Stanford Applicant Is Accepted Using BLM Rant As Application Essay
< < Go Back
An applicant who favors the violent, alt-left, revolutionary Black Lives Matters group gets preferred admission. In this story, you see the problem at our colleges and universities.
By Elliot Kaufman,
Stanford University offered admission to only 4.65% of applicants this year, but that may not be low enough.
Every year, Stanford asks its applicants an excellent question: “What matters to you, and why?” Ziad Ahmed of Princeton, N.J., summed up his answer in three words. His essay consisted of the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” repeated 100 times. He got in.
Mr. Ahmed rejected the premise that he should explain his views. “The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he told the website Mic. Mr. Ahmed, who is not black, considers himself “a BLM ally.” As anyone on a college campus today knows, the role of an “ally” is not to ask questions, or to answer them.
That’s how identity politics works. Men are shamed out of their positions on abortion (except one position) because who are men to tell women what to do? White people cannot have positions on racism (again, except for the correct one) because who are the privileged to tell the oppressed how things are? Truly public discourse becomes offensive and impossible.
So Mr. Ahmed got his point across: The teenager evidently finds the Black Lives Matter movement worthy and important. But saying it once would have made that clear. The endless repetition seems designed not just to pre-empt but also to prevent any argument in response.
More From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):