After discovering the existence and contents of an explicit group chat, Harvard administrators revoked admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021. 
 
 Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat. 
 
 A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen. 
 
 In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.” 
 
 After discovering the existence and contents of the chat, Harvard administrators revoked admissions offers to at least ten participants in mid-April, according to several members of the group. University officials have previously said that Harvard’s decision to rescind a student’s offer is final. 
 
 College spokesperson Rachael Dane wrote in an emailed statement Saturday that “we do not comment publicly on the admissions status of individual applicants.” 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 The chat grew out of a roughly 100-member messaging group that members of the Class of 2021 set up in early December to share memes about popular culture. Admitted students found and contacted each other using the official Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group. 
 
 “A lot of students were excited about forming group chats with people who shared similar interests,” Jessica Zhang ’21, an incoming freshman who joined both chats, wrote in an email. “Someone posted about starting a chat for people who liked memes.” 
 
 Messages shared in the original group were mostly “lighthearted,” wrote Zhang, who said she did not post in the splitoff meme group and that her admission offer was not rescinded. But some members soon suggested forming “a more R-rated” meme chat, according to Cassandra Luca ’21, who joined the first meme group but not the second, and who also said her offer was not revoked. 
 
 Luca said the founders of the “dark” group chat demanded that students post provocative memes in the larger messaging group before allowing them to join the splinter group. 
 
 “They were like, ‘Oh, you have to send a meme to the original group to prove that you could get into the new one,’” Luca said. “This was a just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun kind of thing.” 
 
 Employees in the Admissions Office emailed students who posted offensive memes in mid-April asking them to disclose every picture they sent over the group, according to one member of the chat whose admission offer was revoked. The student spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be publicly identified with the messages. 
 
 “The Admissions Committee was disappointed to learn that several students in a private group chat for the Class of 2021 were sending messages that contained offensive messages and graphics,” reads a copy of the Admissions Office’s email obtained by The Crimson. “As we understand you were among the members contributing such material to this chat, we are asking that you submit a statement by tomorrow at noon to explain your contributions and actions for discussion with the Admissions Committee.” 
 
 “It is unfortunate that I have to reach out about this situation,” the email reads. 
 
 The anonymous student also said that administrators informed implicated students that their admissions status was under review and instructed them not to come to Visitas, Harvard’s annual weekend of programming for prospective freshmen held at the end of April. Roughly a week later, at least ten members of the group chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been withdrawn. 
 
 The description for the official Facebook group for the Class of 2021, set up and maintained by the Admissions Office, disclaims all administrative responsibility for “unofficial groups” and warns members their admissions offers can be rescinded under specific circumstances. 
 
 “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the description reads. 
 
 Luca said she had mixed feelings about the administration’s move to revoke admissions offers. She said she was “going back and forth” on the matter. 
 
 “On the one hand, I think people can post whatever they want because they have the right to do that,” Luca said. “I don’t think the school should have gone in and rescinded some offers because it wasn’t Harvard-affiliated, it was people doing stupid stuff.” 
 
 She added, though, that if memes sent over the chat posed any kind of threat to members’ lives or well-being, then she believed administrators’ actions were justified. 
 
 Other members of the Class of 2021 said they strongly supported the Admissions Office’s decision. Zhang wrote that she thought the students’ actions were indefensible, and that the administration was correct in choosing to penalize those who posted obscene images. 
 
 “I appreciate humor, but there are so many topics that just should not be joked about,” Zhang wrote. “I respect the decision of the admissions officers to rescind the offers because those actions really spoke about the students’ true characters.” 
 
 “I do not know how those offensive images could be defended,” she added. 
 
 Wyatt Hurt ’21, who said he did not participate in either meme chat, agreed and said he was glad administrators took action. 
 
 “I haven’t seen any of the stuff firsthand, but I definitely think that the administration made the right choice and I think that as an incoming student—we all have our group chats and everything like that going on—we all pretty much universally agree it was the right decision,” he said. 
 
 Hurt added that he recently attended several scholarship conferences and that students he met at those events—many of whom he said planned to matriculate at Ivy League schools—also agreed that “rescinding was definitely the way to go.” 
 
 This incident marks the second time in two years that Harvard has dealt with a situation where incoming freshmen exchanged offensive messages online. Last spring, some admitted members of the Class of 2020 traded jokes about race and mocked feminists in an unofficial class GroupMe chat, prompting Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 to issue a joint statement condemning the students’ actions. 
 
 “Harvard College and the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid were troubled and disappointed to see a conversation that included graphics with offensive themes,” Khurana and Fitzsimmons wrote in their statement, which they posted on the Class of 2020’s Facebook page. 
 
 But administrators chose not to discipline members of the Class of 2020 who authored the messages. Then-Interim Dean of Student Life Thomas A. Dingman ’67 said in an interview at the time that the individuals in question were “not matriculated students at this point.” 
 
 Harvard admitted 5.2 percent of applicants to the Class of 2021, accepting 2,056 of the nearly 40,000 total applicants. Roughly 84 percent of students invited to join the class accepted their offer, marking the highest yield rate in recent memory. 
 
 —Staff writer Hannah Natanson can be reached at hannah.natanson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hannah_natanson. ||||| The campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (Lisa Poole/AP) 
 
 The Facebook messaging group was at one point titled “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.” 
 
 It began when about 100 members of Harvard College’s incoming freshman class contacted each other through the university’s official Class of 2021 Facebook group. They created a messaging group where students could share memes about popular culture — a growing trend on the Internet among students at elite colleges. 
 
 But then, the exchanges took a dark turn, according to an article published in the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. Some of the group’s members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, “R-rated” memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group. 
 
 The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images “mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children,” sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message “called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child ‘piñata time’” while other messages quipped that “abusing children was sexually arousing,” according to images of the chat described by the Crimson. 
 
 Then, university officials caught on. And in mid-April, after administrators discovered the offensive, racially charged meme exchanges, at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked. 
 
 In an email to The Washington Post Sunday night, Rachael Dane, a Harvard spokeswoman, said “we do not comment publicly on the admissions status of individual applicants.” 
 
 But according to the Harvard Crimson article, written by Harvard student Hannah Natanson, representatives from the admissions office emailed the implicated students asking them to reveal every picture they sent in the group. 
 
 “The Admissions Committee was disappointed to learn that several students in a private group chat for the Class of 2021 were sending messages that contained offensive messages and graphics,” read a copy of the Admissions Office’s email obtained by the Crimson. “As we understand you were among the members contributing such material to this chat, we are asking that you submit a statement by tomorrow at noon to explain your contributions and actions for discussion with the Admissions Committee.” 
 
 “It is unfortunate that I have to reach out about this situation,” the email continued. 
 
 According to Harvard college admissions policies, the university reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission if the admitted student “engages or has engaged in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character,” among other conditions, Dane told The Post. 
 
 The Harvard College Class of 2021 official Facebook group — like similar groups for incoming students at other universities — allows admitted students to meet classmates, ask questions and prepare for their first semester. The group is managed by the Admissions and Financial Aid Office and states in its description it is “not responsible for any unofficial groups, chats, or the content within.” 
 
 “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the group description states. 
 
 Cassandra Luca, an incoming student who joined the first meme group but not the second, told the Harvard Crimson the “dark” group chat was a “just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun kind of thing.” Luca’s admission offer was not revoked, she told the student newspaper. 
 
 This spring, 2,056 students were invited to join Harvard’s incoming freshman class, drawing from a record number of applications — 39,506, according to a university news release. Nearly 84 percent of the admitted students eventually chose to enroll at Harvard — the highest yield rate in several decades. 
 
 The university’s decision to rescind the students’ acceptance to Harvard underscores the dangers of social media posts — public or private — among prospective college students. According to Kaplan Test Prep, which surveyed more than 350 college admissions officers, 35 percent of admissions officers said they check social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to learn more about applicants. About 42 percent of those officials said what they found had a negative impact on prospective students. 
 
 “For better or worse, social media has become an established factor in college admissions, and it’s more important than ever for applicants to make wise decisions,” Yariv Alpher, executive director of research at Kaplan Test Prep said. 
 
 The repercussions spurred both praise and criticism from Harvard students, alumni and others at a time when university campuses across the country are in the midst of clashes over free speech. Some felt the decision was justified, while others expressed a belief that admissions officers crossed a line by judging students for their private conversations. 
 
 Erica Goldberg, an assistant professor at Ohio Northern Law School who calls herself a “free speech enthusiast,” wrote in a blog post that by “ferreting out” the members of the private chat group and revoking their acceptances Harvard “has proven that there is an oppressive force to transgress.” 
 
 Goldberg, who said she taught at Harvard Law School for three years, compared the dark humor used by the Harvard students to the popular “unabashedly irreverent” game Cards Against Humanity, “whose purpose is to be as cleverly offensive as possible. 
 
 “Even many good liberals love the game, precisely because the humor is so wrong, so contrary to our values,” Goldberg wrote. She called on Harvard to reconsider its decision. 
 
 “Harvard should not teach its students to be afraid to joke in private, among people willing to joke back,” Goldberg wrote. “Harvard should not teach students to turn on each other for speech.” 
 
 This was not the first time Harvard administrators addressed controversial messages exchanged among incoming students. Last year, after connecting on the university’s official Facebook page for the Class of 2020, incoming students joined a private unofficial chat on the GroupMe messaging app. In it, some students exchanged images that included racially charged jokes and at least one message that mocked feminists. 
 
 Though the exchanges prompted a controversy among members of that incoming class, administrators did not discipline the students who sent the messages, according to the Harvard Crimson. Thomas A. Dingman, then the interim dean of student life, said in an interview at the time that the individuals were “not matriculated students at this point.” 
 
 [Yale dean placed on leave after calling people ‘white trash’ on Yelp] 
 
 In recent months, college meme groups on Facebook have become institutions among Ivy League students; some even refer to the craze as “college meme wars.” The groups have been popping up at the campuses of Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Yale and Dartmouth, as well as the University of California Berkeley and others. 
 
 College meme groups on Facebook have become institutions among Ivy League students; some even refer to the craze as "college meme wars." Here's what you need to know. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) 
 
 Students use the groups to share memes picking fun at college cliches, inside jokes and even standard student topics, such as textbook prices. Old-school college rivalries often play out in the groups, as Mic pointed on in a story titled “Inside the elite meme wars of America’s most exclusive colleges.” 
 
 These groups have become so popular that many now have more members than the schools have students. In early February, a Harvard freshman started a Facebook group titled “Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens,” modeling it after two similar university-based groups: “UCLA Memes for Sick AF Tweens” and “UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens,” according to an article in the Harvard Crimson magazine, Fifteen Minutes. 
 
 By early March, there were more members of the Harvard meme group than Harvard undergraduate students. The group now has nearly 30,000 members — including “pharmabro” Martin Shkreli, the former Turing Pharmaceuticals executive who became known as “Pharma Bro” after he dramatically boosted the price of a drug. 
 
 According to the Harvard meme Facebook group description, all memes must be Harvard-specific. “If the meme could apply to any group of wealthy, pretentious pseudo-intellectuals, at least Photoshop a Harvard logo in there somewhere,” the description states. 
 
 As the group’s popularity swelled, so did disputes and controversies that played out in exchanges between its members. 
 
 “Most of these fights fell in line with a discourse familiar to contemporary college campuses,” Tarpley Hitt wrote in the article in the student magazine, “with one side calling for increased moderation of posts which played into racial stereotypes or targeted marginalized groups, while the other championed freedom of expression.” 
 
 One participant in the Harvard meme group posted a link Sunday to the news about the obscene meme exchange. 
 
 “When the memes get too real,” the post read. 
 
 One Twitter user who shared the story surmised: “Are these the first casualties of the college meme wars?” 
 
 Editor’s note: The original version of this story inadvertently neglected to put in quotes words in the fourth paragraph which came from the Harvard Crimson. The story has been adjusted. 
 
 Much memes. So web. Such wow. (Adriana Usero,Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post) 
 
 More from Morning Mix 
 
 Why ‘Over the Rainbow’ was the perfect closer for Ariana Grande’s Manchester tribute 
 
 ‘Completely heartless’: Man charged with stealing Portland hero’s wedding ring as he lay dying 
 
 ‘Wonder Woman’ soars at the box office, breaks superhero glass ceiling 
 
 ‘He broke me’: A defiant, tearful Kathy Griffin slams attacks by Trump and his family ||||| Well, that's one way to get into an Ivy League school. 
 
 According to an email survey of more than 1,300 incoming Harvard students, the Harvard Crimson reports, 10% of the campus' new freshman class have cheated on tests and 42% have cheated on homework. 
 
 That's probably going to be unwelcome news for the 377-year-old university, which is still recovering from a 2012 scandal in which more than 100 students were accused of cheating on a take-home exam for an introductory-level class on Congress. 
 
 Also 
 
 
 
 Then, in March, Harvard Quiz Bowl teams that won four championships between 2009 and 2011 also had wins vacated because of a cheating scandal involving one student. 
 
 The Crimson's survey also reported that 8% of the incoming class expected to get jobs in the finance industry. 
 
 [Updated at 10:21 p.m.: "Even though this is a national problem, the numbers reported from the student newspaper’s informal survey align with the decision Harvard College made last year to take action," Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal said in an email, adding that the school was addressing cheating through faculty and presentations to students, with a joint committee also addressing cheating. "At the end of this process, we hope that Harvard will not only continue to beat national averages in reports of cheating, but also strengthen Harvard's culture of integrity, in which cheating is the rare exception."] 
 
 In the Crimson's findings on cheating, athletes were roughly twice as likely to cheat as non-athletes, with 26% of recruited athletes responding that they had cheated on a paper or take-home assignment before arriving at Harvard. (That figure was 16% for non-recruits.) 
 
 The first line of Harvard's policy on academic dishonesty states that "All work submitted for credit is expected to be the student’s own work." 
 
 "Plagiarism or falsification of research results will ordinarily result in a requirement to withdraw or expulsion," the policy states. 
 
 [For the record: 11:16 p.m., Sept. 5: An earlier version of this post said the Harvard Crimson's survey found that 80% of the incoming class expected to get jobs in the finance industry. Actually, the figure is 8%.] 
 
 ALSO: 
 
 Whitey Bulger talks of love in letter from prison 
 
 VIDEO: Kansas City police save a small deer stuck in the rain 
 
 Anthony Weiner: Outburst followed man's rebuke for marrying 'an Arab' 
 
 Follow L.A. Times National on Twitter
– At least 10 students lost their spots at Harvard before the first day of class after they exchanged offensive messages in a private Facebook group, the Harvard Crimson reports. College officials told the incoming freshmen they were no longer welcome after getting wind of the messages and memes in a chat group once called "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens." The posts included sexually explicit memes and posts that called child sexual abuse arousing and mocked the Holocaust and minorities, per the Crimson, which obtained screenshots of the posts (but didn't publish them). One post dubbed a hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child "piñata time." The rogue chat sprang from a larger group of 100 students who began exchanging popular memes in December on Harvard's official Class of 2021 Facebook page. Jessica Zhang tells the Crimson prospective students like her "were excited about forming group chats with people who shared similar interests." But the mostly "lighthearted" messages, as Zhang put it, gave way to suggestions for a "more R-rated" meme" that spurred the "dark" group, per student Cassandra Luca, who added "it was people doing stupid stuff." Harvard officials who discovered the posts in mid-April took a harder line and revoked at least 10 admission offers, per the Crimson. The college reserves the right to rescind admission if a prospective student "engages or has engaged in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity, or moral character," a Harvard rep tells the Washington Post. In September, 2,056 freshmen will begin classes at the elite college; 39,506 students applied. (Those incoming students include Malia Obama.)