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."

Comments

Well

[El Lobo]

I for once am sick of this new wave of neo-moralism which is invading the USA, but sadly also Europe. It has gone so long now that there have been students in trouble (and expelled from an university), here in Sweden for just ben caught drinking a beer when they are 17. Can you imagine? A beer can compromise the future of a person... Long gone are the merry days of the hippy culture when things were so uncomplicated...

But I must be thankful that the new wave of religious moralism has not (yet) arrived here from America... But sadly, I expect it to arrive very soon...

Re:hmm

[Cauchy]

There was more. The school district where she was a student teacher was the impetus behind this. The district told the university that if she was awarded a teaching certificate, the district would stop using student teachers from the university. I'm guessing that the university felt it needed the school district for the broader good of its other teaching students. I'm not saying the university was right to not fight the district to the death, but clearly it was a more rational choice. The school district, however...

Re:She was not denied her degree

[eck011219]

She was denied the degree she was expecting to get and had worked toward -- I'm not sure why they would change her degree like that, unless the education degree includes the teaching certificate as well. Either way, it's a seemingly arbitrary change by the administration to the outcome of her education that will affect her in her chosen profession.

It's lunacy -- I heard the story a few days ago and figured there must be more to it, but having read more about it now, I don't think there is. Apparently if you have any semblance of an adult life outside school, you're unfit to teach (according to the Morals Police).

Reminds me of the Sprout Goodnight Show host and her firing -- she'd been in some short PSA spoofs about sex SEVEN YEARS before she worked at Sprout (which is a 24-hour PBS Kids network), but parents pressured PBS to fire her and they did so. I guess all that matters is that someone thinks something is bad -- that's now apparently enough to make it true. Here's the Sprout story, by the way. My kid didn't seem to care, but I'm sure others did.

This is Pennsylvania, remember

[b0s0z0ku]

The place where you can be:

(1) Arrested in the hospital for public drunkenness and underage drinking after you are taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning a day before your 21st bday. This actually happened to a friend. I guess that it's far better to let students with alcohol poisoning choke on their own vomit than go to the hospital and risk getting arrested.

(2) Arrested for felony riot for telling a cop who had just hit a fellow student in the face at a Red Cross benefit show that he'd be better off helping clean up NYC after 9/11 than harrassing students who ARE actually trying to help. This actually happened to me a few weeks after 9/11/2001, and fucked with my life for the next few years (difficult to get a job, probation basically required for me to move out of state).

In short; to Hell with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the puritanical prigs who seem to run the government and apparently non-governmental organizations as well.

-b.

Digging a little deeper

[Mortanius]

A little more digging turns up some of the finer points of the fight that aren't necessarily reported in the Washington Post article. For example, this article from the Sydney Morning Herald states:

Snyder did her student-teaching at Conestoga Valley High School in 2006.

Conestoga Valley officials told the college they would stop accepting student-teachers from Millersville if she went unpunished, the lawsuit said.

Which leads one to believe that the university was being pressured from the district to do something about her and let them save face. Presumably the district feels they're in a position of enough power (taking on most of their students for their student teaching assignments?) that they could do this.

However, if you look at the response from Conestoga Valley, available on their website here, they state that's untrue, and include some more information not linked in the Washington Post article, including what they claim is the offending Myspace blog post which is not the picture hosted by thesmokinggun.com which the WP article links to. It could be a little damning towards her if you believe the district that she was actively encouraging the kids to go to her Myspace page, but then, not knowing what her page is (I would imagine by now it's either been deleted or locked down anyway) it'd be hard to say whether the content therein is really unacceptable for the students to see.

One quote from their response troubles me to some degree though, from her cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking:

One of the concerns that Ms. Snyder's cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking, expressed to Ms. Snyder throughout the semester was the importance of maintaining a professional working relationship with the students and not to become overly familiar with them regarding her personal life.

Certainly that can be taken any number of ways, some good, some bad, but taking it simply at face value, it saddens me to see where education has gone these days. Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine :-P) we were all very friendly with our teachers, they would regularly invite our classes to their houses for cookouts and such, we didn't turn out so bad. But that's an entirely different discussion.

Regardless, in the end I'm a little surprised and frightened that a university feels they have the ability to do this. That after someone has paid them tens of thousands of dollars for their education, and has presumably satisfactorily completed the academic requirements, they can one day before graduation tell you "Yeah, we're not going to give you the degree you wanted, have this English degree instead." What's to keep them from doing that to someone else because they don't like brunettes or people from Alaska? (Don't answer that, I know it's a stupid question. :-P) At the very least, if her performance in the field so to speak was the cause of their decision, say so. Naturally (as would be standard practice at any univeristy, I'd assume) the only mention of it on their website at the moment is a brief aside that they can't say anything publicly.

Re:insight in the american psyche

[multipartmixed]

> 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.

In certain parts of the USA, teachers may not even teach the theory of evolution, or that the earth is more than 6,000 years old!