Editorial: The Detrimental Rise of IIT Gossip Pages

By: Barien Gad, President 

In the present digital age at a university filled with tech-talented students, it is no shock that there exists a significant social media presence for the school. However, this piece will not focus on the amateur running the official Illinois Tech Instagram page, putting up low-quality infographics that make us nostalgic for the old days we were too young to even experience.

This month’s editorial will be highlighting the detrimental rise of Instagram gossip pages and their ultimate demise. To start, we need to define what a gossip page is. For the sake of formalities, we will use the Oxford Dictionary definition: “casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.” 

The first and probably least problematic gossip page is @IllinoisTechMemes. @IllinoisTechMemes made its first appearance on September 21, 2019, with a post discussing a minor flood in MTCC and continued to post daily about common topics of frustration such as the poor housing conditions of MSV and the highly despised unlimited meal plan. The posts are funny and more importantly relatable, it makes sense that to date the page has accumulated more than 1.5k followers - which is the most of any gossip page on campus. I chose to include it in the gossip page list as it pertains to our previously outlined definition. 

Next is @iit.revealed, an Instagram page that allows students to anonymously submit content for posts through a Google form; in the form, they define themselves as, “a group of former students, alumni, parents, and faculty that have had to endure the denial of their humanity during what should have been an affirming and joyous time for all of us. We want to empower you to share your truth in solidarity with the many other victims of Illinois Tech’s unchecked culture of anti-blackness, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, and abuse.” True to their words, @iit.revealed is committed to posting on serious matters in a “for the people, by the people” perspective.

I truly believe it was created to bring attention to on-campus issues and act as an anonymous forum for students to voice their concerns and experiences. However, the Instagram page is undeniably a gossip page as it does discuss and report on other individuals without providing details to support its claims. The platform’s posts vary from addressing on-campus racism among the community to making sexual assault allegations against other students and faculty, which are extremely serious and sensitive issues. 

The anonymous platform is powerful in opening conversations and publicly holding both students and faculty accountable for their actions. In their posts, the account blocks out names, however, they do a lazy job intentionally making it easy to tell who is being discussed by revealing the last letter or including the individual’s title. As well, in some posts, the account goes as far as to include the initials of discussed parties. At some point, there were temporary Instagram story posts made that revealed all the names of mentioned parties.

Ultimately public shaming is not a way to solve or address issues on campus either, especially topics of great gravity, particularly in increasing rehabilitative efforts and helping perpetrators hold themselves accountable for their actions. Evidence proves over and over again, public shaming is not an effective form of punishment and rarely works in preventing repeat offenders. 

But even more grave than these gossip pages is the fact that the community feels so failed by the administration in addressing issues of sexual assault and racism that they turn to create their own coalition to punish and protect their communities by sharing humiliating experiences. I say humiliating because I understand many of these shared experiences are only being shared out of disparity for the failed system meant to protect them.

Why is it that so many individuals are reporting on the university’s neglect and turn to anonymous Instagram accounts to share others and their own stories at IIT? What does this say about the justice system at our university and what does the university's lack of actions say to potential offenders? @iit.revealed is a dangerous platform and if it keeps going unmonitored it will cause more harm than good; however, I do acknowledge the pure intentions underlying the platform.

What do these pages tell prospective students? When searching IIT on the Instagram search bar, these are the first pages to pop up due to their large following. Are these pages doing community service and being transparent with on-campus politics and antics or are they presenting a false narrative on the experiences of students as none of the claims are backed by evidence? Is it the community's obligation to advertise the flaws in our university's justice system or is it the university’s responsibility to become more transparent in how they approach on-campus conflicts? 

Finally, the worst and most horrid transgressor of all the gossip pages is @iit.confessions. 

@iit.confessions not only feeds in harmful stereotypes about minority students on campus, but it has also become an unfiltered public platform filled with sexually harassing comments targeting both students and faculty, and I make these claims with solid evidence, unlike these gossip pages.

@iit.confessions’ first post was in October of 2019. The page is quickly approaching its second anniversary, accumulating more than 700 followers and more than 800 confessions posted. The Instagram gossip page @iit.confessions accept anonymous submissions on a google form stating, “Send us your confessions about IIT and the people in it, just fill out the form using the link bio. We accept all forms of tea.” The platform uses the new-generational term “tea” to escape the stigmas and harms connotated with the previous word “gossip” even though the two are interchangeable in this case.

I know students will be quick to defend the page and argue it is meant for humor and that all the accusations are light and have no real meaning behind them. To that, I say you are part of the problem. It is not being “sensitive” to not want students or faculty sexually harassed on social media. It is not that “I can’t take a joke”, it is the fact that once we start excusing such blatant forms of sexual harassment we start to blur the lines of what is appropriate and what is not and we start to invalidate the experiences of these victims. Many of the individuals discussed can be categorized as victims of online sexual harassment, and every time anyone likes any of the posts they are complying and supporting the harassment. @iit.confessions need to be taken down immediately, no matter how sickly entertaining it might be to some. It is harmful and outright disrespectful. To the individuals who started the page, shame on you for creating a platform and keeping it up just for the community to publicly attack one another. 

There is a reason we are trained on topics of cyberbullying from a young age. We are trained to notice the signs, report them, and not partake in them because of the inevitable damage. But as social media continues to engrave itself in our everyday lives, we create new ways to participate in mass bullying by liking and sharing posts. The minute you use your platform to support these pages, you become part of the problem. By simply following the mentioned accounts you are supporting their actions. Liking those posts makes you partly responsible for the consequences.  

A screenshot from a mass email sent by the Illinois Tech Office of Marketing to students, staff and faculty

Now you might be asking yourself how I could possibly be a moderate if I am gladly embracing a max vaccination requirement? The answer to that is quite simple. To start with, the selfish reason I desire the vaccination requirement is that I want to enjoy my remaining years of college, not having to worry about on and off covid restrictions; however, the more important reason is I want to be part of the effort that helps put the final nail in the coffin of  the mass spreading of the covid 19 virus and its variants. 

The cold hard reality is that, if more people don’t get vaccinated and we aren’t reaching herd immunity, there’s more possibilities for viscous and highly contagious variants  to mutate and possibly force us to start the whole vaccine process all over again. For example, the Delta variant is already more contagious and has a higher probability of penetrating through the vaccine than the original strain. For those who are not getting vaccinated, would you really rather have to face another lockdown and miss more irreplaceable years than we already have? Already, Chicago and the CDC have recommended that we go back to wearing masks in public places. If we want to move forward on campus and be able to attend all classes, go to club events, have social events, and go back to not wearing masks, getting vaccinated is the only solution to achieving that. If we aren’t to get the vaccine then we are risking another Zoom university education. 

Of course there are always exceptions due to health conditions, religious obligations, or moral standings, but like with anything there is a limit to what is legitimate and what is used as a shield due to lack of research. It is my hope that Illinois Tech makes it as hard to get out of the vaccine requirement as it is to get out of their unlimited meal plans. I want to make it clear, I am not trying to sit here and tell people who’s right and who's wrong in how they are responding to the Coronavirus, but merely pointing out the detrimental consequences that are bound to happen. It will be a tough and expensive price that everyone will have to pay if one is to think we all shouldn’t have to get the vaccine because enough already have, or to make the decision without taking the timely consideration to read papers from the top doctors and minds in the world. 

I’m ready to get back to school, and before I graduate I would like to be in a classroom, see everyone's smiles, or more realistically their confusion, without a mask obstructing it. Masking up and social distancing was what allowed us to have hybrid classes last semester, now the vaccine is what is going to hopefully take us all back to normalcy. It may not be what we want, or the easiest decision, but getting vaccinated is our best chance at going back to life as it used to be.

I’m ready to get back to school, and before I graduate I would like to be in a classroom, see everyone's smiles, or more realistically their confusion, without a mask obstructing it

Before coming to Illinois Tech, Dr. Ding always had academia in mind when it came to her plans. She looked into the different overseas opportunities there were for PhD programs linked with Shanghai University. Funny story, when asking Dr. Ding about her decision behind choosing Illinois Tech she said she didn’t know it was located in Chicago. It was only after her acceptance that she realized the location and found out that her father’s colleague was located here as well. She mentioned that after realizing Illinois Tech is in Chicago, she thought about Michael Jordan coming from here and how he’s a hero so it would be cool to relocate to Chicago. 

It’s important to make time for what we think we’re interested in...these are the formidable years of our lives that shape who we will be later on. 

After her acceptance, she spent the next five years at Illinois Tech studying towards her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, with Dr. Fred J. Hickernell as her academic advisor. In December of 2015, she graduated with a 4.0 GPA and successfully defended her dissertation on Guaranteed Adaptive Univariate Function Approximation. After graduation, she went into teaching by starting as an Assistant Professor at Illinois Tech and Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. 

Misericordia University is a teaching-oriented university, where Dr. Ding needed to teach at least 4 courses per semester. It was similar to Illinois Tech, as it was a small university and the classes had no more than 20 students. She started with teaching some Computer Science courses and it was certainly different from what she learned from her education. Dr. Ding found herself having to learn a lot of the material she had to teach the semester before she was scheduled to teach it and the more advanced the Computer Science courses were, the harder it was to acclimate to them because it simply wasn’t part of her interest. Upon asking her to reflect on her time there, she said that it was tough on her because she had to self-teach herself to teach her students and although the different topics she taught were interesting, she liked the way math courses were taught more. She noted that she liked how math is well-structured. 

After that, she made the final decision to come to Illinois Tech to teach. This decision was heavily influenced by the established familial feeling she had with Chicago. Dr. Ding likes that Chicago is a city, but it isn’t as big as other cities like New York City. Chicago is also a very diverse city, where you can see all different kinds of people and cultures from neighborhood to neighborhood. She has met many friendly and nice people here, including the brothers and sisters in Christian fellowships and church. She loves how she never intended to come to Chicago, but she now has a home here and she likes that some parts of Chicago remind her of Shanghai. Another redeeming factor is that Chicago has incredible food, and it’s great that the food here is similar to the dishes she had back at home in Shanghai. It’s her home away from home. 

Needle in the Haystack 

When browsing through the Illinois Tech faculty site, I saw that there are only 6 female faculty members in the Applied Mathematics department. When asking Dr. Ding about this fact, she noted that when she was a student in the department, she remembers there only being one female faculty actually. When I asked her how she felt about being one of only six female faculty members in her department and if this impacts her in any way, Dr. Ding stated that she really doesn’t consider herself that much different from her fellow male professor coworkers. She believes that she, along with her coworkers, just has to do what she is responsible for in order to get through her work. Regardless of their gender, all her fellow coworkers are really nice to her and it sets a good example of what she should strive to be for up and rising new professors. 

Although Dr. Ding doesn’t notice the gender difference in her day-to-day work at Illinois Tech, her age is something that sets her apart from others. I asked her whether she feels the need to prove herself since she is younger, and she agrees that there’s a subconscious need to do so. It’s one of her biggest motivations and she finds herself making a lot of time available to her students and superiors. Dr. Ding attributes her eagerness to respond to her students and emails to her personal life being less hectic than other professors. She points out that many professors in the Applied Math department have an established family and have children already, so it makes sense for their time to be split between students, children, and personal time. On the other hand, she’s not at that stage in her life yet, so there are fewer factors that compete to require her attention consistently. She is always connected to her email and replies at any time during the day, so it’s a boundary with her work life that she’s actively working on to improve. 

Reflection 

Some of Dr. Ding’s future goals range from improving her teaching to furthering her research fields. Right now, she is a part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program, where she is mainly writing budget proposals for the research experience plans for undergraduates. She hopes to get funding so that for the next three years this program can continue to house other undergraduate students and be a creative outlet for STEM-related research. As for her teaching plans, she wants to learn to plan courses more efficiently and upgrade the teaching strategy she currently uses. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic guidelines are changing to allow for in-person instruction, she is excited to go back to the classroom to teach and get feedback from students. To be in person on campus and have face-to-face communication with her students again is very helpful in critiquing her lesson plans. 

After talking to Dr. Yuhan Ding, I deeply felt the passion she has for teaching others and learning from them just through her words. As a student myself, I asked if she had any advice she wished to give fellow readers of Words of WiSTEM. Dr. Ding says that at this stage of our lives, we are a sponge —no, not Spongebob Squarepants,— and it’s so important for us to take time to learn more about what we think we’re interested in because these are the formidable years of our lives that shape who we will be later on. 

Your knowledge belongs to you, no one can take that away from you.

While Cummings has a plethora of traits and accomplishments, the one that stands out the most is her boldness and willingness to say and do what is right, no matter the backlash.

Cummings' prominent goal in all her research was to find the correct balance of human and machine. To her it is not about replacing humans, but instead finding a symbiotic relationship between the two. An important part of Cummings research is not only progressing technology, but also seeing how this technology impacts society and its’ ethical ramifications. The perspective that Cummings has is that there are certain tasks such as flying, landing, and aiming that require a lot of repeatability and precision where machines reign supreme, as they are not tethered to neuromuscular lag or bathroom breaks. Then there are tasks that humans overtake such as knowledge based situations which require un-encountered scenarios that demand creative thinking. Therefore, an example of automated technology being used not to replace humans, but instead redefine their role could be in the medical field. The situation Cummings uses as an example is a medic helicopter being controlled by an iPhone to fly, land, and pick up a wounded soldier, have that soldier kept stable by an automated critical care system, until teams of highly trained and specialized trauma surgeons can save the soldier through innovative and trained knowledge. Humans aren’t replaced, they are just put into new roles. 

Besides breaking down boundaries and being an instrumental contributor to the automated technology community, Cummings is an outspoken powerful woman in STEM. While Cummings has a plethora of traits and accomplishments, the one that stands out the most is her boldness and willingness to say and do what is right, no matter the backlash. Besides her career as a fighter pilot and researcher, Cummings has spent a great amount of her time criticizing and educating the public and congress on the dangers of AI, specifically in vehicles. Whether it was publicly criticizing Elon Musk or speaking in front of congress, Cummings has stayed true to her well-backed research and realistic viewpoint of where technology should be in our lives. She stands as a poignant example of what it means to be a woman in STEM, and If I am to leave you with anything today it is Missy Cummings own words on what it means to be a confident, strong woman in STEM: “Even as a senior professor in engineering, I deal with sexism. In fact, I think I deal with it more now as a senior professor than I did as a fighter pilot. 

I can get mad about it, or I can just choose to keep going. I let my work speak for itself. Keep having a positive attitude and just keep pushing forward instead of ruminating over what you know is unfair treatment” (Cummings 2020).