A typical thread on the gossip Web site Juicy Campus lists the women at Baylor University who are the “biggest sluts.” Another lists the “biggest cocaine users” at Southern Methodist University. And another identifies guys at Cornell University who are “creepy.”
One Tulane University student who was maligned on the site told the student government at a recent meeting that she worried a potential employer would see the allegations about her and decline to hire her. Others say their social lives are in tatters over the mean-spirited, anonymous messages posted about them, and they’re contacting campus officials demanding that something be done.
They want the gossip site blocked from the campus network, or they want campus officials to help them get their names removed. (Many students complained to the site’s operators directly, only to have their requests mocked or ignored.)
The site has no affiliation with any of the 130 campuses about which it has set up gossip message boards, so college officials cannot pull the plug. And the Web site itself does not appear to be breaking any laws, no matter how malicious the postings are, because the site is simply offering a public forum and is not responsible for what is submitted. At least that’s what Juicy Campus’s founder, Matt Ivester, a recent graduate of Duke University, has argued on the site’s public blog. (Mr. Ivester did not respond to numerous requests for comment by The Chronicle.)
But college officials and students at campuses across the country have fought the gossip site on several fronts since it first hit the Web last August. Below are some of the tactics used, and an argument that the best approach is to do nothing:
Approach 1: Politely Ask the Site to Tone it Down.
Soon after Juicy Campus opened at Duke University as the fall term began, the student-affairs office started hearing complaints from students and parents.
There were only about a half a dozen, and “they ranged from ‘make it go away’ to ‘find a way to interrupt it somehow,’” says Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke.
Because the site’s founder, Mr. Ivester, was recently a student at Duke, Mr. Moneta asked a staff member who had known the Juicy Campus leader to give him a call. “We attempted to engage him in dialogue about the pain that some students were experiencing over how they were being characterized on their site, with the hope that it would be of concern to him,” Mr. Moneta says. “The message I got back was that he was not interested in moderating or influencing the nature of the conversation, and in some respects was enjoying the notoriety.”
In fact, the site revels in the publicity it gets. It posts links on its blog to all news articles mentioning the site, even highly critical ones. In a way, Duke’s well-meaning action probably ended up egging Mr. Ivester on.
Approach 2: Call for a Blockade.
Student leaders on several campuses have called for a technical blockade of Juicy Campus.
At Pepperdine University, the undergraduate student government passed a resolution in January asking campus technology officials to block the site from the campus network.
“We felt that our community had been directly and intentionally attacked by juicycampus.com, and we hoped to make a symbolic, public statement that Pepperdine does not support this sort of harmful, libelous gossip,” says Austin Maness, a student at Pepperdine and an officer in the student government.
Campus technology leaders decided not to carry out the ban, however.
“Once you go down that road and get on this slippery path, how do you make decisions on what you block, when you block, or how you block?” asked Timothy Chester, Pepperdine’s chief information officer. Plus, many students live off campus, and thus would not be affected by the university’s blocking the gossip site on the campus, he says. So Juicy Campus remains accessible—in fact no college appears to have blocked it.
Approach 3: Hit the Site Where it Hurts.
Officials at Pepperdine did want to take some action against Juicy Campus. So they decided to complain to Google, whose advertising network the site used, and also to Juicy Campus’s Web-hosting service.
“A reasonable individual perusing the content at www.juicycampus.com would agree that the site’s entire purpose is to create a ‘virtual bathroom wall’ for abusive, degrading, and hateful speech,” says one of the letters, signed by Mr. Chester.
And this approach may have had some impact.
Google decided to eject the site from its ad network. “Juicy Campus was in violation of our terms of service,” says Daniel Rubin, a spokesman for Google. The company’s policies forbid “excessive profanity,” and there’s plenty of that on Juicy Campus.
The gossip site quickly found another Web-advertising network, however, and it continues to use the same Web-hosting company.
Approach 4: Spam the Site.
Some students have taken matters into their own hands, attacking the site themselves. They’ve posted long, off-topic messages, or set up software robots to send hundreds of messages automatically, in an attempt to crash the site.
“They’d take like the chapter of Genesis or a Hemingway novel and they’d post the entire thing in a thread,” says Gregory N. Wolfe, a senior at Cornell. “The site became much slower, and spammers started making it so that it was almost inconvenient to read the comments,” Mr. Wolfe says. He reads the site less now as a result.
His own name recently appeared on the site—he was accused of being one of the “Cornell creepers"—but he says he was more amused than outraged. “One of my friends put that there—I kind of wish he hadn’t, but it was pretty funny.”
Brittany Messenger, a sophomore at Colgate University, doesn’t think there’s anything funny about such comments. She’s spent hours posting notes to the site calling for readers to join her in fighting Juicy Campus. She posts the name and address of one of the site’s administrators, and urges people to write him to complain.
But her messages are removed by the site’s administrators almost as soon as she posts them. She says she finds it interesting that the site refuses to remove postings with other people’s names, but quickly protects its own. She is frustrated but determined to do something.
“If we all act together, there’s no way that this site could continue,” she says.
Approach 5: Ignore the Site.
The best way to combat Juicy Campus is to just ignore it, according to many campus administrators. Some officials refused to talk to The Chronicle about the site, reasoning that doing so would only give it more publicity and prolong its life.
Mr. Chester, of Pepperdine, argues that interest in the site is already winding down on his campus. “This site is now outrunning its 15 minutes of fame, and I think it’s going to die of its own dead weight.”
If anything, the site should be used to teach students that the kind of hateful speech posted on the site exists, and that people must rise above it, some administrators say.
That’s the view of Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy at Cornell, who says the site is an occasion to “renew our commitment to expression that fosters respect, innovation, and learning in our community.”
For now, though, students at dozens of campuses are posting to the site enthusiastically, calling each other names and expressing their darkest frustrations and anxieties.
Many wish it would stop, but even some of those students are reading to see whose name appears next.