Baby-faced Johns Hopkins senior Andrew Mann is a budding astrophysicist, but his unlikely sideline as a cyberspace gossip-monger already has him exploring the darkest, dirtiest corners of the undergraduate cosmos and fending off attacks from campus lawyers and outraged students.
Like JuicyCampus.com, boredat.net and other college-oriented Web sites that have recently exploded in popularity, Mann's upstart network of anonymous message boards - among them the Johns Hopkins University-focused JHUConfessions.com - invites students to dish dirt and disclose secrets. Perhaps inevitably, the cloak of anonymity ends up attracting racist, misogynistic, homophobic and sex-starved vitriol that would make the seediest bathroom wall blush - and which is testing college administrators' tolerance for free speech.
In a post-Virginia Tech world, the dangers of unadulterated forums on college campuses make even free-speech champions uncomfortable, Mann acknowledges. Within days of his launching JHUConfessions.com in January, one person posted a suicidal confession, and another published a homicidal threat, he said.
In response to angry e-mails from upset students, Mann and his partners quickly deleted those posts and set up security measures in an attempt to prevent similar problems.
"We don't want to destroy people's lives," Mann said. "It's not worth it."
Concern about hateful, defamatory and threatening messages that could impugn a college's reputation has led some university administrators and student groups in the country to crack down on the anonymous gossip sites, either by blocking access to them from campus computers or threatening legal action.
In March, New Jersey's attorney general announced an investigation into whether Juicy Campus is violating consumer protection laws by engaging in "unconscionable commercial practices."
While lamenting the existence of JHUConfessions, Hopkins officials say they have no plans to try to shut it down. "There's very little speech that shouldn't be protected speech, especially in a university community," said Paula Burger, Hopkins' dean of undergraduate education in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "You just have to live with a certain amount of this."
Not all campuses targeted by Mann's CollegeACB startup, which stands for Anonymous Confession Boards, have adopted such a tolerant posture. Denison University Vice President Samuel J. Thios demanded in February that CollegeACB "desist and take down" DenisonConfessions "immediately" or face legal actions.
