Parkland gun activist loses spot at Harvard

“After careful consideration the committee voted to rescind your admission to Harvard College,” William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, wrote Kashuv in a letter dated June 3. “We are sorry about the circumstances that have led us to withdraw your admission, and we wish you success in your future academic endeavors and beyond.”

In a telephone interview Monday, Kashuv, who moved to Washington after graduation to lobby for school safety legislation, described the past few weeks dealing with the fallout of his comments as “rough” and a “whirlwind.”

“Hopefully people have the goodness in their hearts to forgive me,” he said. “I really hope that. What I said two years ago isn’t indicative of who I am,” he said.

Unlike some of his classmates who became national figures for starting a youth movement against gun violence, Kashuv garnered widespread attention as a conservative student in favor of gun rights. He served as the high school outreach director for Turning Point USA, a conservative group with ties to the Trump family. Kashuv has since stepped down from that position, though he said Monday that his departure was unrelated to the comments that got him into trouble with Harvard.

He first apologized in May for the comments, which he said he made in a Google Doc and in text messages a couple of years ago. A video showing screenshots of what he wrote, including repeated racial slurs, was posted online in May, apparently by at least one former classmate. Kashuv said “former peers and political opponents” then questioned Harvard directly about admitting him.

“We were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments, using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible,” Kashuv wrote on Twitter on May 22. “I’m embarrassed by it, but I want to be clear that the comments I made are not indicative of who I am or who I have become in the years since.”

Two days later, Kashuv received Harvard’s letter asking him to explain himself. Kashuv, who graduated from Stoneman Douglas this month, had planned to take a gap year before matriculating at Harvard in the fall of 2020. Two other Parkland student activists, Jaclyn Corin and David Hogg, both of them vocal proponents of tighter gun restrictions, are headed to Harvard this fall.

Kashuv told Harvard he apologized “unequivocally.” He said he could not recall what he had written beyond what his former classmate had made public and had no record of the conversations himself.

Screenshots show Kashuv and other students used a Google Doc study guide as a chat of sorts, with several of them editing the document simultaneously and commenting on each other’s remarks. Kashuv went back and tried to delete his comments later, according to the student who posted the video with the screenshots on Twitter, but they proved to be recoverable. The student who posted the video did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

One screenshot shows Kashuv using a racial slur for African-Americans more than a dozen times.

“like im really good at typing” the slur, he wrote. “ok like practice uhhhhhh makes perfect son??!!”

In a different screenshot of a text message, Kashuv allegedly also used the slur to refer to black student athletes.

The Google Doc comments were made late at night as the students tried to outdo each other with outrageous remarks, Kashuv said Monday, describing himself as thoughtless and immature at the time.

“In the same document, I said a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff,” he acknowledged. “That’s not who I am. My parents are Jewish. I’m Jewish. I go to synagogue every single week now — I’ve been going the past few weeks.”

A Harvard spokeswoman said the college does not “comment publicly on the admissions status of individual applicants.” Harvard informs students upon their admission that the college reserves the right to withdraw its offer for several reasons, including if an admitted student “engages or has engaged in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character.”

In 2017, Harvard rescinded admission offers for at least 10 applicants who had shared sexually explicit and other offensive memes and messages in a private Facebook group.

Parkland, however, brings different political challenges.

Conservative Stoneman Douglas students have said they felt marginalized by their peers and the news media after the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting, which inspired young people across the country to try to register voters and get gun laws changed. Already, some political commentators on the right see Harvard’s decision to rescind his admission as motivated by complaints from Parkland graduates who oppose Kashuv’s politics.

Harvard has faced other recent criticism for its handling of politically fraught matters. In May, the university did not renew the appointments of the first two African-American undergraduate faculty deans in the school’s history — both of them law professors — after protests from students who were unhappy that one of the deans took on the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein as a legal client.

Kashuv did not accuse Harvard of making a politically motivated decision, though he noted that others have raised that point. He did say he had not spent time with the students on the Google Doc chat since the shooting, in part because of their political disagreements over gun control.

“We’ve just drifted apart,” he said. “They disagree with me politically, and they don’t like my political views.”

He said he has other friends who disagree with him, and that several of them reached out Monday to offer their support and tell him they thought Harvard had gone too far.

Other Stoneman Douglas graduates, however, appeared to at least indirectly refer to Kashuv on social media, making vague comments about “consequences” and sending him “thoughts and prayers,” a gesture victims of gun violence have seen as an empty one, especially coming from opponents of gun control.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.