Wednesday, October 1, 2008

censor from inside

There is a website that does a fair amount of advertising on facebook called Juicy Campus.  The general gist of it is a discussion board in which people post anonymously.  It ends up in libel, which is illegal.  I saw the site once, as a friend was showing it to me, and it appears there was mostly greek vs greek bashing.  With all the libel, it was brought to the attention of the Student Senate to try to block the website from being accessed via campus servers.  That means that sitting in my dorm room, I could not log onto that particular site.  The bigger issue comes up in terms of free speech.  Due to the fact that we are a private university, not public, we can play around those rules a little bit more.  However distasteful the topic was, Drake University’s President Maxwell, who paid attention to the revolutions of previous times, urged the students, not just the university, to take action against the website.  As of 30 seconds ago, one could still log onto the website, and read all of the unsigned harassment.  Therefore Drake has not acted.  However the president mentioned spamming the walls to lock up the server, etc.  He was definitely proposing out-of-the-box responses to a nasty website.  If Drake had just shut it down, there would till be students who find another way to do bash each other without owning up to the comments.  However, Maxwell had a point in saying it would be far more effective as a student run endeavor.  Here is the link to the article:

http://media.www.timesdelphic.com/media/storage/paper1086/news/2008/09/29/News/Pres-Maxwell.Says.Juicy.Campus.Is.Antithetical.To.Drake.Values-3456411.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines

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