175+ College Admissions Offices Promise Not to Penalize High School Students Who Get Suspended for Protesting Peacefully Against Gun Violence

in Current Affairs, Education | February 26th, 2018 3 Comments

Image by Lorie Shaull, via Flickr Com­mons

“Will my admis­sion get rescind­ed if I get sus­pend­ed for engag­ing in a school walk-out meant to bring atten­tion to the school shoot­ing issue?” That’s a ques­tion many high school stu­dents have posed to col­lege admis­sions offices around the coun­try, espe­cial­ly after some high school offi­cials threat­ened to sus­pend stu­dents tak­ing part in anti-gun demon­stra­tions.

Many lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties have since issued pol­i­cy state­ments and giv­en these stu­dents their bless­ing and sup­port. In a post called “In Sup­port of Stu­dent Protests,” Han­nah Mend­lowitz, from Yale’s Admis­sions Office, writes:

[W]e con­tin­ue to get the ques­tion: will Yale look unfa­vor­ably upon dis­ci­pline result­ing from peace­ful demon­stra­tions?

The answer is sim­ple: Of course not.

To the stu­dents who have reached out to us with these con­cerns, we have made clear that they should feel free to par­tic­i­pate in walk-out events to bring atten­tion to this issue with­out fear of reper­cus­sion. Yale will NOT be rescind­ing anyone’s admis­sion deci­sion for par­tic­i­pat­ing in peace­ful walk­outs for this or oth­er caus­es, regard­less of any high school’s dis­ci­pli­nary pol­i­cy. I, for one, will be cheer­ing these stu­dents on from New Haven.

And on the offi­cial Twit­ter feed for the Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, a tweet reads:

Appli­cants to Brown: Expect a social­ly con­scious, intel­lec­tu­al­ly inde­pen­dent cam­pus where free­dom of expres­sion is fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant. You can be assured that peace­ful, respon­si­ble protests against gun vio­lence will not neg­a­tive­ly impact deci­sions on admis­sion to Brown.

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg. Below, find a list of 175+ uni­ver­si­ties that have grant­ed sim­i­lar assur­ances, along with links to their state­ments. The list comes from Alex Gar­cia, who is main­tain­ing a reg­u­lar­ly-updat­ed Google Doc. Access it online here.

Again, you can refer to this Google Doc for more updates.

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Comments (3)
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  • Gerald says:
    February 26, 2018 at 8:08 am

    My guess is that the alleged sup­port of free speech rights would stop dead in its tracks if the prospec­tive stu­dent in ques­tion were peace­ful­ly protest­ing attempts to cur­tail cit­i­zens’ rights guar­an­teed under the 2nd Amend­ment. Pro­fes­sor Amy Wax’s recent WSJ piece enti­tled “What Can’t Be Debat­ed on Cam­pus” gives a sense of how repres­sive these insti­tu­tions have become.

    Reply
  • gwr says:
    February 26, 2018 at 8:37 am

    My guess, Ger­ald, is that your guess is just a guess. And for what it’s worth that’s all it’s worth.

    Reply
  • Jason Baxter says:
    February 26, 2018 at 8:16 pm

    Excel­lent guess, Ger­ald, based on the luna­cy we see reg­u­lar­ly on col­lege cam­pus­es.

    Reply

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