March 25, 2008

After Campus Shootings, U.S. to Ease Privacy Rules

By TAMAR LEWIN

The Federal Education Department proposed on Monday new regulations to clarify when universities may release confidential student information and, after the Virginia Tech shootings last year, reassure college officials that they will not face penalties for reporting fears about mentally ill students.

The proposed regulations were prompted by concerns that colleges were overemphasizing the students’ privacy rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to not intercede with young people who appear troubled.

Although the law has always had a health and safety exception that allows releasing confidential information in emergency situations, many college officials have been wary of invoking it, fearful of being found to violate the federal privacy law.

Even though the regulations would provide no major substantive changes, lawyers who specialize in education said they were important to the extent that they stop administrators from invoking the privacy act as an excuse for inaction.

“You’re the dean, you think a student’s in trouble, and you want to pick up the phone to call his parents or his doctor,” said Sheldon Steinbach, a lawyer at Dow Lohnes in Washington. “But you’re worried that you’re violating the law and you’re going to lose all your federal funding.”

“The safety and health provision’s always been there,” Mr. Steinbach continued. “But these regulations provide a psychological safety net for young, risk-averse administrators.”

The Virginia Tech shootings in April left 33 people dead, including the student gunman, Seung-Hui Cho. A report by a panel that Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia named found that because university officials misunderstood federal privacy laws as forbidding any exchange of a student’s mental health information, they missed numerous indications of Mr. Cho’s mental health problems.

A federal report in June found widespread confusion over the laws.

“There were concerns and confusion about the potential liability of teachers, administrators, or institutions that could arise from sharing information, or from not sharing information, under privacy laws, as well as laws designed to protect individuals from discrimination on the basis of mental illness,” that report said. “It was almost universally observed that these fears and misunderstandings likely limit the transfer of information in more significant ways than is required by law.”

The new rules would create a safe harbor for campus administrators who see a significant threat to the health or safety of a student or others and disclose confidential information to people who can respond.

“If, based on the information available at the time of the determination, there is a rational basis for the determination, the department will not substitute its judgment for that of the educational agency or institution in evaluating the circumstances and making its determination,” the proposed regulations said.

Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education, said the proposed regulations should prove helpful.

“Colleges and universities tend to be very law abiding and sometimes go too far to be sure they’re in compliance,” Ms. Meloy said. “But because of the shocking nature of recent happenings on some college campuses, there is more understanding that to err on the side of withholding information can have dire consequences.”

The proposal would also bring the 1974 privacy law into the 21st century. It would extend coverage to students attending class online, discuss data theft and let universities release student information to contractors and consultants to whom they outsource work.

The proposal also clarifies, but does not change, the often misunderstood rules on parents’ access to their children’s college grades and other records. The privacy law lets universities give parents the education records of students claimed as dependents on their tax returns.

Universities may also give parents information about students younger than 21, dependent or not, if they violate drug or alcohol policies.

A Crash Course in Online Gossip

A Crash Course in Online Gossip

BY ANONYMOUS Rumors and accusations have become the Juicy Campus Web site’s bread and butter.


By RICHARD MORGAN
Published: March 16, 2008

THE post that appeared on a Juicy Campus message board on Feb. 25 was blunt and decidedly extracurricular.

It identified a Yale sophomore, by name, as having appeared in a pornographic movie, and linked to a Web site that showed him engaging in explicit acts with three other men. The post had about 900 views in its first few days (about 5,300 undergraduates attend Yale).

After learning about the post from a roommate, the student spent most of that evening panicked and dispirited. In the days that followed, he pored over study materials for his midterm exams and did his best to focus on his coming spring vacation. “I’m trying to zone it out,” he said in a telephone interview. “What else could I really do?”

Such dramas pervade Juicy Campus, an eight-month-old Web site (JuicyCampus.com) that cultivates and distributes gossip across a network of 59 college campuses. Promising that all posts will be anonymous, it allows students to participate in a collegiate version of celebrity gossip sites like TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com; it is a dorm bathroom wall writ large, one that anyone with Internet access can read from and post to.

For students who have been identified by name on Juicy Campus, the results can be devastating. In a tearful phone conversation, a 21-year-old junior at Baylor who majors in public relations recounted her experience when her name surfaced on the site in a discussion about the “biggest slut” on campus.

“I’m trying to get a job in business,” she said. “The last thing I need or want is this kind of maliciousness and lies about me out there on the Internet.”

Without registering, anyone can post to the site, where messages are tagged with keywords — Harvard, spring break, overheard on campus — for easier in-site searching.

Messages skew toward discussions of Greek societies and students’ sex lives: hottest fraternities, “sluttiest” sororities, and who gave herpes to whom. The site’s most-viewed forums usually trade in gossip at small colleges with strong fraternity and sorority systems.

Juicy Campus’s single most popular post seeks to identify the most promiscuous sorority sister at the University of California’s Irvine campus.

Ashley Rose, a junior, was more annoyed than upset to discover that she was named in the post. “It’s amusing, really,” she said. “It’s all so exaggerated and extreme that you kind of know it’s a lie. It’s a site for cowards and melodramatic people.”

Under Juicy Campus’s terms and conditions, users agree not to post anything “unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy.”

To reiterate that point, Matt Ivester, the site’s founder, recently declared on his site’s official blog that “hate isn’t juicy,” and attached an exculpatory note from his legal team.

Mr. Ivester, a 2005 graduate of Duke, declined requests for interviews and did not respond to e-mailed questions. In February he told The Daily Bruin, a student newspaper at the University of California, Los Angeles, that Juicy Campus was part of a trend toward “gossip 2.0” and that he found it “pretty entertaining.”

The Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity has been crucial to the success of the site and of Mr. Ivester (whose Facebook profile photo shows him wearing a fraternity T-shirt and cap). When he founded Juicy Campus in August 2007, he asked his fraternity brothers across the country to provide feedback on how the site was organized and to offer material for some of its earliest posts.

But now many of these same fraternity brothers are part of the backlash against the site. “I don’t see any value in it,” said Aulden Burcher, a senior at Duke, a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon and a friend of Mr. Ivester’s. “Look at what it does to the Greek system: rankings, sex, drugs, what happened at parties. Nobody is made better by it.”

Some student bodies are trying to ban Juicy Campus from their campus. Last month the student government at Pepperdine, in Malibu, Calif., passed a resolution urging the administration to prohibit access to the site.

“Looking back, it was a mistake,” said Austin Maness, a senior who wrote the resolution but now feels that it only increased students’ awareness of Juicy Campus. “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, “and everyone started going to the site.”

Similar bans are being discussed at Columbia and Yale, and by the Greek systems at the University of California’s 10 campuses.

In situations where Juicy Campus posts have crossed the boundary from nuisance or harassment to outright threat, the site has cooperated with authorities. In December, Carlos Huerta, a senior at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, posted a message on Juicy Campus alleging that he would start a shooting spree on campus. At the request of the police, Mr. Ivester traced the threat to Mr. Huerta, who was arrested and released without charges.

Authorities can also intercede without Mr. Ivester’s cooperation, as occurred last week when a similar message appeared, written by somebody wondering if he could get his classes canceled by starting a shooting spree. The police traced the post to George So, a junior at Colgate University, who was arrested and charged with second-degree aggravated harassment and released on $1,000 bail.

For many students who have been written up on Juicy Campus, even those who are accustomed to posting provocative pictures on Facebook photo albums and drunken videos on YouTube, the experience has been a formative lesson that an online reputation is as much a part of one’s permanent record as a grade-point average or a credit score.

“Juicy Campus is really just an exclamation point following everything that’s already been going on,” said Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor of law at George Washington University who specializes in online privacy.

College students, he said, aren’t “thinking about the consequences because they haven’t experienced them yet and because they weren’t warned by their parents, who didn’t experience them, either.”

Despite their distaste for the site, some legal experts believed Juicy Campus could not be sued for gossip posted by its users.

“Legally, Juicy Campus is fully, absolutely immune, no matter what it runs on its site from users, just like AOL is not responsible for nasty comments in its AOL chat rooms,” said Michael Fertik, a graduate of Harvard Law School and the founder of reputationdefender.com, a service that helps clients remove defamatory material about themselves from the Internet.

But he added that the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides the site legal protections, was “functionally Mesozoic” in the blogging age. Juicy Campus, he said, “is not encouraging people to be themselves, it’s encouraging people to be the worst version of themselves.”

Even if such options were open to him, the Yale student whose pornographic past was exposed on Juicy Campus said he would probably not take action against the site. “Revenge means focusing on someone else, when what I need to do is take care of myself,” he said. “I’m not a gossip person, which means I’m not a counter-gossip person, either.”

The day after his history was revealed, he changed the photograph on his Facebook profile to one of himself giving viewers a halfhearted thumbs up.

How to Combat a Campus Gossip Web Site (and Why You Shouldn't)

Monday, March 17, 2008

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

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.

What's a Wiki???

A wiki is software that allows users to easily create, edit, and link pages together. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.

Wiki Wiki is a reduplication of wiki, a Hawaiian word for "fast". Some have suggested that wiki means, "What I Know Is." However, this is a backronym.

Video: Wikis in Plain English

Drive In - The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and College Student Personnel Association of New York State

Hello CSPA Members!

Below is a reminder about a professional development opportunity for you sponsored by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and CSPA. Feel free to share with your colleagues and to attend!

Best Practices: The Increased Importance of Risk Management In Higher Education

Thursday, March 13, 2008 , 9am- 2pm

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Student Union, Troy, New York

Hosted by: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and College Student Personnel Association of New York State

Participants will have a chance to learn and discuss:

• updates on new laws, policies, procedures and standards

• overviews of common risk management definitions and terms

• recommended steps for implementing better risk management practices

• ways to identify challenges, key issues and common mistakes

The conference will include an overview of the significance of risk management concepts followed by a series of panel presentations focusing on key risk management areas such as Event Programming, Travel, Study Abroad, Athletics, Hazing, and Alcohol/Drug issues. Panelist include: Charles Carletta, General Counsel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Jack Buttridge, Risk Management Consultant for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Richard A. Vohden, Marsh Risk Consulting Dennis McDonald, V. P. for Student Affairs, The College of Saint Rose Travis Apgar, Assistant Dean of Students/ Greek Life, Cornell University, Matt Milless, Director of Student Activities, Union College Kevin Beattie, Acting Director of Athletics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Deadline for Registration is March 6, 2008. Please reference the attached newsletter for the registration form.

E-mail Kimberly Williams, Syracuse University with any questions: knwillia@syr.edu

Developing a Crisis Response Plan

Developing a Crisis Response Plan

Tuesday, March 18th
1-3 EST

If this message does not display properly, please visit our website.

Weekly Innovations
Your free one stop shop for higher education news, collaboration and innovation.

Complimentary On-Demand Trainings
- Violence Goes to College: Detecting and Preventing Avenger Violence

Video of the Week - Columbine School Shooting Tributes

Overview of Webinar

This program is designed to give student affairs administrators, staff and counseling center staff an overview and introduction to critical issues that should be planned for and addressed in planning for emergencies in their campus community. The purpose is to raise questions and awareness about how prepared you are and questions to discuss internally to address areas that may need to be improved.

Objectives

• After attending this workshop, participants will have an increased awareness of planning issues for student affairs professionals and counseling center staff providing crisis services to the campus community following a critical incident.
• After attending this workshop, participants will have an increased awareness of the four phases of emergency management and how to apply them to developing and exercising plans.
• After attending this workshop, participants will have an increased awareness of issues that need be addressed to plan for delivering family assistance services following a campus tragedy.

Who Should Attend?

• 2 and 4 year colleges and universities
• Vice Presidents, Deans and Directors
• Student affairs administrators
• Counseling center staff
• Those involved or interested in crisis plannings

Who is the Speaker?

Dr. Eric Klingensmith completed his Doctorate in Psychology (Psy.D). at Antioch New England Graduate School and received his Michigan PEM (Professional Emergency Manager) designation in 2004. He has been involved in disaster mental health services since responding with a State of Florida mental health team to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. He has been on several crisis response teams that provided services to schools, hospitals, private industry, and communities. Currently, Dr. Klingensmith is Coordinator of Crisis Intervention Services at Grand Valley State University’s Counseling and Career Development Center and Housing/Residence Life Offices. He also coordinates the Counseling Center’s Critical Incident Response Team.
Dr. Klingensmith is active with the American Red Cross Disaster Mental Health Team of Ottawa County and serves on the Chapter’s Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Ottawa County HAZMAT Team and the Michigan-1 DMAT team. He has spoken nationally on disaster mental health and emergency management topics including: Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), Family Assistance Centers, Providing Assistance to Families Following Aviation Accidents, Emergency Management for Colleges and Universities, Diversity and Cultural Issues in Emergency Planning and Response, and How to Develop Crisis Response Services on University Campuses.

Innovative Educators
http://www.innovativeducators.org
303-775-6004
val@ieinfo.org

Welcome

We are testing out a blog to share all of the ideas and brainstorms from our Professional Development Group meeting. We plan to add information about upcomming conferences and articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Please bookmark this page and refer to it often:

http://csa-prodevo-group.blogspot.com/

The 2008 New Jersey Drive-In State - National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) Conference

The 2008 New Jersey Drive-In State
National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) Conference

E-Z Pass to Success: Streamlining the Advisement Process


When: Friday, May 9th 20088:00 AM

Where: William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ
The John Victor Machuga Student Center & University Commons

Conference Fee: $40 by April 1st, $50 after April 2nd
(Fee includes continental breakfast and lunch)

Proposals: Please submit your presentation proposal by March 1st for consideration. Please see the Presentation Proposal Form or cut and paste
http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/nacada/ to your browser.

Hotel Information and Driving Directions:

A block of rooms has been reserved until April 18th at:

Residence Inn by Marriott
30 Nevins Road
Wayne, NJ 07470
973-872-7100

To receive the special conference rate, please mention the NACADA conference at William Paterson University conference.

Driving Directions to William Paterson University can be found at: http://ww2.wpunj.edu/aboutus/dirmain.html

Join us for the NACADA 2008 New Jersey State Drive-In Conference. Register now by following the link below. We hope to see you in New Jersey!

http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/regional_divisions/region2/documents/NJ2008stateconferenceregform.pdf

The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal

The Mentor is a free electronic publication about academic advising in higher education. The goal of this journal (available only on the Web) is to provide a mechanism for the rapid dissemination of new ideas about advising and for ongoing discourse about advising issues. Toward this goal, articles in the journal are published continuously in a current issue in progress.


http://www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/