@GFG honestly, there is another closed FB group, Grown & Flown, that talks about CC with a fair amount of disdain.
And I too confess to becoming fairly close FB friends with some CC members, I recently discussed my kids’ summer employment and attending a concert with them. I will be meeting up with one of them this summer to tour a college campus that my DD is interested in attending and their child currently attends, which I think is really cool. I promise you that we will not be discussing y’all. I agree with @Petrichor11 not all private discussions are skeevy. I just don’t think the wider CC audience is interested in the mundane details of my life. But, if you want, we can form a spinoff FB group together to discuss my bizarre fascination with guinea pig videos.
But I do agree with someone above who said sometimes you just don’t know the direction a subgroup of people that you have met randomly on a social media platform is going to go. It could go very badly, as it did in this Harvard situation, or it could go really, really positively as I have experienced.
Apropos of the commonness of this behavior: I get a lot of cases of students who’ve shared offensive material and then face an admission challenge. No matter what day of the year such a student comes to me, there is always a famous >adult< in the news for saying something offensive, and I can use the press coverage to illustrate good and bad ways of framing a screwup. The frame is useful not only for public presentation, but also for the student’s own understanding of their error. Celebrities never stop giving me fresh teaching material.
Just today, I gave a homework exercise to one such student: watch the video of Bill Maher talking to Georgetown’s Professor Dyson about Maher’s use of the N word last week. Maher’s comments are a mixed salad of thoughtful, appropriate, apologetic remarks and ill-advised excuses, blaming the victims, etc. I challenged my student to distinguish one from the other in preparation for their own admissions interview.
“got full university support for their work, money and a building to disseminate their humor, all under a proud Harvard masthead”
It may not matter for the point being made, but just to get this technically correct: The Lampoon is recognized as a Harvard student group, but they don’t get funding or the building from the university. Those are independently, privately owned and endowed, as are the Crimson and Hillel buildings.
The problem with intent is to presume the adcoms can be mind readers. Yes, Sam and John posted identical memes, but Sam wanted to amuse and John wanted to offend. Therefore, Sam still gets to attend, while John gets rescinded. If I were to infer intent from actions, someone who truly wanted to offend as many people as possible would post the memes in a highly visible public forum, such as that provided by the Harvard Lampoon. Someone who wanted to avoid offending anyone who didn’t share their admittedly twisted sense of humor might post these memes to a private chat group, with membership restricted to perhaps a couple of dozen people.
^ As I understand it, though, the point of the R-rated meme group was to say shocking things. It wasn’t just a funny meme group that also allowed R-rated memes, it was a space to engage in specifically offensive humor.
Certainly, the requirement that those who wanted to enter had to post a meme to the regular group seems to back up the idea that they wanted to indulge in shocking behavior – and that it wasn’t entirely limited to their own “private” group.
I can’t read people’s minds, but I can make some pretty good inferences from their actions.
And again, for me, the fact that this was how they were choosing to spend among their first moments in the Harvard community is telling to me – and not insignificant in determining their punishment. When you’re new, you really don’t have much credibility established to draw on when you make a mistake. When you haven’t even started, and so your membership in the community is really still conditional, you have no credibility, plus the school’s obligation to you is extremely minimal compared to their obligation to matriculated students.
^Well, we’re probably not going to completely agree. If a student is allowed to post repulsive cartoons to the Harvard Lampoon, as long as at most 20% of the cartoons fall into that category, that seems like an arbitrary rule. Likewise, if you’re saying the meme group would have been permissible, if they posted six cat videos for each of the highly offensive memes, that seems very arbitrary.
Not to be pedantic, but there’s a difference between trying to engage in offensive humor and trying to offend. If you’re trying to offend, you need access to an audience that would be offended by what you’re saying.
@Hanna Thank you for the clarification, and I apologize for my incorrect assumptions on HL’s funding and facilities.
@apprenticeprof I share your shock and disappointment that their ‘first moments’ upon acceptance was an act of crass speech instead of something humble and celebratory. As for what defines comedy in this day of South Park, meme wars, standup comedy…the prevailing trend is really quite shocking and vulgar in a push-the-limits way. It can also be darkly funny, if we’re honest. But it IS still speech (not harmful action), and was semi-private in the case of the Harvard10.
Two last points then I’ll lurk quietly…
As ‘offensive’ as the memes are, I really don’t believe the perpetrators meant to actually OFFEND… i.e. make viewers feel real emotional pain. I am sure the 10 students do not truly advocate genocide or child abuse. Virtually no one does, let alone H admittees. They simply and stupidly meant to shock and one-up the previous outrageous post.
Long ago I was a Yalie and one of my most creative classmates created a satiric flyer (this was the 80s) that pushed the limits of decency much like these memes did. His was original and tasteless and absolutely hilarious. Well he was caught and slated for strong punishment. Our whole residential college revolted and confronted our Master in a dining hall rally and ultimately my friend’s punishment was reduced. But the key point is this: my undergraduate experience was greatly enhanced by sharing life and meals and midnight bull sessions with this friend – he was and is intelligent, thoughtful, outrageously funny, and a really kind person. He became a writer for Conan OBrian (justifying ‘we seek to educate students who will become leaders in their fields’) Should he have been expelled or denied enrollment? I emphatically say NO.
I guess my take on it has a lot to do with how I view Harvard, which is something less than the Golden Ticket to All Life’s Mysteries than…well, a very nice university. The kids did something stupid. They got rescinded, life moves on, they’ll learn from their experiences (hopefully).
A friend’s son was accepted to uni; he did something stupid, he got rescinded. Life moved on. He’s learned something from it (hopefully). In his case it was the state flagship, not a school with a public image as Super Sparkly Unicorn U, but the general mechanism is the same.
Better they learn not to be stupid at eighteen than at fifty-something (a lesson which might have served Bill Maher and a dozen others well). Sucks for them they didn’t learn it at sixteen and save themselves some trouble. But in the long run, they did learn something from their very brief tenure as Harvard students, and there wasn’t even a charge for tuition.
Meantime, Harvard’s not short of intelligent, competent kids that want to go there (someone on the waiting list is no doubt thrilled at their stupidity), and the kid can get an education other places besides Harvard (even if being rescinded means the next year is going to have to be a gap year or the local cc.)
This sounds like the “but I didn’t mean it” excuse I’ve heard from former colleagues in part-time jobs I’ve had before, during, and after college.
This illustrates another good lesson from this incident…intentions don’t always matter if there is a great potential for or ends up with a serious bad outcome. Some folks learn it early from strict parents/elementary school environments…others end up learning it as adults with greater cost/negative outcomes.
When I was hired to work at a financial firm, my new supervisor impressed on me the very first day about the vital importance of ensuring the financial information we had was 100% accurate before it was implemented on the firm website and to perform periodic checks to check for errors with other departments.
A part of it was him reminding me how even a misplacement of a decimal point could result in sanctions from the NASD/SEC and result in large fines($1 milllion/day) and possibly even jail time for him because he was the supervisor responsible for overseeing employees like myself and the work we do.
We also had Nick Leeson of Barings Bank fame whose initial intentions of being the best performing securities arbitrager resulted in the complete bankrupting of his employer, his conviction of serious securities violations, several years in prison, and a permanent ban on him ever working in a securities/financial related profession,
I’m amazed that folk seem to think that Harvard admissions should somehow be clairvoyant and be able to see into the soul’s of 17 year olds they have never met except on paper or via a short interview. The world is full of examples of folk making bad choices about who to associate with - how many women have woken up one day and realized they were married to a dangerous abuser. Some people fly under the radar. In the last political season, some of my life long friends exhibited behavior that resulted in me “rescinding” their friendship. Nasty, racist, vile comments on social media that when I became aware of it, I was appalled to know that it was just underneath the surface all the time. Not differing opinions, but something that was much deeper. How many of us have worked at jobs were someone who was vetted by our company turned out to be a crook, harasser, etc.? It happens. Hard life lesson for them.
I think this is a good lesson for other students who post stuff on social media then get passed over for a job or a scholarship. A part of me feels sorry for them because they are all academic stars most likely but they are still dumb kids. I am so thankful that every stupid thing I have done was not posted online from when I was 18.
Re post #330 by Tperry1982, I don’t expect Harvard to be clairvoyant and be able to “see into the souls” of their applicants; nor do quite a few other people who have contributed to this thread. I just wish (along with many of the other posters here) that Harvard admissions would stop pretending that “character is the foundation on which the decisions rest,” when they have no reliable way of assessing character. (The words in quotation marks may not be a direct quotation from a Harvard official, but they are close to what he/they have been quoted as saying.)
I disagree. If they actually wanted to be offensive they would not have been a closed group. They wanted to share a penchant for tasteless memes that pushed all boundaries and slaughtered sacred cows…in private.
Upthread, someone claimed that the memes included pictures of dead Syrian babies. I saw no such thing. I would like that poster to provide a link to corroborating evidence.
I completely agree with @QuantMech regarding H’s claims to select students of superior character. I would agree that they seem to look for certain character TRAITS, but that is in no way equivalent to superior character. They need to stop suggesting that those they reject are of inferior character, which is implicit in their statements.
ETA I seem to recall having read that there were 15 students in this group, but only 10 were rescinded. Apparently the other 5 were able to convince Admissions that they were less culpable. Or maybe, cynically, rescinding them would have made the university look bad. (Rescinding the D of a major donor makes you look high-minded.)
There is a reason or reasons that these particular 10 were rescinded, while other participants (including the person who blew the whistle) were not rescinded. This or these reasons are not known to the public. We don’t have all the facts that the decision-makers had. If we did, we may be in a better position to judge whether the punishment fit the crime.
How these 10 responded when asked to explain their actions may have done them in. Perhaps they were defensive, or indignant, belligerent – or otherwise doubling-down in ways that revealed their character further. This is my speculation. I have no idea why Harvard picked on these 10 while letting the others go. Among those who did not get rescinded were probably those who demonstrated regret/remorse and explained their mistake in a way that convinced the administration that they were good kids who made a mistake. These 10, for whatever reason, were not convincing.
On the contrary, I would say that they do (although there may be some disagreement on exactly how to define character). They don’t rank people by character, though, just like they don’t rank people by brains, and this is the source of the confusion: Harvard doesn’t identify the people with the top 2,000 characters and auto-admit them. I would say their process is quite reliable, and the vast majority of those they admit have good character, although they occasionally get someone wrong because the application is by its nature an incomplete picture.
Certainly some of the thirty-odd thousand applicants they deny every year are of inferior character, but I don’t think you’ll find Harvard saying or implying anywhere that everyone they admit has better character than everyone they deny. That’s because they know that they deny tens of thousands of applicants a year with good character but with other attributes that are less essential, because they only have so many spots.
I really think this thread is going in circles…the same arguments were being had a hundred posts earlier.
DeepBlue86, new contributors keep turning up, who apparently haven’t read the entire thread and/or missed some of the opinions. Also, I keep hoping that my logic will persuade you!
Probably the majority of Harvard applicants have reasonably good “character” within your definition (though perhaps somewhat fewer do, within my definition). So winding up with the majority of admits having good “character” is not a particularly impressive accomplishment by admissions.
I understand that Harvard doesn’t want to advertise, “We will bounce you if you have demonstrably weak character,” and “We are looking for the people who will be most successful in the future, so to the extent that your good qualities of character might interfere with your success, we are not interested;” but I think both of those might be more accurate than what Harvard does advertise.
Agreeing with @QuantMech’s post #332
The character thing is a way for colleges to justify their admissions process and admit or deny whoever they want. It is believed that Harvard (and Yale and Princeton) started to emphasize character in the admissions process in the 1920s to restrict the number of Jews they admitted. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/the-chosen-getting-in.html?_r=0.
In this particular instance, Harvard had objective evidence to use as the basis for rescinding admissions based on “character.” But if colleges are going to judge they character of their applicants in general, they may often have to rely on subjective, hearsay evidence – such as teacher and counselor recommendations – which may reflect biases that the students who ask for recommendations or even the recommenders themselves may not recognize.
For example, I doubt that any mainstream university officially believes that being obese or having body art means that the applicant is of “poor character.” But there are people who believe that both of these things are indicative of character flaws, and some of those people may be teachers or counselors who write recommendations for students. How do you prevent their biases from tainting the admissions process?
I haven’t seen anybody claiming Harvard can or should see into the souls of applicants. Just the opposite. But if there’s any truth in what Harvard does claim, then they are indeed ranking applicants by character. You can’t claim “character” as the foundation of every admissions decision without also claiming to distinguish applicants on that basis, even if your ranking is a simple binary of “acceptable vs. unacceptable.” @JHS, however, suspects that there’s something more fine-grained going on.
There’s good reason to be skeptical of the “character” criterion in admissions, even setting aside the annual scandals and demonstrations of poor character at Harvard. Historically, as @CA94309 points out, it first appeared, rather ignobly, as a way discriminate against Jews. Today, it’s a useless criterion for applicants since Harvard will not explain how character is evaluated, other than to mention that it comes up in things like interviews and LORs. As we’ve seen, those sources of information are carefully cultivated to be one-sided. Besides, all these years of choosing Harvard classes based on character don’t seem to have produced much measurable data: how does Harvard know how well the “character” criterion is working? Is there anything happening to try to avoid the next round of rescissions next year? Crimson-bleeders think there’s nothing to see but if I were on the admissions staff I’d be reviewing things.
Personally, I prefer Yale’s approach. Like Harvard, they say they’re seeking future leaders – and odds are they’re doing it in similar ways behind the scenes – but instead of pontificating about the importance of character and their ability to evaluate the entire human being of the applicant, they admit that they “have to make the hunchy judgment as to whether or not with Yale’s help the candidate is likely to be a leader.” That’s it: hunchy judgment. Vague but honest. Veritas! And in the meantime Yale also gives pointed language about what does matter: “The single most important document in your application is your high school transcript.” https://admissions.yale.edu/what-yale-looks-for
