"Mean Girls," college style?

With finals week in progress, many students at Saint Joseph's University have taken to the Web and visited what many are calling a “Mean Girls”-style “burn book.”

Students at St. Joe’s have simultaneously reveled and reviled in CollegeACB.com, a Web site that serves as an “anonymous confession board” for everything from campus gossip, comments on the cafeteria, and advice about professors.

Recent topics on the Saint Joseph’s forum include “Fakest Girls in the Sophomore Class,” “Biggest tools on campus,” and the “Hottest hair on campus.” Other discussion threads focus on individual students, with comments that either affirm or reject the person’s attractiveness, intelligence, or other personal features.

CollegeACB.com was launched in 2009 as the creation of two Wesleyan University graduates and currently sustains approximately 180,000 page views per month. Users must register in order to comment on the site; however, anyone can visit the site and view content for any university’s forum, including St. Joe’s.

The Web site got an extra boost in page views and consistent viewers after a popular campus gossip site, JuicyCampus.com, shut down for financial reasons in February of 2010.

While a February press release from CollegeACB.com’s current owner, Peter Frank, said that “the ACB is a website that helps build community and engenders the open exchange of information,” many students have said that it’s nothing more than a source of open hatred for individuals.

In one posting, an anonymous student wrote, “Everybody at this school comes from good backgrounds. Can we please make our parents proud and stop talking s**t behind our classmates backs?...This is a small school, can’t we all just be mature and make the best out of college?”

Another user wrote, “Welcome to the real version of ‘Mean Girls.’ I hope you are proud of yourselves.”

But other comments on the website support its perceived “humor.”

One anonymous poster wrote, “If you don’t like the humor people are getting out of your personality, grow up and don’t come on here.”

According to Vice President for Student Life Cary Anderson, Ed.D., Web sites like CollegeACB.com are a regular occurrence.

“If the site disappears, then there will be something else that [comes up]; we can’t even imagine three years from now what the next iteration of something like this will be,” Anderson said. “So I guess, for my perspective, it’s looking more at this notion of social networking, anonymous posts, and student conduct or behavior, whether it’s on campus, on the street, or in cyberspace.”

Anderson said that he would be issuing a letter to the university community later this afternoon along with Provost Brice Wachterhauser, Ph.D. Among the concerns that will be mentioned in the letter, Anderson said that the need for students to understand the consequences of their actions is important.

“What is anonymous today may not be anonymous in the future. I think people need to keep that in mind in all their postings, whether it’s on Facebook or one of these sites or once again whatever the next iteration is—that doesn’t go away,” Anderson said.

With the recent rise in incidents of cyber bullying, Anderson also said that he recommends that students who are particularly upset about postings on the Web site seek out sources of help on campus, like the Counseling Center.

While Anderson said that the university has no plans to censor social networking sites, including CollegeACB.com, he did state that there are different ways for students to handle the situation on their own.

“One thing is to ask students, if somebody has an issue with a particular posting, to let the site administrator know. Different sites are going to respond differently to this [in terms of] to what extent they’ll do that,” Anderson said. “Another piece is that sometimes advertisers on the web aren’t familiar with what they’re sponsoring. So another avenue is to let—for students to let advertisers on various sites know what kind of content they’re sponsoring.”

Ultimately, Anderson said that it’s up to students to address the issues present on Web sites like CollegeACB.com.

“It is an off-campus site and it does adversely affect students at Saint Joseph’s and so we would hope that students would talk amongst themselves and take control of that culture,” said Anderson.