@marlowe1 and @BrianBoiler If you haven’t already, you really ought to read the piece on this by the Editor of Above the Law about what it’s like to be Black at Harvard. It’s nice and all to be generous in offering a chance at education to the brash and uncouth, even when they are really arrogant, but it’s another thing to impose a disproportionate share of the cost of that generosity on a small, vulnerable group of students that the university has been trying, with very limited success, to get to flourish. It’s no secret that the University of Chicago has terrible trouble recruiting African-American students even in its own back yard, so to speak. How much more trouble would there be if those students saw the university publicly endorsing the idea that it’s a no-big-thing youthful indiscretion to use the n-word deliberately and provocatively to make your classmates uncomfortable.
Of course, charity towards Kashuv militates in favor of not rescinding him. But charity towards other students whom the university has also accepted, but who are known to feel like they are always told they don’t belong, militates very strongly in favor of telling him to do something else with his life than to take his act to Hyde Park. It’s one thing to say “no safe spaces;” it’s another to knowingly create one that’s radically unsafe for no valid academic purpose.
By the way, my understanding is that Kashuv’s “private” writings were shared with his entire APUSH class. I would have more sympathy for him if I thought he were really callow and unsophisticated, but it really seems like the opposite is true. He is now, and was then, a highly educated, highly intelligent, deliberate provocateur who lacks any empathy with the victims of what he sees as his heroic nonconformity. No thank you.