The debut of AmherstConfessional.com two weeks ago has not gone unnoticed on the College campus. The Web site, which acts as an anonymous channel for Amherst students to divulge their innermost desires, thoughts and opinions, has become a hotbed of controversy. Since last week the site’s total number of confessions has risen from a paltry 40 or so to a figure well beyond 1,200. In this relatively short period of time, the Confessional’s comments (responses to confessions) have also exploded, surging from a few hundred to close to 9,000.
People have written about everything ranging from their consideration of suicide to tales of unrequited love and lust. Although at first most of the posts were confessions (authentic or otherwise), the site soon became a hub for trollers, spammers and rankings of members of the student body and the staff. According to a number of students, what has been said so far, on the site, has gotten out of hand.
“[The] Amherst Confessional is a stalker haven. Who knew people watched me giving tours or speculate about my promiscuity?” commented Bessie Young ’11.
Mick Montesi ’08, another student who has been mentioned by name on the Confessional, has a different take on the matter. “I think the slander is egregious, but like they say, ‘The only bad publicity is no publicity,’” he said. “I can see this getting out of hand and hope we can all be mature.”
Others are saddened and disturbed by the outrage the Web site is causing. According to Residential Counselor and Peer Advocate for Sexual Respect Rachel Johnson ’10, “Some people are using this as a forum to objectify people, attack their body image, their reputation and are saying really spiteful and hurtful things. What they’re saying is cowardly because they’re hiding behind anonymity. It’s really disappointing that Amherst students cannot come up with more creative or productive topics to discuss.”
Assistant Director of Health Education and Sexual Assault Counselor Gretchen Krull also feels disheartened by what the Amherst Confessional has evolved into. While Krull supports the opportunity to have a forum for members of the Amherst community to express themselves, she feels the Confessional is unsafe because of the way students use the site to belittle people. “If you are constantly reading material that is degrading, it really does have an impact on your sense of how people are viewing you and an impact on your sense of yourself.”
Added Johnson, “I cannot even believe all these highly intelligent wonderful people I associate with on campus are actually saying these kinds of things. It feels like middle school.”
Still, not all find the Confessional something to buzz about. Said Professor of Sociology Jerome Himmelstein, “Since our culture encourages discourse about sex all the time, very little is taboo or shocking or secret. [The site] is boring.”
Dean of Students Ben Lieber is not fond of the Confessional either. “It is appalling,” he said. “I opened it up and I was back in junior high school.” According to Lieber, because the Confessional is not under the College’s control, there is little that the school can do about it. “We cannot wave a magic wand,” he pointed out. He said that blocking access to the site is out of the question because such an act would violate the school’s policy on the ability to freely access information, and even still, it would not be difficult for particularly computer savvy students to hack through a firewall. However, President Tony Marx currently plans to craft a letter to Xu urging him to close the site for the good of the Amherst community. “There is nothing redeeming [about Confessional],” Lieber posited.
The Amherst Confessional was launched two weeks ago by Oberlin College senior Shibo Xu, who re-launched the site at his own campus last spring. Xu has since created similar sites for Connecticut College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock in the Berkshires, Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and Queensland University in Australia after friends at those schools requested him to do so. Xu also recently debuted one at Williams College (“I just made it to show that I’m not playing favorites in the rivalry,” said Xu), and a Mt. Holyoke College Confessional is in the works.
Very early this morning Xu posted a letter on the Amherst Confessional from the Dean of the Conn. College Community Armando Bengochea to his student body addressing the outrage the Confessional has similarly caused on the New London, Conn. campus, citing the way “some participants are using the site to anonymously attack individual members of the campus community and to engage in malicious gossip” as the primary complaint. Nevertheless, he maintained that his administration is “never inclined to exercise censorship.”
At Simon’s Rock the Confessional similarly created nothing short of an uproar. According to Xu, the site was originally a hit and “spread like wildfire.” But with a total enrollment of about 400 students, this private liberal arts college could not diffuse many of the slanderous comments put on the site. Xu said a lot of the systems now in place to prevent such catastrophes did not exist during the Simon’s Rock debacle. Although Simon’s Rock administrators immediately sought to shut down the site, it was only until a threat against a professor’s children was posted that Xu agreed to close the site for good. However, when the school’s lawyers demanded that Xu hand over sensitive information pertaining to confessors’ privacy, the pre-law major drew the line, adamantly refusing to do so without a subpoena. Xu has yet to be subpoenaed.
Despite the clamor, Xu, who makes no money from the sites, insists that the Confessionals are meant for good. “I really believe that things should be said (or written) and that people are good. I want the Confessional to be a source of dialogue, a place for people to interact, ask questions, exchange ideas and to communicate without names.”
Although he takes slandering very seriously and promises to do his best with filtering the trash from the legitimate, Xu claims he still cannot figure out a way to make the Web site not contain names. “There’s a lot of potential for damage on the Confessional, but there’s also a lot potential for good, too. People can release their most pent-up frustrations, secrets and just let it all out to the community and have the community respond to them in a productive way.”
Finally, he added, “It would be a shame if a Web site like this can’t exist because it becomes an online cesspool. I promise to work hard to prevent it, but at the end of the day, the Web site is what you make of it.”