“First Vulcan to graduate at the head of her class”

I think ST09's scene makes Spock's reasons for declining admission to the Vulcan Science Academy pretty clear: their bigotry against his human heritage. There's no reason to think that event played out any differently in the Kelvin Timeline compared to the Prime Timeline.

 

And yet they accepted Michael Burnham, a full human. Although I suppose Burnham at the time would not have disagreed with the sentiment that her humanity was a disadvantage.

 

Uncertain the VSA was the same in both universes. Spock prime wasn't the same as the Kelvin Spock.

 

Yes, this is very much what I meant; thank you Christopher!

 

Exactly. I can easily see the Vulcan Science Academy having an official nondiscrimination policy while being informally or unofficially quite prejudiced against non-Vulcans -- accepting non-Vulcans even as they casually insult them. That's exactly how they treated Spock, and there's no reason to imagine they wouldn't have done the same to Michael.

But as far as we know, Spock Prime and Kelvin Spock's lives didn't really begin to diverge until after Kelvin Spock first encountered Kelvin Kirk after he had joined Starfleet. The VSA rejection scene in ST09 as far as I can remember is wholly consistent with what had been established in previous prime timeline productions about Spock and the VSA.

 

That was evidently the filmmakers' intent, but it's not an absolute certainty. I mean, Nero's arrival created ripples that altered a lot of seemingly unconnected things -- the Enterprise being built 13 years later, Andrei Chekov and his wife having a son they named Pavel 4 years earlier, Section 31 finding the Botany Bay a decade or more before the Enterprise found it in Prime, the 2256 Klingon War not happening, etc. So there's no guarantee that anything happened the same way except in broad strokes.

We can surmise, perhaps, that the Klingons were preoccupied with studying the Narada and interrogating its crew and thus were not as active in raiding the Federation in the following decades, so Michael Burnham may never have been orphaned, meaning Spock's childhood would have gone differently. Aside from that, the different astropolitical situation would've meant that Sarek would have had different diplomatic assignments and would have been present or absent from different formative events in Spock's youth. So it seems unlikely that the same events would have happened absolutely verbatim, even if the overall trajectory of Spock's life was broadly the same.

 

Not to mention considerably larger and more heavily armed.

 

Prime Spock: Whoa, Burnham's life in Starfleet is so cool! Who cares if she called me a weird little half-breed (21st century humans said far worse things on a regular basis)--Beep this Vulcan Science Academy nonsense, I'm joining Starfleet too! T'Pring who? I want to meet that officer they call Number One, she's dreamy.

Oh right, I'm supposed to be emotionless.

Kelvin Spock (never met Burnham due to Nero's time manipulation): I'm joining Starfleet Academy because the Vulcan Science Academy is so blatantly speciest, I'm going to write all about it on the Federation News Network and destroy their reputation for good.

On a more serious note, it's interesting that Kelvin Spock is seemingly unaware (and the Vulcan Science Academy likewise) of his "Vulcan dyslexia", as he confusedly asks what disabilities the Science Academy is referring to. I know this is because Discovery retconned this in after the 2009 movie, but now it sticks out. If they were aware of it, the VSA could have just referred to this to not sound speciest, or for some reason in the Kelvin Timeline Spock never developed this disability.

 

True, but that's a recent revelation. The idea that Spock was "the first" goes back to pre-movie fandom days. Only with the continuity backfilling provided by later series has it become "evident" this couldn't be true, even though the original idea is one of those things that propagated for years back in the "Before Time."

 

Except there was the Intrepid in "The Immunity Syndrome." What are the odds that every one of its crew, including its captain, would've joined Starfleet later than Spock? It's not just backfilling -- it never made sense from the start. And I can't figure out where the myth originated in the first place. There's nothing to suggest it in canon, it isn't from The Making of Star Trek, so I don't know where people got the idea.

 

Even before the movies, the USS Intrepid was entirely manned by Vulcans. The TOS episode with the giant space amoeba.

So if Spock were the first Vulcan to join Starfleet, he must have started a trend where a whole bunch of Vulcans (the same ones who bullied him as a kid, but really secretly envied him) said "Look, Spock is joining Starfleet! Let's go join too!" then signed up to Starfleet Academy en masse.

The Vulcan Science Academy thus lost its best and brightest to Starfleet, who went on to become casualties in the Klingon War, got killed by cloud creatures and god like aliens and, yes, giant space amoebas, or getting turned to mush by faulty Starfleet transporters (like Sonak).

No wonder Sarek was so furious at Spock for joining Starfleet. His decision cost Vulcan an entire generation of their best to Starfleet casualties. Spock logically concluded that his father must be acting emotionally, because Spock cannot be logically blamed if a bunch of Vulcan admirers decided to follow him into Starfleet and were unprepared for how dangerous it was.

 

It just occurred to me that this Vulcan dyslexia thing could have been cured earlier on in the Kelvin Timeline. In fact, I'd place bets it was probably cured between Discovery and TOS, to explain why it's never mentioned again in any other Spock appearance.

 

Note to self: Learn more about Star Trek. Especially the original series. It's supposed to be pretty good.

 

Last I heard they're picking up the original pilot that was rejected ages ago and going forward from there. Those showrunners must really be desperate.

 

Dyslexia is not something that's "cured," it's something that's managed and adapted to. Plenty of people manage to lead normal lives with dyslexia, including quite a few successful authors, an astronaut who walked on the Moon, and various scientists, possibly including Albert Einstein. (Also John DeLancie and Whoopi Goldberg.) There's no reason to assume it would be any different for Spock. It didn't come up later in life because he learned to manage it in childhood, as was explicitly stated in "Light and Shadows."

 

Or they were dealing with Praxis, which blew at least 25 years sooner in the Kelvin timeline...

 

I remember Andorians and Caitians, but not Tellarites.