Harvard Rescinds Kyle Kashuv's Acceptance Over 2-Year-Old Private Comments

Eric Schaffer | June 17, 2019
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Kyle Kashuv, former Parkland student and Second Amendment advocate, announced that his acceptance to Harvard had been rescinded as of Monday morning over comments he'd made in a private conversation on social media roughly two years ago.

In a lengthy thread on Twitter, Kashuv explained: “Harvard rescinded my acceptance. Three months after being admitted to Harvard Class of 2023, Harvard has decided to rescind my admission over texts and comments made nearly two years ago, months prior to the shooting. I have some thoughts. Here’s what happened.”

The backpedal from Harvard comes in response to comments now-18-year-old Kashuv allegedly made when he was 16, in which racial slurs were used. According to the Daily Beast:

One screenshot claims to show Kashuv writing the n-word more than a dozen times in a shared study guide on Google Docs.

"like im really good at typing n---er ok like practice uhhhhhh makes perfect son??!!" Kashuv allegedly wrote in a portion of the document.

In another part of the Google Doc, Kashuv allegedly wrote the same slur repeatedly, in capital letters. Kashuv also allegedly referred to black student athletes as “n---erjocks” in one text message.

After the comments were made public, Kashuv immediately apologized, asserting that he saw the world through “different eyes” due to his experiences following the Parkland shooting, emphasizing that he was “embarrassed by the petty, flippant kid” shown in the leaked screenshots.

“Harvard deciding that someone can’t grow, especially after a life-altering event like the shooting, is deeply concerning,” Kashuv went on to say in his announcement on Twitter. “If any institution should understand growth, it’s Harvard, which is looked to as the pinnacle of higher education despite its checkered past.”

It pains me to say this, but the day Kashuv’s comments dropped, I all but knew his Harvard acceptance would be rescinded. Harvard, the formerly prestigious institution which was willing to brave any storm to stand for academic advancement — filled to the brim with America’s intellectual elite — has succumbed to "wokeness."

Instead of allowing someone to learn from and leave their past behind, Harvard has joined left-wing efforts to assure that those who have ever said anything untoward, awful or offensive - especially from the political right - are purely represented only by those flashes of life.

I am not best friends with Kyle Kashuv, but I have had enough conversations with him and know him well enough to say this: his past comments and immature jokes do not represent him. His personal beliefs are not those of the ‘edgy’ teenager shown in those screenshots.

Yet many on the left, and now Harvard, have deemed it necessary to judge him as such.

If this is the approach society decides to take — judging people based not on current moral fiber, but on edgy, offensive and flippant comments made in youth which don't represent who you actually are — it is not only a dark day for academia, but a dark day for the country.
 

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