Now I am fully aware that in 2024 pretty much every single social media platform that exists is based on anonymity so it may seem counter intuitive for me to push hard against anonymity. However, I will say this, the social media companies are wrong. This is one of the most pervasive evils of our time. And as a champion of what is right, I will not allow it in the classroom out of principle, not because of “abuse”.

Now for those who want the anonymity because they don’t feel comfortable saying they do not know x, y, z. Let me reassure you that there is NOTHING wrong with not knowing something. There is an infinite number of things I don’t know as well as all your other faculty. The problem arises when people refuse to find the answers to their question, choose to go to the wrong sites for their answers, or blatantly pretend they actually know something when they do not. So please come to our Discussion Forum, post your questions, we are all here to help. All posts that are anonymous will be followed by a post that clearly states your name within it.

As far as anonymity being one of the pervasive evils of our time, let me elaborate. When your online at some social media site, perhaps for an example let’s use reddit. You have NO clue who is on the other side of any disagreement / comment. It could be a 12 year old in their basement. It could be a disgruntled 50 year old posing as someone else. However, it also could be someone from another country. Perhaps someone from a country that hates the United States. Perhaps someone that wants to sew dissent amongst it’s population (one of the OLDEST methods for creating civil unrest). Or perhaps it’s quite literally farms of people ran by their government with the sole intent of getting everyone to hate one another!! It is a fact, we are fully aware this is happening from agents within Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China just to name a few. They do NOT have our best interests in mind and the pervasiveness of anonymity has contributed towards the massive divisions we now see in our current culture. How much has it contributed? Due to anonymity we will never know.

So I say, we are in academia and are BETTER than all of that nonsense. Let’s strive to put our name on everything we do and take responsibility for all our comments out there in the interwebs.