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Student, Denied Degree For MySpace Photo, Sues
gwoodrow writes "We've all heard the 'fired because of MySpace' stories, where a simple blog or picture gets someone canned. But now one of the targets is fighting back. (The offending picture in this case was a snap from Halloween 2005 of the student in a pirate outfit drinking from a cup.)" From the article: "Teacher in training Stacy Snyder was denied her education degree on the eve of graduation when Millersville University apparently found pictures on her MySpace page 'promoting underage drinking.' As a result, the 27-year-old mother of two had her teaching certificate withheld and was granted an English degree instead. In response, Snyder has filed a Federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania university asking for her education diploma and certificate along with $75,000 in damages."
2005 was 2 years ago, and she's 27 now, that makes her 25 in the photo...how is this underage drinking again?
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
I would like to see the page in question, since "promoting" and "here's a picture of people with a beer" are two very different things (but of course, can be interpreted any way the viewer wishes). Sigh -- MySpace to the rescue of society's morals an ethics again...
When I see clearly absurd stuff like this, I tend to wonder whether there are other aspects to the story that we're not being told about.
I'm not judging either way, but is it not a possibility that the 'victim' here is screaming loudly about a single innocuous piece of evidence while failing to mention any of the other relevant details or bits of evidence in the 'case'?
I looked at the picture. I shows an obviously of-legal-drinking-age adult woman in a pirate hat drinking from a plastic cup with no indication of the contents of said cup. How this promotes underage drinking is beyond my ability to comprehend.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Where our school taxes run deep, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are leeches and our governor is doing his best to increase the New Jerseyfication of the state.
I've told people for the longest time, any time PA is in the national news, it can't be a good thing.
Personally, I don't agree with Millersville (not too far from me) since the activity took place away from school and the teacher to be, as far as I know, has never advocated to anyone that getting drunk is a good thing.
Further, as others have pointed out, how is she promoting underage drinking if a) she was above the legal drinking age at the time the picture was taken and b) we have no idea what was in her cup.
Besides, if Millersville is going after her because of something she may have done, are they going to rescind degrees from those who have graduated and are later found to be doing something similar or are convicted of other crimes? Say, child molestation, rape or robbery? What if someone posts a picture of themselves in a thong at a party (as a guy) or some skimpy, revealing outfit (for a woman)? Are they going to withhold degrees for that too?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is not neo-moralism as much as it is simple cowardice. People in authority today, more than ever before, are doing the CYA thing regardless of the consequences to those under their authority. This judgement is sad, sick, absurd, wrong. But the people who made the judgement ( withhold her certificate ) thought that this was the safe course of action, that they were protecting themselves from any political fallout. As I suspect we will soon see, they couldn't BE more wrong. /chandler bing
I am from and live in, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a strange attitude towards alcohol. It is remarkably easy to get a license to serve alcohol yet liquor is a state run enterprise. It is kind of a schizophrenic balance of control and freedom. If only you should have seen the public outcry when the state liquor store was going to have hours on Sunday. I was vaguely amused because many of those in the public outcry, I am sure, went to buy a bottle of wine on Sunday. This girl is going to win her lawsuit, hands down. What Millersville University did was attempt to flex its muscle. In doing so, that attempt just went way too far and will end up generating negative publicity for an otherwise, fine state school. I hope Millersville's administrators are arrogant and blind enough to see this to a public venue. Universities are supposed to be about academic freedom and thought freedom . . .or maybe once upon a time they were. The egregiousness of this is simply shocking.
Actually, I do pay property taxes as a home owner. I also know people who work in the teaching profession in the same city in which I pay these strangely high taxes. And in my brain I've made a note to someday figure out where the money is going because it's not going to the teachers.
And whereas yes they do get 3 months a year off, most of the don't make enough to avoid needing to get a summer job. Many of them are either working on grading papers and preparing lesson plans at home, or they're putting 12 hour days in at the school keeping up with some of it. The worst part is knowing how many of them honestly want to instill that vital critical thinking nugget in the heads of kids, but then get beaten down with the fact that they have to teach to a standardized test because that's what they'll be reviewed over.
Maybe where you're at the teachers job is a cushy one, but from my observations in a non suburb city it isn't. The only teachers I know who are thriving and loving the job all teach at private schools, and there aren't enough of those jobs to go around.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Ok, so as I see it, the 'problem' is this: They say they won't give her a teaching degree because the very fact that she was *photographed* with a cup of beer in her hand makes her an unacceptable teacher. You can't do that. This institution cannot impose it's own moral guidelines on it's graduates regarding something that is completely LEGAL. Well, maybe they can, but they can also lose their ACC accreditadion. What if she had been photographed smoking, or watching a rated-R movie, or any other number of legal activites? You can't just deny someone a degree they have worked for years to get, just because you don't approve of their personal choices. I hope she sues the pants off of this college and they award her triple the sum she's asking for. This is blatantly immoral and wrong of the college and I hope they learn their lesson.
How are they going to feel, knowing that she's a party girl?
Yeah, because only the truly debauched party at Halloween.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
It's not encoureaging underage drinking, it's more of a sympthom of a society soaked in paranoia, unrealistic expectations and simplistic views of the world that clash with a modern age where a person's life and living will be more exposed and available.
So we have two choices now: a.) remove the access to insight into our lives, or restrict it radically, or b.) realise that the people that take care of your children are humans too, with all that entails. There are no saints here. It's not a bad thing.
You don't have to be religious to be self-righteous, authoritarian, or just a plain old bastard.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Ah, but is it over the national average for people with a Master's? Compare like with like.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
So she was reprimanded, did she get a passing grade? If yes, then give her the cert, if not deny her the cert. And just because she gets her cert doesn't mean they have to give her a recommendation or hire her.
But if they pull that BS she should get enough money from the school system so she doesn't have to work, the people recall most of the school board and the superintendent is forced to resign. Its called you screwed somebody's life over, now you get to pay.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
No it doesn't. There is still a 0.001% chance of contracting an STD from a gynecologist visit, a 0.0012% chance of contracting genital warts from a toilet seat, a 0.0019% chance of becoming pregnant while being unconscious and raped during any given hospital stay, etc.
The only SURE way to avoid STD's and pregnancy is a successful suicide. So I would like to encourage my right-wing religious friends to consider that as an option--if you TRULY want to remain pure, that is. It's the only way to be sure.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
> Isn't that what they call a straw man argument...
Nope. It would be a straw man argument if he claimed these were the spoken arguments against birth control. But he doesn't, he speculate that these are the unspoken reasons (at least #1 and #2).
It does show a total lack of respect for the opponents. Nothing wrong with that. The official spoken arguments for certain positions, such as alien visitors, creationism or the immorality of birth control are utterly insane. Trying to counter them with rational arguments are a total waste of time, as they are not based on rational thinking.
It is much more productive to try to analyze which emotional needs makes people hold to these irrational positions. Once you understand the true reasoning behind them, you can start working on filling the emotional need the motivates them, and the positions become irrelevant.
> You have put those with different opinions than you in a box, and then made up there thoughts so
> you can be better than them... isn't that what your post was complaining about in the first
> place?
Nope, he was complaining about people trying to control others behavior. Not about people trying to change others opinions.
Your comment is truelly remarkable and gtives an idea of the completely screwed up mentality USa people have (at least, a part of it, and most likly the bible-belt part).
In my country, nobody would give a rats' ass if a teacher DId say she/he got drunk the night before. What, you think pupils or students are going to get traumatised? Seems to be going on a lot of traumas, lately, including 'online rape'. For Gods' sake; when are you guys going to get a grip? Your problems mainly stem just *because* you treat youth as if they were some alien beings who can have no idea what's the real world all about. Of course, they DO know all to well, but because of the paniced reactions everywhere, they never have learned how to deal with it in a normal fashion.
To be 21 before you can sip a glass of alcohol...meh; ridiculous. In most european countries, you can drink alcohol when you're 16. and when your parents let see sip from their beers, even when you're only nine, no-one makes any fuss about it - because it isn't. the rerality is, if ypou treat drinking beer as no big deal, and you let them taste it, they usually go: "yukkie, that's awful." and don't want to try it out anymore. Also, when you drink with kids in a social context (e.g. not binge drinking stuff), they are more inclined to follow that pattern. If you treat it as something special, it gets 'forbidden fruit' status, and if they only have peers to look how to act when confronted with alcohol, that's when shit happens.
In france, kids often drink 'table-wine' (wine with moderate alcohol-level) as a normal thing, in Belgium the same with table-beer, etc. do they have more drunks and alcohol-problems there, then in the USA with its 21-year law? Not at all. In fact, the prevalence of problematic drinking (like binge-drinking) is way LOWER there than in anglo-saxon countries, where the restriction to alcohol is much more severe. The whole concept of 'save the children' in the USA has gone way overboard, to the detriment of the youths themselves.
In a reasonable country, the fact that a teacher was drunk has nothing to do with her professionalism *unless* she was drunk during the course of her work, obviously. But if she got drunk outside her professional hours, even if she puts hundreds of photos about it on the net, it doesn't say anything about her capacities as a teacher. It's the same crap and obsession of the USA with irrelevant nonsense as back with Clinton getting a blowjob, over and over again. What you do in your private life - EVEN if it comes out in the open (as long as it's legal) - DOES NOT and SHOULD NOT have any bearings on how you are treated while exercising your profession.
In the USA, I wonder if a teacher can say something which is scientifically true but socially/politically-incorrect, like stating that moderate consumption of alcohol is actually healthy. These days, especially in the bible-belt states, I think no teacher can say that without risk of being fired or being severly reprimanded. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this. That obsession of weeding out the political incorrect and having to 'cry wolf' with all the other wolves (the prevailing mentality) is sickening.
In summary:
1)Drinking is no big deal
2)Posting pics about it is no big deal
Conclusion: as long as whatever she does is not illegal and does not affect her actual professionalism in the classroom, there is no reason why she should be treated the way she was. And even if it was illegal and did affect her teachings, then still it should be determined if it was severe enough to warrant the withdrawal of her diploma.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
- Wearing a seatbelt is not "condoning" unsafe driving.
- Putting up a lightning rod is not "condoning" thunderstorms.
Anyone who uses that reasoning is seriously confused.Similarly, teaching kids about how their reproductive system works, and about contraception, is not "condoning" promiscuity, any more than teaching someone about locks, safes, and keys is "condoning" thievery.
Certainly, promiscuity provides a disease vector, both for diseases we know about, and ones we don't yet.
So does sneezing.
Humans appear to have a limited ability to resist either of these urges. So for one we have condoms, and for the other, Kleenex(tm) (or your elbow).
Do these same people argue that we shouldn't have tissues, because you should instead fight the urge to sneeze?
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
What's different is that the page (at least the photo I saw) shows nothing of the sort.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
This comment is way way way way way off-topic. Seriously now. We're talking about underage drinking, freedom of expression, and puritanical outlooks on life that make no damn sense.
Who is out there modding this insightful? Come over here. You're 'bout to get stabbed in the jaw.
If you're referring to the article itself, this lady isn't even employed by a district. This is about her living her life and someone else trying to dictate a level of "professionalism" upon her. This is ridiculous and I hope she wins.
No sig for you!!