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 Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes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.” 
 
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 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“lighthearted,” wrote Zhang, who said she did not post in the splitoff meme group and that her admission offer was not rescinded.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) 
 
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 ‘He broke me’: A defiant, tearful Kathy Griffin slams attacks by Trump and his family ||||| Part II of a four-part series on Harvard’s incoming Class of 2017, based on data collected by The Crimson in an online survey conducted in the month of August. Part I ran on Tuesday, Part II ran on Wednesday, and Part IV will run on Friday. 
 
 After going public a year ago with their investigation into Harvard’s largest cheating scandal in recent memory, administrators went to great lengths to promote a culture of academic integrity in the Harvard community. 
 
 But the results of a Crimson survey of the Class of 2017 conducted last month suggest that some of the newest members of that community are already guilty of academic dishonesty. 
 
 Ten percent of respondents admitted to having cheated on an exam, and 17 percent said they had cheated on a paper or a take-home assignment. An even greater percentage—42 percent—admitted to cheating on a homework assignment or problem set. 
 
 Recruited athletes were even more likely to admit to cheating—20 percent admitted to cheating on an exam, compared to 9 percent of students who were not recruited to play a varsity sport at Harvard. Twenty-six percent of recruited athletes said they had cheated on a paper or take-home assignment, compared to 16 percent of non-recruits. 
 
 Across the board, the incoming freshman class reported higher rates of cheating than did Harvard’s Class of 2013 in a Crimson senior survey conducted last spring. In that survey, 7 percent of graduating seniors said they had cheated on an exam, and 7 percent said they had cheated on a paper or take-home test. Thirty-two percent of graduating seniors said they cheated on a problem set or homework assignment during their undergraduate careers. 
 
 The Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2017 generated responses from more 1,300 incoming freshmen—nearly 80 percent of the class. Part III of a four-part series on the results of the survey focuses on the academic and extracurricular lives of freshmen. 
 
 ACADEMICS 
 
 Recruited athletes were not the only demographic to be more likely to cheat. Men were more likely than women to report having cheated. Male freshmen were twice as likely as their female counterparts to have cheated on an exam and one-and-a-half times more likely to admit to cheating on a paper or take-home assignment. 
 
 Despite the number of freshmen who admitted to academic dishonesty, their responses indicate that they overwhelmingly expect to prioritize academics at Harvard. Eighty-four percent of respondents put academics first when asked to rank their anticipated priorities among academics, extracurriculars, varsity sports, paid employment, and social life. Not a single respondent put academics at the bottom of their list. 
 
 The academic interests of the new freshman class were not always consistent with concentration numbers at the College. Twenty-six percent of surveyed freshmen said they plan to concentrate in economics or government, the two most populous concentrations at Harvard that represent 21 percent of current Harvard concentrators. And not a single freshman expressed plans to study African and African American Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, or South Asian Studies. 
 
 And just three months after a faculty committee released a set of reports advocating the revitalization of the study of the arts and humanities at Harvard, just 11 percent of surveyed freshmen said they plan to concentrate in that discipline. That figure is even lower than the current percentage of arts and humanities concentrators, who already make up just 16 percent of the student body. 
 
 Surveyed freshmen were also ambitious in their undergraduate academic plans. Fifty-nine percent said they plan to pursue a secondary field, and 36 percent a language citation. Among all surveyed freshmen, 23 percent plan to pursue both. 
 
 The survey results suggest that these high achievers are self-motivated. Eighty-two percent identified their greatest source of pressure as their own expectations. Just 8 percent named their parents as their greatest source of pressure. But not everyone was stressed out—7 percent of respondents said they are not under pressure. 
 
 The majority of surveyed freshmen said they expect to spend more time studying in college than they did in high school. A plurality of respondents—36 percent—indicated that they anticipate studying between 20 and 29 hours a week in college, and 26 percent said they anticipate spending between 30 and 39. Four percent said they anticipate studying 50 or more hours a week, and only 2 percent said they anticipate studying for 10 or fewer. 
 
 In comparison, 58 percent said that they studied for 19 or fewer hours in high school. However, pre-college study habits varied widely between respondents who went to public and private secondary schools. Only 17 percent of students who attended a non-denominational private school said they studied for 10 or fewer hours a week, compared to 39 percent of public, non-charter school students. 
 
 EXTRACURRICULARS 
 
 Although a large majority of respondents ranked academics as their anticipated highest priority for college, a plurality—40 percent—ranked extracurriculars second, and another 35 percent ranked it third. 
 
 Surveyed freshmen were also enthusiastic about their secondary school extracurriculars. A large majority—84 percent—were involved in community service in high school. Also popular were music clubs/bands and student government, at 39 and 37 percent, respectively. 
 
 Respondents also reported being drawn to academic clubs in high school: 34 percent were involved in math clubs or competitions, 32 percent in science clubs or competitions, and 25 percent in other academic clubs. 
 
 Of those who were involved in student government in high school, 79 percent said they believe that student government has the power to effect change. Respondents who did not participate in student government were a bit more skeptical, with 60 percent expressing faith in the potential of student government. 
 
 Many surveyed freshmen rose to the top of their high school extracurriculars. A plurality of respondents—27 percent—were the president or top leader of two clubs in high school, and 26 percent were in charge of one. Two percent were the leaders of six or more clubs, and 9 percent were the editors-in-chief of their high school newspapers. 
 
 But not all freshmen obtained a top leadership role in their extracurriculars—19 percent led zero clubs. 
 
 ATHLETICS 
 
 One particularly popular high school extracurricular was athletics. Sixty-nine percent of surveyed freshmen reported being involved in athletics in high school, but just 12 percent of respondents were recruited to play a varsity sport at Harvard. An additional 9 percent of the class planned to walk on to a varsity team at Harvard. 
 
 Three quarters of freshman athletes, including both walk-ons and recruits, said they were likely or very likely to play their sport for all four years. However, recruited athletes were more likely than intended walk-on athletes to envision themselves graduating as four-year athletes, coming in at 93 and 47 percent, respectively. 
 
 Intended walk-on athletes were disproportionately drawn to certain sports. Among the intended walk-on athletes, more than 27 percent said they plan to try out for the men’s or women’s lightweight or heavyweight crew teams. Only three were ambitious enough to say they plan to walk on to the men’s basketball team that made it to March Madness the past two seasons. 
 
 Twenty-two percent of incoming recruited and walk-on athletes reported having received at least one concussion while playing a sport. Of those, two-thirds said they had been concussed once. But for most, these experiences did not dissuade them from playing their sports. Just 5 percent of all athletes and 19 percent of those who had been concussed from sports said they felt that concussions had affected their approach to their sport or desire to play that sport. 
 
 Athletes and non-athletes reported differing academic backgrounds. Coming into Harvard, 33 percent of incoming recruited athletes said that BC Calculus was the highest level of math they had completed prior to college, compared to 43 percent of non-athletes. 
 
 Athletes also expressed different academic plans for Harvard than their non-athlete counterparts. Although the “Gov Jock” is a commonly referenced stereotype among Harvard students, just one incoming recruited athlete expressed plans to concentrate in government. In comparison, 11 percent of non-athlete respondents were interested in becoming government concentrators. 
 
 On the other hand, economics, the most popular concentration among Harvard students, was disproportionately represented among incoming recruited athletes. Thirty-two percent said they expect to become economics concentrators, compared to 15 percent of non-athletes. 
 
 —Staff writer Madeline R. Conway can be reached at mconway@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @MadelineRConway. 
 
 —Staff writer Cordelia F. Mendez can be reached at cordelia.mendez@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @CrimsonCordelia.
– 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.)