(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. 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. 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 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. 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10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.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. “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. “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. 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. “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. Roughly 84 percent of students invited to join the class accepted their offer, marking the highest yield rate in recent memory. 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. 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. 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. “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.
– 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.)