The perils of anonymity

There's an odd glow that seems to hover over Princeton in May, when seen through the eyes of a graduating senior. It's a feeling of preemptive nostalgia for the things we're doing now, grounded in the knowledge that we won't be doing them soon.

I could write an essay about the glow, umpteenth in an annual series of columns-about-it-being-the-writer's-last-column. But I've promised myself, and more importantly my editor, that I'll use this space to do something more concrete. I want to consider www.ShadesofPrinceton.org, a new web site put together by the race relations mavens in Sustained Dialogue. The site publishes firsthand stories of experiences with discrimination (the bad kinds only) at Princeton.

The catch, and it's a big one, is that the stories and responses to them are all completely anonymous. A disclaimer acknowledges that the stories on the site are purely annecdotal and confides that the system "does not allow any incident to be corroborated for factual basis." Posters must pledge (by checking a box) that their stories are true, but they know no one is checking. The idea is to get people talking — especially victims of discrimination. That impulse makes sense to me. Any journalist can tell you that people are often willing to say much more "on background," with their names removed, than they would in a normal public forum. And I'll be the first to agree that anonymity has important uses. Some things that need to get talked about just wouldn't come up if we all had to stand behind our every word. There's also a role for groups – like the opinion board of this paper – to assume shared responsibility for a written product, provided that every reader knows or can easily learn who is in the writing group.

But anonymity is like fire in a public debate, as harmful in some contexts as it can be helpful in others. If not carefully monitored, it can easily degenerate into unaccountable drivel, or worse. As long as they refuse to make even the most basic efforts at quality control, the architects of this new web site will be condemning their own effort to failure.

Are the stories on the site true? Nobody knows. After reading through, my guess is it's a mix. Laments about economic segregation from the high cost of eating clubs have the ring of truth, as do a few accounts of name-calling between roommates. But others, like a description of an Indian student being told in class that his life is worth less than the lives of Americans, don't ring true to me. The larger point is that it's absurd to sit around guessing about the state of Princeton's social climate based on the way some anonymous piece of text is written. With zero accountability there is zero reason to trust the site, or to use its content as a basis for changing the way we think or act.

Recounting our personal interactions after the fact, we tend to shade things the way we want to remember them, often without even realizing it. Our own arguments get sharper, our ripostes wittier, the other guy more irrational or angry or racist or sexist or whatever. That's why it's useful to have an outside party take a look at what's going on. Sources may be anonymous in the newspaper, but they are known to the reporter, and she's staking her professional reputation behind them. It means she thinks they're telling the truth, and that they are who she says they are – whether it's a "senior administration official" or a "black Princeton sophomore." Granted, recent events have shown how easy it can be for reporters themselves to go wrong — but a reporter's word is still much better than nothing.

Shades of Princeton is at best an unaccountable exchange of unverifiable claims, and at worst could be willfully manipulated by anyone who has an axe to grind. We need an open exchange about race and other touchy topics — and that starts with getting the facts. Sustained Dialogue should return to its own ground rules, where people in meetings "speak only for themselves."

Right now nobody is speaking for anybody, and that needs to change. Doing anonymity right would involve having a trustworthy intermediary confidentially check out the facts of these stories. That's a lot of work for somebody, but it would be well worth the effort. David Robinson is a philosophy major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at dgr@princeton.edu.