UVa Student Council unhappy with JuicyCampus.com

The Web site - a national message board that urges its anonymous collegiate visitors to post salacious gossip about their classmates - recently added UVa to its list of 59 included campuses.

Postings to the site have included the names of UVa students who are called gay, promiscuous or heavy drug users. Remarks that are blatantly racist, sexist and vulgar are the norm. One typical posting from Tuesday afternoon was titled "Fat Thetas" and asked other visitors to provide names of overweight sorority girls attending UVa. The site's motto: "Always Anonymous ... Always Juicy."

"This site is just plain and simple hurtful," said Neal Fox, a first-year UVa student. "These hurtful comments have had a sincere effect on the academics and on the social lives of students at the university."

The Student Council - which represents UVa's nearly 14,000 undergraduate students - approved a resolution that urges all UVa students to boycott the Web site, asks JuicyCampus.com to remove from its site all references to UVa, and calls on the popular social networking site Facebook.com to stop running advertisements for JuicyCampus.com.

"It's targeting individuals and their sexual orientation and their race," said Sam Davies, a first-year UVa student who sponsored the Student Council resolution. "It's an embarrassment. It's getting to the point where we have to act."

Representatives of JuicyCampus.com did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. An automatic statement from the site, founded by a 2005 graduate of Duke University, said that JuicyCampus.com usually does not remove content from its site and urges anyone offended to "shift your point of view on these posts and the site in general." It is unlikely, the statement said, that a reasonable person would believe everything they read from such anonymous postings.

In admonishing JuicyCampus.com, UVa's Student Council is hardly alone. Student governments at Pepperdine University, Baylor University, Columbia University and elsewhere have considered similar resolutions against the gossip site.

A handful of Student Council members at UVa expressed reservations about approving a resolution that could be construed as counter to the principle of free speech. "This is a very dangerous precedent to set," said Jason Goldstein, a third-year student.

Goldstein said that he personally finds JuicyCampus.com distasteful, but that it clearly is popular with some UVa students and the larger issue is that they believe bathroom wall-type slurs are acceptable.

"If you truly don't think this describes what's going on at the University of Virginia, then there wouldn't be anything posted on the site at all," he said.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVa media studies professor, said that JuicyCampus.com is the most offensive, non-pornographic, Web site that he has ever seen.

"It's clearly out there to create buzz by doing harm," he said.

The Internet is filled with blogs and Web sites that attack and ridicule elected officials, celebrities and others in the public's eye, he said. Yet JuicyCampus.com is different because it essentially encourages its users to similarly damage the reputations of everyday students.

"What this site does is essentially what's happening to Paris Hilton is now happening to all of us," Vaidhyanathan said. "Except we aren't asking for it or being compensated."