Acacia O'Connor Editor-in-Chief

In the Main Building elevator last week, there was a sign asking users not to hold the doors open. The margins of the sign were filled with anonymous bathroom stall-esque comments venting frustration about the trouble-ridden elevator. One student riding the elevator laughed at the sign and said, “If you want to know what we think, all you have to do is put up a blank sheet of paper.”

The popular new “blank sheet of paper” on college campuses is the campus Weblog, a forum for news, gossip and commentary on campus life. Student bodies at many colleges are now being informed by “unofficial” campus blogs, including peer institutions Middlebury College and Wesleyan, Columbia and Dartmouth Universities. In addition to collaborative blog projects, individual students sustain personal blogs, though their posts are often less frequent.

Vassar currently has two such widely public campus blogs, MadsVassar (madsvassar.blogspot.com) and Blog 9 (lifeinthe9.blogspot.com). Blog 9, which was launched this semester, has amassed over 21,000 hits, while MadsVassar has garnered nearly 140,000 since its inception in September.

“I was a big fan of some other blogs, mainly Hollywood gossip blogs, and then I found more and more college blogs,” said the author of MadsVassar, a freshman male who lives in Jewett. “It started between friends on my floor. I never thought it would become this popular.”

MadsVassar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he’s gotten a large amount of feedback about the blog, both positive and negative. Because the blog is written in the first-person plural “we,” many believe the blog to be a collaborative project created by several students.

“I’ve overheard conversations like, ‘I know who MadsVassar is—it’s two sophomore girls from Davison House.’ I kind of see it as everyone’s voice, and I’m just the one to actually type it,” said MadsVassar.

The name MadsVassar came from the Danish form of the name Matthew, a permutation on the name of the College’s founder.

While initially created to compete with MadsVassar, Blog 9—which is a collaborative blog run by 20 students—has since found a different niche. Blog 9 creator Nick Dressler ’11 said that he quickly realized that “There would be no way for us to possibly compete with MadsVassar.”

“They are one of the biggest news sources on campus outside The Miscellany News,” he said. “What we are now is the alternative blog on campus.” Blog 9 aims to present diverse viewpoints through personal stories, Dressler said.

Individual Vassar students, as well as academic departments, also currently maintain blogs. One official example is Brooke Skinner ’08, who is employed as an author of the blog Tea at Three (teaatthree.blogspot.com) by the Office of Admissions. Tea at Three’s audience is mainly prospective students, Skinner said, and as such, she tries to be as informative as possible while putting Vassar in a positive light.

“There isn’t really a strict set of guidelines and they don’t censor me,” Skinner said. “But if I say anything that goes against Vassar, I have to justify it. I can’t outright bash Vassar.”

She added that there have been times when the Office of Admissions disliked what she had said because it was critical.

“I think that’s also true about a lot of MadsVassar’s entries,” she said, citing a recent post about a gas leak in the TAs. “Obviously that looks bad on the College, if people have sulfur gas leaking into their apartment.” she said.

College Relations Editorial Director who said in an e-mailed statement that she finds no fault in the blogs’ tone or content.

“I like Mads and Blog 9 both. However, sometimes there is a post about something that's going on on campus that could be misinterpreted without more contextual information,” she said.

She said that problems such as the TA gas leak lay more in an issue, such as a gas leak being misconstrued.

“These kinds of posts are not a problem for the on-campus community, and in fact may be useful. However, if a prospective student or his or her parent happened to read that post, and only that post, it might leave them with the wrong impression,” she said.

Next year College Relations will link to Uganda Rx, a blog created by Jamie Rosen ’08 to document the Vassar Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) trip to Uganda over Spring Break.

“How effective a blog is at getting people’s attention depends on how many people see the blog,” Rosen said. “There are millions of blogs; every org has a blog now.”

Other Vassar blogs include gisatvassar.blogspot.com, the unofficial site of Geospatial Technologies at Vassar, maintained by Academic Computing Consultant Meg Stewart. Students who keep personal blogs do so for individual reasons. Danny Forcella ’08 keeps a blog about sports, television and movies.

“I realized that I wrote about TV and movies a lot in notebooks and I figured it better to get it down on the Internet so I could never lose my work,” Forcella said of why he started his blog, dforcella.blogspot.com. Forcella, who is a member of the Vassar men’s basketball team, said his teammates and friends read the blog regularly.

“I don’t enjoy reading, but I find myself reading blogs in my spare time,” Forcella said. “It’s comforting knowing that it is just someone sitting on their computer writing their thoughts.”

Not all are comforted by the thoughts of others as expressed on blogs, however. While posts on MadsVassar are mostly informational, they have given rise to a running dialogue of often snarky comments. Posts on issues such as the sophomore class gift, gender-neutral housing and the bookstore move have precipitated between 30 and 50 comments in response. The majority of these are written by anonymous posters; some have included offensive content that would enrage the average student.

Blog 9’s posts are admittedly more personal and editorial in nature, which often leads to personal attacks in comments.

“Because you’re anonymous means you can say anything, but it doesn’t mean that you should,” said Blog 9 blogger Nina Thompson ’11.

Both MadsVassar and Blog 9 currently allow comments to be directly posted in response to blog entries, though offensive comments are deleted.

“There’s a difference between hate speech and free speech, and there have been instances where people just write really intolerant things,” said MadsVassar.

Dressler said that he thinks the ability to comment anonymously appeals to an quieter minority.
“I firmly believe the majority is very open-minded,” he said. “But that minority can come out of the woodwork on blogs.”

As newsrooms around the country contract and more news sources turn to blogging as a more immediate way to transmit news, questions about the role of blogs have come to the forefront.
“Major news sources are in a state of panic,” Dressler said, but added that he feels that blogs are “an outlet for editorial more than anything else.”

Skinner, a sociology major, is writing her senior thesis on how Jena 6 first received national media attention because it was talked about on blogs.

“I think blogs should be taken more seriously as a source of news. It provides a non-commercial view, provides a view outside of the big media conglomerates,” she said.
Vassar bloggers themselves seem split on how much credibility to give the sites.

“I don’t think people should look at blogs instead of the news,” said Thompson. “I don’t think you should use that as your news source. For the same reason that in a research paper you don’t want to use all Web sites; nothing’s entirely neutral.”