Harvard rejects students who posted racist memes. Should they be allowed to?

So another Pandora’s box for me to open. Yum.

I saw this case where Harvard pulled an admission decision after they saw a racist Facebook post from some students. Hmm.

Thoughts?

Well first: what an idiot. Or idiots. Since there were several. Surely if you got into Harvard you at least know how to think about consequences and this particular act obviously would have had consequences, setting all debate aside. So, again. What idiots.

Second thought: these people probably got into other elite schools like Yale and Princeton and Columbia and etc etc. I don’t know for sure but I’m going to make a wild guess that they did get into those schools. And Harvard didn’t disclose which applicants they revoked admissions from, so basically they just walk away free. Harvard is drawing the line, but not enough to disclose, which could result in some angry Ivy League parents. Well fuck. That makes me lose even more hope in humanity. I never really liked elitism. I wonder why.

Third thought (and this is the pandora’s box): are they allowed to do this.

I wrote a long post about privacy and Facebook bios. I am a strong advocate of online rights and I still stand by what Snowden did to have such an integral conversation in our society. But I also live in real life.

I do think institutions, especially educational institutions, should have a holistic review of their applicants. That includes what they were like at school, how they maintained their friendships, how they treated others — things like that. Those are necessary interpersonal skills. But then here’s the other thing. Colleges usually review school transcripts, admissions essays, recommendation letters — things that will most likely not have an ounce of bad thing about that candidate and most likely will cover it up as some sort of a growth story. But Facebook is where you get the real stuff. Or, as real as you can get, really. It’s more real than an admissions essay, so to speak. I understand their need to do so.

But I don’t know. It just feels a bit… off. Like, the gesture of letting that slide, just letting the officers budge their way into this right to a privacy we have — it feels like undermining the very concept that Facebook is also a part that should be kept private. We sort of know that this happens, and now we have proof that this happens, but we don’t really care. It is what it is. It’s become kind of a social norm, really. I’m the weird one for pointing out that Facebook is supposed to be for friends, and if not, you should be able to control your own audiences. I’m the one out of touch with real life.

And it just made me think about a lot of things. Thus opening up the Pandora’s box.

So, take Facebook as an example. What is something that you can get from Facebook that you can’t get from a public resumé type network like LinkedIn?

Authencity.

Although I cannot say people are 100% authentic on Facebook, since I am not 100% authentic myself, but I don’t really hype it up as much and keep it really nice and clean as I would in, say, LinkedIn. You have a variety of posts that show your authentic self compared to a list of credentials. So you can get an idea of what that person is like. What for? To see if this person is racist or sexist or anything that is blatantly just… bad. But I don’t know a lot of people that do racist propganda on Facebook for fun, except trolls. And I think trolling is another Pandora’s box in which my friend Jeung Eun Kim explored very well in her article about Pewdiepie and dark humor.

But I want to stick to something else today.

So, say that you were a company trying to rule out racist people and looking into their Facebook to investigate. If your original motive is to rule out actual racists, does this method really have any legitimacy?

Because Facebook, although it endangers our privacy in many ways, can’t make us force our thoughts out. You can’t take something that someone is thinking and put it out there for the world to see unless they voluntarily leave kind of digital footprint — a post, a text, or joining a racist Facebook Group in this case. If they were able to do so, that would be some next-level Dystopian reality you would see in George Orwell’s 1984. And we all know the ending to that frankly horrifying tale.

So, if the companies/institutions were trying to vet their candidates, is this truly an effective method? Wouldn’t it be technically more efficient to look into their diaries? That would make more logical sense.

But looking into other people’s diaries, unless it was for a criminal investigation (WITH warrants — know your fourth amendment rights) is not okay. That’s because the individual did not intend for it to be shared. But in that sense, what makes people think it’s okay to look through an applicant’s Facebook profile or even request the applicant to tweak their privacy settings to “public posts” if they chose to make their audience smaller? What gives them the right to do that?

And as much as I am glad that Harvard did this, it makes me feel even more skeptical about the methods that institutions are using via social media to “find out what they are like.” I don’t know how many people exactly are racist in Harvard, but if there are racist people in Harvard and they still got admitted, they are probably keeping their racist ideals to themselves. In private. So, coming back to the original point of vetting out racist people. You can’t vet people’s thoughts. It’s physically impossible.

So does that mean that these kids who didn’t keep their racist thoughts in private should get away with it? No. That was stupid. But should this be a thing we regularly keep in mind? Yes and no. I don’t think it’s right to post idiotic racist memes and still get into Harvard but I also don’t think it’s right to undermine the concept of privacy.

So, like I said, a Pandora’s box indeed. I would love to hear what other people think about this, since I personally do not yet have a clear stance on this issue. It was a fun topic to think about, however.

Anyways, for the meantime, don’t do racist things. And I’ve struggled with internalised racism before and I know it’s kind of difficult to get over that, but try. It works.