There’s a New Teacher in Town

Kyle Kashuv, a secondary school student and gun rights activist, lost his place at Harvard after referring to Jews as his slaves and writing the word that shall not be named to his friends in a Google Doc. 

Responses so far have varied from ‘Harvard is an evil Hillary Clinton Social Justice Warrior institution, everyone at age 16 is a Nazi, so let Kyle be’  to ‘he fully deserves to be locked away for life in a Moroccan prison, Harvard is only right to judge their students based on texts”. Finding a balance isn’t easy. 

Of course, plenty of people get rejected from Harvard. What makes Kyle particularly interesting, is that he survived a school shooting and speaks to the NRA about how great guns are.  So, being shot at in a school prompted Kyle to go campaign for more guns? Imagine Harvard’s surprise when they learned he was clever enough to write racists slurs on the internet.

What’s more, Kyle knows how to spell his name and how to use Twitter. So, like any upset teenager, he turned the whole thing into a social media circus by posting every single correspondence with Harvard on Twitter. Yes Kyle, they’ll definitely cave when you humiliate them publicly. 

Kyle thinks that “if any institution should understand growth, it’s Harvard” and  that “throughout its history, Harvard’s faculty has included slave owners, segregationists, bigots and anti-Semites”. Isn’t that like saying ‘you’ve hired unintelligent racists before me, why change now?’ 

While (hopefully) not the most convincing line of argument Kyle has ever produced, he does make a point. For a university to only hire only students they agree with, or at least not those that offend them, is a slippery slope. Shouldn’t a university be the place to be challenging these sort of ideas? By keeping Kyle out, there’s a good chance he’ll be thinking this all over in his trailer, come up with deep-rooted trust issues, conspiracy theories and before you know it the Republican Party has a new president-elect.

In the meantime, Harvard has declined to comment on the case, but said that their decision was based on Kyle’s questionable maturity and moral character. Which is surprising, as Harvard certainly hired its fair share of looneys and slow people. The entire Bush family went there, so did the Unabomber and pretty much any Middle Eastern royal family that buys the university a new science lab, is guaranteed a spot. So now this guy is just too old fashioned and right wing? Perhaps Kyle’s mummy and daddy just weren’t important enough. 

Of course, this isn’t the end of Kyle’s life. Donald didn’t go to Harvard, said far worse things without even looking through his private communications and look how he turned out. 

Kyle should stop wasting his time asking the Harvard office of diversity for help to “right this wrong”, and apply to Oxford instead. Only last year a student of Medicine stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife while under the influence of drugs and even she wasn’t kicked out. What’s more, the UK’s court found that sending her to prison would seriously harm her career prospects as a heart surgeon, so they didn’t bother. This is great news for Kyle! Although, if he does get held up a knife point, let’s just hope he doesn’t start campaigning for the right to bear knives in the UK.