Harvard pulls student offers over sharing of offensive memes on Facebook

HARVARD has revoked acceptances for a group of students who shared offensive memes in a private Facebook group.

Harvard has rescinded admissions offers to at least ten future students after they shared offensive memes in a private Facebook group. Picture: Paul Marotta/Getty Images

AT LEAST 10 students who were accepted to Harvard University had their admission offers revoked because they made offensive comments online, the university’s student newspaper reported.

Campus newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported that some students in the incoming freshman class created a private Facebook group in December where they traded images and messages that were often sexually explicit and sometimes mocked racial minorities.

One commenter called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “pinata time,” according to the paper. Others made jokes about the Holocaust, sexual assault and child abuse.

Harvard spokeswoman Rachael Dane declined to comment, saying Harvard doesn’t discuss the admissions status of individual applicants.

The university tells accepted students that their offers can be withdrawn if their behaviour “brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character,” among a variety of other reasons.

The Crimson did not identify any of the students who said their admission offers were withdrawn.

The student newspaper said it spoke on condition of anonymity to one of the students whose admission had been withdrawn. It also described correspondence that Harvard officials had sent to members of the group.

Students had created the Facebook group as a spin-off from a 100-member group created for the Class of 2021.

The Crimson says students were required to post provocative memes in the bigger group before being allowed into the smaller one, which was at one point called “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.”

In April, Harvard admissions officials sent letters to some members of the group asking them to explain their offensive posts, saying their admission was under review and that they shouldn’t attend Harvard’s freshmen visiting event in April.

About a week later, at least 10 were told their offers were withdrawn, the student newspaper reported.

While some students were divided, Wyatt Hurt, 21, who said he did not participate in either meme chat applauded the decision by school administrators.

“I haven’t seen any of the stuff first-hand, 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.

News of the revoked offers comes just a week after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — who studied computer science at Harvard — delivered a commencement address at the prestigious university.