As protests and unrest roil the country following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, more than a dozen colleges have publicly responded to outrage over racist social-media posts by incoming students — and several, mostly private institutions, have swiftly rescinded admission offers.
Marquette and Xavier Universities, and the University of Denver, are among the colleges that quickly kicked out incoming students when they learned the rising freshmen had used racist language in online posts or in videos about Floyd, a black man killed in police custody last week. Each institution released a statement that said, in effect: This student didn’t uphold our values and is not welcome on our campus.
Admission offices have long received reports of bad behavior by incoming students, but consequences were carried out more slowly, said Marie Bigham, a former admissions officer and college counselor who founded the advocacy group Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today. Over the past week, many cases have played out publicly, where students have tagged or direct-messaged the university on social media, and action has been swift.
At several institutions, including the College of Charleston, Arizona Christian University, and the University of Denver, it took only a day for campus officials to rescind offers to incoming students.
Colleges appear to be acknowledging that the moment is sensitive, and that Floyd’s death is not something to joke about, Bigham said. While campus leaders are well intentioned, they’re likely also being driven to act from a reputational standpoint, she said, since many of the racist posts written by students have circulated widely online.
Many of the complaints about these posts appeared to come from other students, who demanded that their colleges rescind acceptance offers and said they were unwilling to tolerate racist behavior.
“I’m really heartened personally that people are standing up and that institutions are saying, ‘We don’t want this, either,’” Bigham said.
Some public colleges, though, have said their hands are tied by the First Amendment, which protects offensive speech.
Clif Smart, Missouri State University’s president, explained in a blog post that he was “horrified” by the behavior of two incoming students, and that his first impulse was to rescind their admissions offers. But he ultimately declined to do so because their speech was legally protected. The two students ended up withdrawing from Missouri State voluntarily.
Meanwhile, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stephen Farmer, vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, acknowledged that a prospective student had made racist comments online but said in a statement that he couldn’t comment on the status of an individual student and couldn’t “infringe upon any student’s right to express vile and despicable opinions.” Campus officials will “do all that we can to communicate this expectation to every enrolling student,” the statement said.
The University of South Carolina, also a public institution, announced that a current student who made racist comments online was no longer enrolled. The university acted after receiving a bias complaint about the student, officials said.
Admissions offices typically play a reactive role, responding when offensive posts are reported to them — by students, parents, or people anonymously emailing the university or contacting the institution on social media. Admissions officers don’t have time to actively monitor the social-media accounts of incoming students, said Jeannine Lalonde, associate dean of undergraduate admissions
at the University of Virginia. “We’re not out there looking for reasons to deny a student,” she said. The only reason she’d look up students online is if they wrote something that caught her eye in their application, she said.
Admissions offices often make the decisions about whether to rescind offers to incoming students. But when complaints are particularly troubling — involving racist language, for instance — or reach the university’s radar via public platforms, sometimes they’re not just handled within one office, admissions experts said.
At Marquette, the decision to rescind an admissions offer to a prospective lacrosse player this week was made by student affairs, the office of diversity and inclusion, and the athletics department, as well as admissions, a university spokeswoman wrote in a statement. At Xavier, a spokesman wrote in an email, the admissions office made the decision in consultation with other administrators.
Sometimes colleges have responded to public outrage by emphasizing their educational role and saying the students’ offensive behavior should be turned into a teaching moment.
Smart, the Missouri State president, said he had planned to allow the two prospective students to come to campus anyway, “knowing that this decision would be ridiculed, questioned, and second-guessed.” If they had enrolled this fall, he said, they would have had to go through education and training on understanding what they did wrong and how to be culturally competent.
He added that, while the two prospective students had “displayed poor judgement” with their posts, colleges “should not bar a student from entry for offensive comments posted as an adolescent.”
But Bigham said she’s glad many institutions are taking more stringent action in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In this moment, as a person of color, she said, “if a college wanted to talk about teaching and reconciliation, I would wonder about my safety and humanity.”
