Harvard pulls admissions offers

Explicit Facebook posts of would-be students cost them Ivy League spots

Harvard College has rescinded offers of admission from at least 10 prospective students after they were found to have posted “sexually explicit” memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook chat, according to The Harvard Crimson.

About 100 members of the Class of 2021 formed the messaging group on Facebook in late December to share memes about popular culture, the school newspaper reported on Sunday.

Eventually, some students suggested forming 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 newspaper said.

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, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by the Crimson. One message called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.” Other messages quipped that abusing children was sexually arousing.

In mid-April, the admissions office learned about the group and began emailing students who posted the offensive memes, asking them to disclose the offensive material they shared to the group, the Crimson reported.

Then at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.

Administrators told the Crimson they don’t comment on individual applicants. But 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.

Harvard is where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates started what would become Facebook. Last month, 12 years after he dropped out of Harvard for Silicon Valley in 2005, he received an honorary degree from Harvard.

Harvard admitted 5.2 percent of applicants to the Class of 2021, or 2,056 of the nearly 40,000 total applicants. Roughly 84 percent of students invited to join the class accepted Harvard offer.