Harvard Memes Incident is a Lesson for All of Us

To loosely quote Babe Ruth from the movie The Sandlot, “Heroes get remembered, but screenshots never die.”

Comedian Joe Rogan described our current times by saying: “We’ve got a goddamn nerfed-up world filled with nonsense.” As such, meme culture—you know, those little online pictures with snarky captions—is actually a thing.

Unfortunately, memes are all fun and games until someone gets kicked out of college – as ten students accepted into Harvard’s class of 2021 learned in April.

Here’s what happened, from The Harvard Crimson:

“Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes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.’