The New Music School Compliment Pages: Effective or Just Plain Silly?

On a recent evening, I was browsing my Facebook newsfeed when my attention was drawn to a most curious update: one of my acquaintances, who is a student at Juilliard, had just become “friends” with “Juilliard Compliments.” Intrigued (and wondering whether the profile actually belonged to an unfortunate individual whose parents had a fondness for oxymorons), I clicked on the profile and was led directly to its information page, which presented the following paragraph in explanation:
 
“Following similar projects which have started at Columbia and other schools, Juilliard Compliments is a social project that aims to spread joy and happiness to the Juilliard community.
 
Just message a compliment that you may have about someone from the Juilliard Community, and we will publish it anonymously. So, if you have something nice that you’d like to say about anyone at Juilliard, but aren’t too comfortable to tell them in person, send us the compliment, and we’ll post it anonymously. By tagging them in the post, we’ll make sure that they are notified about the compliment.
 
COMPLIMENT AWAY!”
 
My eyebrows raised as I finished reading the description. Was this for real? It was certainly a nice gesture and I could definitely see how it could be useful in rehabilitating Juilliard’s typical portrayal as a “cut-throat” conservatory, but my impression was that the whole idea was rather cheesy. For one thing, I highly doubted that Juilliard students are incapable of complimenting someone in person; and for another thing, I similarly doubted that they would really take the page seriously–if they contributed to it at all. But then again, I realized, it did have the potential to do some good for the school; if nothing else, it would at least encourage communication amongst students outside of the practice room hallways (even if said communication took place under strict conditions of anonymity). Shaking my head slightly, I logged off of Facebook for the night, marveling at social media’s ability to incessantly surprise me.
 
A couple evenings later, I had forgotten all about my virtual visit to the “Juilliard Compliments” page and was focused on other important Facebook-related matters (did anyone “like” my status yesterday?) when, to my surprise, I saw that one of my colleagues at the Eastman School of Music, where I’m currently pursuing my Master’s degree, had become friends with “Eastman Compliments.” You’ve got to be kidding me! I thought to myself as I hastily clicked on the link to the profile page. Sure enough, it was identical to Juilliard’s, excepting the replacement of the elegant gray-and-blue “J” with the University of Rochester’s iconic “Meliora” crest. Now, my curiosity had become instatiable–I had to friend this page. How else could I see whether people were really taking it seriously? Perhaps I had received a compliment myself?
 
Within the hour, the anonymous administrator had accepted my friend request, and I quickly scanned the profile’s wall, my eyes darting from post to post. Surprisingly, most of the them seemed to be quite genuine, although I couldn’t imagine any of them actually being said out loud. How would you react if someone came up to you and said, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that you’re a ginger tinted ray of sunshine in my life?”  or “You’re one of the most beautiful people I know, inside and out!” or  even more bizarrely, “You’re a majestic lynx, crouching in the moonlight, in the darkest crevasses of my consciousness. Watching, over me and all of us.” (Yes, those were all real posts. You can’t make this stuff up.) Obviously, some of the compliments were more serious than others, and some were actually really nice, which I appreciated, but at the same time the anonymity aspect still seemed weird to me. People love to be complimented–we didn’t need to do it anonymously on some obscure Facebook page! It’s not as though we were insulting each other, or something….
 
But then, long about midnight as the ill winds of winter whistled through the barren streets of Rochester, New York, the evil twin of “Facebook Compliments” was born. Within seconds, it seemed, half of my friends at Eastman were eagerly sending friend requests to a new page, which bore a most intriguing title: “Eastman Put Downs.”
 
Oh, boy, here we go, I thought to myself, sending my own friend request (how could I resist?). A short time later, it was also accepted by the undoubtedly sly administrator, and I hurriedly clicked on its information page to find the following paragraph:
 
“Following similar projects which have started at Juilliard and other schools, Eastman Put Downs is a social project that aims to spread blood on the doors of the Eastman community. (Not that we don’t already have a lot of that!)
 
Just message a put down that you may have about someone from the Eastman Community, and we will publish it anonymously. Make sure you word it exactly how you want it so all that has to be done is copy/paste. WE MIGHT EDIT IT
 
Insult away!”
 
Again–you can’t make this stuff up.
 
Unsurprisingly, the page was soon flooded with submissions, none of which were actual “put downs” but rather hilarious inside jokes about various individuals, encompassing everything from hairstyles to reed colors to the smell of someone’s feet (vividly described by the poster as emanating an odor reminiscent of “limburger cheese tossed with garlic and clam sauce”). Within hours, the page had become even more funny than “Eastman Compliments,” even branching out into jokes about various composers and tagging their respective Facebook pages (my personal favorites from this variety include, “Handel needs to learn not to repeat himself so much” and “Mozart totally phoned in the end of the requiem” ). Indeed, by dawn the next morning someone had already suggested that “Eastman Put Downs” and “Eastman Compliments” get into a “Facebook relationship”; so far, however, neither page has made any moves.
 
Needless to say, it’s certainly been an eventful couple of weeks for the Eastman School in the world of social media. I still maintain that the whole idea is pretty silly, but there have been some genuinely heartfelt statements sent in to the compliment page, and public recognition of one’s contributions to a community is always nice, so I suppose my verdict on this somewhat bizarre trend is that it is at least somewhat beneficial for music school communities, if only a source of clever entertainment. As one student wrote in, “Props to Eastman Compliments and Eastman Put Downs for adding intrigue and mystery to the mundane Eastman social scene like it has never known before.”