Dartmouth College's Vice Provost for Student Affairs Inge-Lise Ameer admitted something this week that few administrators do: She monitors what's posted on Yik Yak. And a recent survey shows the majority of school officials do the same.

Ameer was meeting with student protesters after the campus was divided over allegations that demonstrators shouted obscenities in the school library. In response, racist posts cropped up on Yik Yak, the social media app that lets users post anonymously to a geolocation-restricted feed.

Ameer told the demonstrators that the reaction to the protest "displays our society very clearly right now" and that "there's a whole conservative world out there thats not very nice." One student angrily challenged her to go further and say "they're racists." Ameer said she wouldn't go that far -- but then she mentioned something that not many administrators have.

"We're on Yik Yak all the time and we're constantly contacting them: 'Please take this down. Please do this. Stop doing this,'" Ameer said.

On campuses across the country , students demonstrating about racism in recent weeks have been met with offensive and derogatory responses on Yik Yak . The app has become the go-to spot to criticize protesters and accuse them of reverse racism.

Yik Yak has exploded in popularity on college campuses since 2013, and is frequently the focus of protests by students who say it captures racist sentiments among their peers.

Colleges have said they are unable to do much about Yik Yak because banning an app on smartphones is virtually impossible ; the First Amendment blocks public schools from prohibiting merely offensive comments. But many school officials are monitoring these social media platforms.

Three in four college officials said in a recent survey by the consulting firm Margolis Healy that their administrators monitor publicly available social media networks, and 64 percent of campus safety staff said they do as well. A little more than half say they keep an eye on Yik Yak, but the majority of them said they focus on Twitter and Facebook .

Most officials said they do monitoring manually, and just 4.4 percent said they rely on student reports, according to Steven Healy, the co-founder of Margolis Healy.