The Kyle Kashuv-Harvard controversy, explained

A teen conservative activist got in trouble for past racist comments. Then he lost his Harvard admission over it — and ignited a national controversy.

Typically, the status of one high school student’s application to Harvard is not national news. But when the high schooler in question is a prominent conservative activist who has met President Donald Trump, and when the outcome of his application directly touches on the raging culture war surrounding politics on college campuses, things are different — which is why Harvard’s decision to rescind admission to a young man named Kyle Kashuv got national attention Monday.

Kashuv is a recent graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A survivor of the 2018 shooting at the school, he became famous for advocating against gun control after the attack. Kashuv became the high school outreach director for the conservative group Turning Point USA, and lobbied in favor of a federal “school safety” bill that attempts to address the school shooting problem without gun control. He currently has more than 300,000 followers on Twitter.

These extracurriculars, together with good grades and high SAT scores, earned Kashuv admission to Harvard earlier this year. But in late May, a series of offensive comments he made roughly two years ago — the repeated use of the n-word in private chats and Google Docs — came to light. Harvard initiated a formal review of Kashuv’s admission, and on Monday morning, Kashuv tweeted out a letter from the university formally rescinding his admission.

Kashuv’s Twitter thread, which included a blow-by-blow account of his futile efforts to restore his admission, went viral. By afternoon, his name was trending nationally on Twitter. It also set the conservative media aflame with allegations of liberal bias in academia and the dangerous power of social media mobs. Prominent right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, for example, accused Harvard of setting up “an insane, cruel standard no one can possibly meet,” citing the incident as evidence that “our universities may be irrevocably broken.” He was far from alone in this sort of sentiment.

This isn’t just a matter of one student’s admission to a prestigious university, in other words. It’s a case that hits on some of the hottest of hot button issues — racism, political correctness, and campus free speech — and reveals why the right is far more concerned about “social media mobs” than the left is.

The controversy also proves that identity politics isn’t just something practiced by the left: the defense of Kashuv is conservative identity politics in practice.