Should College Administrators Yak Back?

Shortly after arriving at a big student-affairs conference this week in New Orleans, Rey Junco took a look at the conversation attendees were having on Yik Yak, an anonymous, location-based app.

As an associate professor of education and human computer interaction at Iowa State University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Mr. Junco was probably more familiar with Yik Yak than many attendees at the conference, the annual meeting of Naspa — Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.

Mr. Junco didn’t follow the conversation on Sunday, the conference’s first day, for very long: “I didn’t find it very interesting,” he says.

But the next evening, Mr. Junco saw a tweet referencing troubling comments some attendees were posting on Yik Yak. He jumped back in, but “I didn’t find the stuff on Yik Yak concerning at all.” Sure, Mr. Junco says, there were sexual comments and mentions of hooking up at the conference. But was that really any surprise?

Not everyone at the meeting, though, shared Mr. Junco’s assessment.

Brittany C. Duron, a graduate student at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, took to Yik Yak to call her colleagues out for the offensive posts. And she even identified herself in the message, including her Twitter handle.

What got her “riled up” about the messages, she says, was that people were using the app to say negative things about the student-affairs field, or were taking aim at specific individuals at the sessions. “It makes me wonder, Am I going to have a job in this field if we behave in a way that might make people think they don’t need professionals like us?” she says.

On Tuesday, Naspa tweeted a statement saying that the “hateful posts” from a small number of users did not “in any way reflect the values of our organization or the profession.” The association was more concerned about mean comments directed at individuals than posts about social life during the conference, says Kevin Kruger, its president.

Mr. Junco, for his part, was most upset about people’s “self-righteous reactions.” The incident was worth more discussion, Mr. Junco thought. With Mr. Kruger’s approval, he organized an impromptu session, “Yik Yak @ the NASPA Conference,” the next morning .

Many of the dozens of people who came to the session had heard of Yik Yak, but had not used it before the conference, Mr. Junco says.

Some attendees expressed concern about what they would tell students who had heard about the conference controversy.

To Mr. Junco, the incident presents an opportunity to talk with students about using social media responsibly — and a chance to say that “higher-education professionals are real people, too.”

And it’s important, Mr. Junco says, to remember that it’s unclear how many people were really behind the offending “yaks,” or posts.

The big takeaway of the session, Ms. Duron says, was that people were not necessarily upset by the behavior that was highlighted. They were more concerned with protecting their professionalism and the relationships they have on the campus, particularly with students.

Reasons to Sign On

Whatever else results from the Yik Yak incident at Naspa, it probably got more people who work in student affairs thinking about a platform many of their students are already using. But will exposure to the app lead more student-affairs professionals to use it back on their own campuses?

The founders of Yik Yak would probably be happy to see their app gain traction with a larger pool of users.

Yik Yak is making efforts to improve its reputation. When the founders, Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, spoke this week at the University of Georgia, Mr. Buffington mentioned that the app now has a feature that asks users about to post a threatening yak if they’re sure it’s a good idea.

Even so, if professors and administrators know about Yik Yak, they’ve probably heard a negative story about bullying or threats.

There are several reasons for student-affairs professionals to use Yik Yak, says David Parry, an associate professor of communications and digital media at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia. If they are on the app, contributing to the conversation and up-voting and down-voting other yaks, they can help to set the tone.

Still, Mr. Parry doesn’t think many administrators are on the app, though its distinctive and controversial trait – its anonymity – makes it difficult to tell.

Given students’ desire to rant anonymously, there will always be a place for them to do so, Mr. Parry argues. In a way, he says, Yik Yak is just a modern version of graffiti on bathroom walls.

Contributors and Lurkers

Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism and communications at Lehigh University, says that if he were an administrator, he’d make sure someone on the campus was regularly monitoring Yik Yak. “To me, that’s kind of like the fire alarm,” says Mr. Littau, who is researching Yik Yak.

There are two types of people on social media: contributors and lurkers. Mr. Littau sees administrators fitting into the lurker category, monitoring and observing what’s happening on the app, but not actively engaging.

Administrators could, of course, write signed posts, but it would be hard to say if the poster was really that person. At Lehigh, Mr. Littau says, he’s seen students respond to unpopular actions by administrators with satirical yaks attributed to them.

But it’s also important not to overreact. Lehigh sent out an email to all students condemning the app, but Mr. Littau says the message just drew more attention to it. When he asked a class of about 35 students whether they’d heard about Yik Yak before receiving the email, he says only four of them said they had. For those who hadn’t, the next logical step after reading the email was downloading the app.

So what would it take for Yik Yak to catch on more broadly? Tracy Mitrano, director of Internet culture, policy, and law at Cornell University, sees Yik Yak’s recent infusion of venture-capital backing as a signal that it is trying to emulate the path blazed by Facebook, from a niche platform for students to a universal one.

To Ms. Mitrano, Yik Yak falls under the same gossip-site umbrella as Juicy Campus and College ACB. That model is difficult to sustain, she says: “To date, all the negative gossip sites have failed.”

Users eventually tire of reading negative comments, Ms. Mitrano says, so to succeed Yik Yak will have to go “more mainstream.”

Some colleges are trying to take matters into their own hands. A campaign started by Slippery Rock’s student government encourages students to use the app for positive comments and to down-vote negative ones. Colgate University began a similar initiative at the end of last semester that was led by professors. After all, an app like Yik Yak does have potential to be more than graffiti.

Mr. Junco argued in a recent article for Wired magazine that “online anonymity does more good than harm.” Yik Yak, he wrote, can help students form their identities in an anonymous, and therefore safe, space.

Despite the negative comments, the platform has a lot of potential for good campus discussions, Mr. Kruger says. “Although I hate some of the things I read on Yik Yak,” he says, “they’re all teaching opportunities.” If it worked at the Naspa conference, perhaps it can on campuses, too.

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.