I’m finished with teaching until August, and am looking forward (mostly) to turning my attention back to my own work.
But before I do, I want to post a quick hit about a college-related website that just came to my attention: College ACB (Anonymous Confession Board). I’m declining to link to it, because after spending a little time there, I feel comfortable declaring it a cesspool of sexist/racist/homo- and trans-phobic hatred that deserves only your derision.
College ACB is selling itself as the inheritor to Juicy Campus, which, if you’re unfamiliar, was at least as bad of a college gossip site, focusing largely on campus greek life, and which was shut down early in 2009 for “lack of revenues” (although it might have been sucked back into the bowels of hell). It’s also selling itself as an “alternative” to the superficial, mean-spirited bitchery of other such sites.
Uh-huh. That’s why, when I dialed up my current campus, as well as a couple of my alma maters, I found threads on “Biggest Freshman Slut,” “Which Sorority is the Fugliest?” and “Who HASN’T Fucked [name redacted]?” If this is the “alternative,” I shudder to think of what else is out there. CABC includes every sort of lowest-common-denominator bias, built almost entirely on misogyny: frats are a insulted as “a buncha fags,” and so-and-so is a whorecuntbitch who likes it up the ass, another young woman is ugly or old or stuck-up or a “crackhead hoe” or…jeezus, it’s really nauseating. It makes the blogosphere look positively refined.
Anyway, I didn’t bring this up to confirm you in your despair over “kids today,” but rather to ask those of you who are affiliated with college campuses in the US (I did a cursory search, and it appears to be solely a national phenomenon) to take some action.
- First of all–if this even needs saying–don’t partake in this sort of crap, on this site , or elsewhere. Don’t post. Don’t read (unless you need to, relative to the below). Don’t join, even to defend someone who is being slandered.
- Second, talk to your friends and colleagues about this site, and see what you can do to counter-act it. If you’re part of a gay-straight alliance, or have links to the campus women’s (or men’s!) center, the student activities aboard, or the res-life people: take action. Build some programming around the issues that this site raises. Maybe incorporate it into freshman orientation activities for the fall. If you’re an instructor, maybe there’s a way you can engage some of these questions in your classes. (I’m teaching public speaking again in the fall, and you can bet your sweet bippie I’ll be pulling this in.)
- Third, bring the site to the attention of your school’s administration. I’m not always a fan of the Powers of Admin, but in this case, they need to know. Their students are attacking their schools and each other, very often by name, in a public forum. No one is going to look or feel better as a result of this site, and its in everyone’s interest to see it abandoned or shut down (cue the whining about “censorship”).
Don’t forget: what you do matters. You can make a difference.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Another reason to be glad that the 'Net wasn't full-blown when I was starting college. @ http://bit.ly/a1gJ6m [...]
Good information. I would point out this: even without this site, or any of its execrable progeny, this is going to go on — it’s just going to migrate to Facebook. I’m more worried about the trickle-down effect, as high schoolers get their hands on this kind of stuff.
Perfect example: my wife calls me Friday to say that one of our sons (in grade school) received a Facebook invitation to a fight at a local ball field. Apparently, two kids were supposed to go at it at the park, and kids were being invited to go watch and/or participate.
It seems to me, and I admit this sounds curmudgeonly, that no one under the age of twenty-five should be allowed access to social networking sites unless they take a pyscho-social exam, to prove that they have some modicum of practical social skills and some sense of morals. I honestly think you are seeing this in college, because we have a generation that has been raised on this in high school in the last few years, and they are bringing it to the wider audience in college, seeking approval and validation. And that frightens me.
*facepalm* Checked out the one for my school, relatively tame but with one conspicuous topic about someone named. I’ll try contacting the administration but I don’t have a ton of hope — there’s been some serious trollery on the website of the school newspaper, which is hosted on their own domain, and when I contacted them about that saying that they really needed to do something about it, the response was, “I hear that you’re upset. It seems that you’re upset. I’m sorry that you’re upset.” Soooo glad I’m graduating.
It’s like the net is a direct line to people’s ids. The uglliest, cruelest, most hateful stuff gets spewed onto it-and the repercussions are minimal at best.
Where are the parents who are supposed to be teaching these kids what decent behavior is? Where are the parents who are supervising their kids’ use of the internet? The word “no” is just not that hard to say, people. Get a spine and use it.
Oh, and there’s another thing. Censorship is when the government prevents individuals or entities from exercising their First Amendment rights. It’s not when a private organization like a college declines to host a site on its servers. It’s not when your church or synagogue refuses to invite a speaker just because you want to hear that person. It’s not when your local movie theater refuses to screen a film the owners consider obscene. Not getting your own way does not equal censorship.
MM: I give the “No, That’s Not Censorship” speech at least once a semester. I don’t have a mathematical formula worked out, but I know there’s an inverse relationship between how privileged someone is and how likely they are to complain about their speech being “repressed.”
I agree the stuff on these sites are garbage, but it’s more disturbing that people are comfortable with college adminstrators picking and choosing what is acceptable and what is not.
And how “private” is a college that accepts federal and state funding? At some point it would seem that public schools, because of their reliance on federal funds, become state actors subject to the First Amendment.
@charlemagne: I don’t agree. The college admins are the ones who are responsible for running the place. They’r ethe ones who get sued if something goes wrong, so they should have the power to protect themselves and do what they believe is best for the institution. Students are consumers, not owners. If they don’t like what the college is selling, they’re free to take their money elsewhere.
State-owned colleges are a different story; I was talking about private ones. I don’t think that taking federal money for, say, research changes the situation any. If you have to answer to the government for the way you run your institution, then I agree. Otherwise, no.
@charlemagneinsweats – “it’s more disturbing that people are comfortable with college adminstrators picking and choosing what is acceptable and what is not.”
Really? The administrators have a responsibility to make the college environment one that is conducive to learning, and for that to happen, students need to be able to feel safe on campus. Administrators need to wise up to the fact that the internet is now part of the college landscape and internet harassment of students by other students is something they should be paying attention to and disciplining if necessary.
From a practical standpoint, how could a college eliminate from its presence a website it finds offensive? Would you expel anyone from campus who viewed the site? Seems like an impossible task.
The only remedy I can think of would be for someone libeled by this site to sue.
Does no one else feel it’s short-sighted to start banning “offensive” content from campus? Someday it may be your ox being gored.
“Does no one else feel it’s short-sighted to start banning “offensive” content from campus?”
I’m getting really sick of that argument, honestly. There is a middle ground between Soviet Russia and letting anyone say anything at any time. When “offensive” content is harassment of students, no, I don’t feel that it’s short-sighted to ban that.
I’m leery of “slippery slope” arguments, charlemagneinsweats. I mean, that’s the name of a logical fallacy for a reason.
And even though I am deeply distrustful of Admin, generally, this is the sort of thing that I think it’s good for. Not across-the-bar banninating, but addressing, on a large scale, a problem that affects a campus. I don’t know that banning it is even possible, but making clear that participating in sites like CACB is unacceptable, against the school’s ethics/honor code or whatever, and possibly criminally actionable (not by the school itself) seems like a no-brainer.
I’m open to your ideas of how else to handle the situation, though.
“From a practical standpoint, how could a college eliminate from its presence a website it finds offensive? ”
Ban the IP address from university servers. There. Done.