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Cyberbullying on campus

"Cyberbullying" has become a genuine problem on some college campuses, reports BU's Bostonia magazine in its Spring 2009 edition:

In summer 2007, a music professor at BU was shocked to learn that he had a Facebook page — in his name, with a recent photo and a spot-on bio. But, the professor recalls, “embedded in the document were really scurrilous things that were reputed to have been said by me, and they were quite unpleasant and ugly and immature.”

...Welcome to Cyberbullying 2.0, the adult version of the meanest pastime on MySpace and Facebook. In recent years, the dangerous game has grown up and grown calculated, and its consequences now include adult-sized miseries — dashed career opportunities, ruined professional relationships, crippling anxiety, even thoughts of suicide.

http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/spring09/bully/

(Hat tip to my Suffolk U. Law School colleague Joseph Cronin for bringing the article to my attention.)

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Comments

I found the article to be confusing (what was it four or five articles on one central topic???) but very informative. I really am thankful that I did not go to high school or college during these times (I havent been out for long but it was a different time computer wise), and that Im pretty much the only person in my office that knows how to operate a computer let alone get into cyber bullying.

When I was in college I was the admin for my schools Rate My Professors and was very strict about not allowing nasty comments to make it through, and had the ability to reach back and erase comments that were just not relevant. Since the site had the hotness factor it was sometimes hard to draw the line between what was ok and what was not when it came to talking about the professors appearences, but luckily most of my schools professors were not young hot hunks so that made life easier. I used to have certain professors who would email me to request that I delete certain comments and many times I would refer them to the website if I thought the comment was relevant (while I would not think it would be ok to mention someones speech pattern normally it does make a huge difference if your advanced mathmatics professor speaks softly in a heavy accent while facing the blackboard/whiteboard for 90 percent of the class, I thought that was a relevant piece of information that other students should know.)

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