Colleges Struggling With the Digital Bathroom Wall

theodp writes "Back in the day, anonymous character assassination was confined to permanent marker scrawl in bathroom stalls. But now, thanks to sites like the student-run CollegeACB.com (ACB=Anonymous Confession Board), which can get hundreds of thousands of hits on a good day, TIME reports that anonymous slander is going viral on campus. Even the most elite universities — normally the land of the politically correct — have been struggling with the problem of anonymous gossip sites and their very un-PC posts, which an Amherst dean likens to 'the worst of junior high.' If he thinks things are bad now, wait until the kids start getting creative with Google Sidewiki."

Comments

futile struggle

[Odinlake]

Really, it's futile in the long term to try and ban "harassment comments" or whatever you want to call it, unless you want to really compromise free speech and become worse than China. Maybe instead stop being so bloody touchy about stupid things stupid people write? What is it we've told our children for ages - "stop caring, don't give it attention"?

Uh, no, not really

[Quiet_Desperation]

Have you been encased in a cement bunker for 20 years? "PC" is not just about avoiding overt insults or, say, the fact that we have condom ads on television now with a guy getting his junk buffed in a wind tunnel. When recent polls in the polls in the UK indicate that 80% of the population is tired of political correctness, you have a real problem, not a generation gap.

When people complain about PC, they mean the sort that causes valid or even scientific discussion from even taking place because some hypersensitive miseryshit somewhere might be offended.

It's the sort of PC that chastises a kid in a Halloween pirate costume for wearing an eye patch because it's offensive to the disabled. Oops, I mean differently-abled! Sorry! Don't sue me for causing emotional distress, please! It's curious they never seem to ask an actual other-abled person. No, wait, "other" sounds exclusionary doesn't it? Argh! The low seas of PC be treacherous, me mateys!

Political correctness also seems to be covering hypersensitivity to safety, so you have it applied to cases where trapeze artists are required to wear hard hats or the Army is told to make their training courses safer to the point of, well, pointlessness. That seems odd to me, but the street finds its own uses for words, much like hacker is used in place of cracker by the general population. Language evolves- deal with it.

Re:So, it's...

[mcrbids]

Kids do stupid things. That's aout as newsworthy as the sun rising I the East. Within a few years, stupid comments you made way back when will be recognized as such.

But while there is real slander going on, that's the extreme edge of a real sea-change going on. Sites like RateYourProfessor.com have fundamentally changed how studets and learning institutions interract! My wife, daughter, and two oldest sons are all attending CSUs and they all rely on RateYourProfessor HEAVILY to decide what classes to take. They find that it's quite accurate, too!

This is something that strikes at the very heart of (IMHO) antiquated conncepts like tenure, which often works to cement boring, mediocre teachers into irrevokable positions in schools, draining the will of otherwise good students, and making education more expensive and less valuable to all others involved.

This is a very good thing!