Kyle Kashuv, the 18-year-old conservative activist and high school shooting survivor, will not attend Harvard next year.
He has the grades and the test scores: a 3.9 GPA and 1550 on his SAT. He has the extracurriculars. For almost a year, Kyle served as the high school outreach director for Turning Point USA, organizing young conservatives throughout the country. He even has an acceptance letter welcoming him to the Harvard College class of 2024. But Harvard has rescinded that acceptance after a political adversary of Kashuv’s leaked a years-old Google Doc on which he had written the “n-word” and other offensive terms.
Kashuv promptly apologized for the childish private remarks. “We were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments, using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible,” he wrote. “The comments I made are not indicative of who I am or who I’ve become in the years since.”
Of course not. I suspect the comments do not reflect even who he was at 16. On the leaked Google Doc, Kashuv also wrote, “f*** my a** now NOW” and “I WILL LITERALLY F*** YOUR UGLY A** DOG.” Either Kyle leads a secret double life as a zoophilic, gay racist, or he, like all teenagers, said something outrageous among his friends for shock value.
How many other students admitted to Harvard have ever written or uttered an offensive phrase or racial epithet — even jokingly, even just once? How many have ever sung along to a rap song or quoted a Quentin Tarantino movie? Does the Harvard College admissions office plan to investigate the private teenage chat logs of the 2,000 students it just admitted?
Surely the admissions officers themselves, up to and including Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons, have never uttered an untoward remark or made an off-color joke in private. Perhaps some enterprising journalist ought to examine all of their private correspondence from age 16 onward just to make sure.
The cruel irony is that, while there is no evidence that Kyle Kashuv harbors any actual racial bigotry, there is plenty of evidence that Harvard does.
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