School Power Over Student Web Speech?

Petey_Alchemist asks: "In the wake of the Pope John XIII student weblogging ban, the online lives of students are once again being examined by their academic institutions. News outlets are covering a series of recent events--most notably the expulsion of a Fisher College sophomore (who also happened to be President of the Student Government) after he posted in a 'controversial' Facebook group. Facebook, for those of you who don't know, is an incredibly popular social networking site for American college students. The fact that you must have a college email account to join provides some modicum (re: illusion) of privacy, but doesn't keep faculty or administrative members from joining and patrolling the website. Bottom line: Facebook, Pope John XIII, and other online student speech cases are popping up all over the place yet no case defining the amount of control a school has over a student based on that student's web speech has come before the Supreme Court. When will this happen? Moreover, what will be the result when it finally does?"

Comments

Personal Experience

[SeanMon]

A student at the school I attend was recently expelled because she posted photos on a public webpage of herself drinking. The school found out about it (I think an IT guy was surfing and searched for my school name on a free photosharing site), and the girl was expelled.

The lesson: don't be stupid about what you post on publicly viewable websites, such as blogs. You never know who's going to read it.

Supreme Court... Free Speech

[panth0r]

To be honest, I think this could happen very soon and I both think and hope that the Supreme Court will be on the side of free speech. Everyone in the United States has a right to free speech, but we also have consequences to bear for taking out freedom of speech too far, in public schools I imagine there will be fewer to no free speech restrictions. However, in private schools, I think they will put a harsh ban on violating their rules if they have any. I imagine that few (private) schools will actually enact AND progressively enforce these rules, but if they do, the punishment will be harsh, like suspension if the pupil does it twice, and expulsion for a third offense. Naturally, the first time will just be a nice "please take the site down NOW." This topic has me baffled, still, my personal belief is that everybody should have the right to free speech, especially when it's approiate, and bad-mouthing one's school (in many cases) is not only normal, it's almost expected for students at some schools, and if a school is so bad that more than 25% of the students express extreme dislike, I also think the school should re-evaluate its priorities.

Downhill

[Psionicist]

When I was young I thought USA was a really cool country. For whatever reason, probably because of pop culture export, USA seemed great and my own country (Sweden) boring. I remember a kid on my block was really into the marines, he had a US flag above his bed. He knew lots of presidents, pretty good for someone not native to the country.

Then I grew older. I realized no country is inherently cool, when you look at the society and politics and not just action movies. USA seemed reasonable though, I remember a history (or geography) lesson in elementary school when a teacher described the basic ideas of the constitution, and the emigration from Sweden->America in the previous centuries. Inspiring.

Fast forward til now. Do I awe you? No, because in my opinion (which will be modded down really freaking fast), your country is going downhill. You are teaching religion as science, I don't even think fundamentalist muslims do that. Then you sort-of ban freedom of speech by forbidding blogging, of all stupid things to ban (whatever happened to land of the free?), introduce laws like DMCA, and are actively trying to destroy the whole worlds intellectual property laws.

Think about it.

Regards,
Swedish citizen.