Would you say the same about kids in very
rural or urban inner city areas that are predisposed to certain perspectives?
Should they be doomed because they had no other exposure?

College admissions already has an intensive character test. Why do these posts
overrule that test? Regardless of admissions, you're losing all nuance and
expecting people to be perfect from day 0. Such people don't exist, and all
you'll end up doing is creating more hate, divisiveness and letting in people
who hide themselves better.

~~~
gremlinsinc
> Why do these posts overrule that test? Regardless of admissions, you're
> losing all nuance and expecting people to be perfect from day 0. Such people
> don't exist, and all you'll end up doing is creating more hate, divisiveness
> and letting in people who hide themselves better.

I guess your bar for perfection is super low, mine is not being a
racist/nazi/white supremacist. I mean, I thought that was pretty low, that
should just be common sense at this point, it's 2020, I honestly thought we'd
grown out of this by now. Nothing has changed since 1960, not a damn thing.

~~~
manigandham
You have again fallen back on your omniscient assumption that these kids are
hardcore racist. How do you claim to know just how terrible everyone is with
such little context or data?

But then again if you think things haven't gotten better since 1960 then I'm
not sure what there is to discuss. I'd tell you to lookup something called the
Obama presidency but I'm afraid that wouldn't cut it against your ever-
shifting sense of moral superiority.

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

~~~
toomanyrichies
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.

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

~~~
toomanyrichies
True, and that would be relevant to the discussion if "affirmative
action"-based admissions decisions were equivalent to reverse racism. But they
aren't.

Many arguments against affirmative action are based on the idea that we should
judge people on their merits. And I'd agree with that- we absolutely should.
The problem is that this is neither current practice, nor historical practice,
nor even achievable, at least in American society. It's been demonstrated that
CVs from people with ethnic-sounding names are binned to a greater extent than
people with white-sounding names in job hirings, admission decisions, etc.

There's a non-trivial difference between someone who loses out on a college
admissions decision because of affirmative action, vs. someone who has been
systematically subject to racist policies at a micro and macro level all their
lives.

~~~
manigandham
There's no such thing as "reverse" racism. It's just racism, which is
discrimination by race.

We should only judge people on merits. Even if it's not perfect today, we
should progress towards it through better procedures, training and evolution;
not regress backwards into more racial-based policies. And it's definitely
achievable, just like plenty of non-white minorities have achieved the highest
posts in every level of society, including the presidency.

You will never solve racial issues by introducing more dependence on race. As
a foreign-born immigrant minority who is now a proud US citizen, I don't need
or want your racial affirmative action. I'm fine letting my work and actions
speak for themselves.

------
ralmidani
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.

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

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

~~~
PlasticTank
Let's just ban people who think differently from education, that will surely
be a great boon to the country... It doesn't matter if they grow out of it or
not, who are you to decide who gets education and who doesn't, I thought
education was believed to a be universal right.

~~~
gruez
>I thought education was believed to a be universal right.

It is. Getting an education at a top tier college? Not so much. There's always
university of phoenix.

