Penn Shoutouts is due

At this very moment, hundreds of Penn students are hunched over their computers, furiously composing pithy bits of prose that they hope to get published in the Shoutouts section of 34th Street, the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper's weekly magazine. Today at noon is the deadline for the much-anticipated, once-a-semester feature.

The Ivy League's finest literary work it's not.

In the request for the fall's submissions on the magazine's blog, the editors described shoutouts as "reader-submitted expressions of love/vitriol/both . . . and the meaner, the better."

Then they threw down the gauntlet. "Sometimes people worry that 34th Street has lost its edge, that we're just not as gloriously bitchy as we once were. Each semester, Shoutouts reaffirm our place as the most cynical people around."

If this spring's crop, due out Thursday, is anything like those in the previous six years since the feature was introduced, a few of the messages will be kind, some will be amusing, but most will be so mean and dirty that few could be reprinted in this newspaper without significant deletions.

Advice for roommates who clog the shower with body fluids. Criticism of classmates with back acne. Attacks on gays and JAPs and elitists and professors. And lots of references to raunchy sex.

A relatively mild one: "To the girls with the stripper pole right by your window: Just know that we skip Shabbat dinner every week to watch your sexy Friday night show. Keep it up, because we sure are."

In the panoply of anonymous gossip sites, Shoutouts is relatively benign, if only because it protects the anonymity of those targeted by posts. Names are allowed sparingly, if the message is not brutal.

The recently defunct JuicyCampus.com, a national no-holds-barred Web site for college students, allowed names to be named and openly encouraged contributors to dig into the basest dregs of their creativity. Others, like AutoAdmit, a site popular among law school applicants and students, has been accused of damaging the reputation of innocent people. The site is involved in at least two court cases, raising questions about the intersection between online privacy and freedom of speech.

Shoutouts is not nearly as poisonous, but it is not harmless, either. At a minimum, parents of prospective freshmen who visit the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday might be concerned about the tenor of campus social life.

It can't be helped, though, since the Daily Pennsylvanian is completely separate, independently financed and student operated.

If Shoutouts furrows brows in the administration, no one is saying so. A Penn spokesman declined to comment.

Besides, would any high school kid who has caught a few episodes of Gossip Girl be shocked to learn that college students can be wanton and uncouth? "There's so little we could print that we're not hearing and seeing somewhere else," said Julia Rubin, the 21-year-old editor of 34th Street. "The core purpose of Shoutouts is to be funny. This is not meant to hurt anybody."

There are standards, Rubin said. She and her fellow editors say they try their best to delete identifying descriptors that are harsh.

Still, students say, it's not hard to figure out when a shoutout is directed at you or one of your classmates. If you're "the abrasive redheaded sorority girl in my CogNeuro class," you'll probably get the message.

The morning the last Shoutouts came out, Nneka Mitchell received a text message from a friend telling her she was in it. "That's never good," Mitchell remembered thinking.

She has guiltily enjoyed the schadenfreude herself, she admitted. "You read one and say, 'This is mean.' Then you keep reading."

So she was worried about what she would find as she ran downstairs to grab a copy of the paper. She scanned the pages and found it:

"Shoutout to Nneka Mitchell: 'cuz . . . she got it like that."

Mitchell, 21, a junior studying communications, was greatly relieved - then flattered - because throughout the day, friends congratulated her for being the object of a stranger's admiration, if not desire.

Of the 300 entries received in the fall, about 90 were published, said Juliette Mullin, executive editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian. Some semesters, depending on the space and the quality of the material, the overflow appears in the magazine's online edition.

"Most of the campus looks forward to it," said Julio Erdos, a 20-year-old junior majoring in mechanical engineering and international relations. "I think the shoutouts are hilarious."

The feature's popularity consistently creates a jump in circulation and attracts advertisers, Mullin said. But the editors restrict it to twice a year to keep interest high and ramp up the anticipation.

College newspapers including the University Daily Kansan and University of Wisconsin's Badger Herald maintain a daily shoutout section online and print a "best of."

Both the Wisconsin shoutouts and the Kansas feature, called Free for All, are milder than Penn's version. And all three are tame compared with JuicyCampus, which survived a year and a half feeding off shock appeal. At its peak, it was reported to be drawing one million viewers a month, but as the outcry grew over postings that amounted to cyberbullying, advertisers became skittish, and the site could not sustain itself in the economic downturn. It shut down in February.

That month, in an article on Portfolio.com, David Margolick reported on the saga of AutoAdmit.com, in which two women from Yale Law School were accused of bribery, a secret lesbian affair, heroin addiction, and oral sex with the school's dean in exchange for a passing grade in a course.

All of it was untrue.

But because the Internet is like one massive Velcro strip for rumors, the lies stuck and appeared prominently on any Google search for the students' names. The women tracked down their anonymous assailants and sued in federal court, alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress.

The case, which has yet to be settled, has already cost one of the men who ran AutoAdmit, a Penn Law School graduate, the job he had been offered at a prestigious Boston firm. He has countersued the two Yale students.

That case will be heard in Philadelphia federal court.

Although the AutoAdmit posts and their serious aftermath are a far cry from Shoutouts, the coarseness of anonymous college gossip can be a real problem as well, said Danielle Citron, an associate professor of law at the University of Maryland.

Most of the anonymous gossip is aimed at women, and it's overwhelmingly sexual, Citron said. But unlike scrawling on a bathroom stall or fratboy banter, online comments have an infinite audience.

While it's human nature to enjoy gossip, Citron said, the Web's anonymity gives people license, even encouragement, to be truly poisonous.

"Social-science research about anonymity is pretty informative here," she said. "It's amazing what we will do and say when we are shielded from social shaming. You think when you're doing it online, people are images and things that we attack. It's depersonalized." And popular.

There's a price for becoming so comfortable in the mud, Citron said. Especially as young women increasingly join in, using misogynistic language and competing in the one-upmanship.

"This generation has been schooled in the misogyny of bravado. . . . It's become a point of pride that I can talk that way, too. I can be a vicious [expletive]. Young women are jumping on this, thinking it's empowering. It's anything but," she said. "It's corrosive.

Newspaper editors at half a dozen schools, including Harvard, Tufts and Cornell, said they did not have any features similar to Shoutouts. But independently of the college newspapers, several campuses have created informal gossipy blog sites, such as Columbia's "Bored@Butler.";

The best shoutouts tend to be the ones that aren't as profane, said Emily Lasky, a senior majoring in English and psychology. In the spring edition, Shoutouts usually reflects more sophistication, she said.

Junior Danielle Malekan said she liked reading the shoutouts that refer to incidents on campus that everyone has heard about and are written with care. "It's the way they're presented that makes them funny," she said.

Still, she and her friend Erdos will be checking out the nasty ones, too.

"It's horrifying," Erdos said. "But I think it's very rare to find comedy in this country that doesn't come at someone's expense."