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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.
No bullshit please, clearly she was denied her degree due to pressure from the RIAA. Dressing as a pirate and so on...
Arrr.
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...
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...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
"It's OK for a drunken pirate to have a pretty useless degree, but we'll be damned if we're going to enable a drunken pirate to get a low paying stressful thankless job by giving them a certificate!"
Obviously ninja have infiltrated the schools administrative staff...
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
... and that picture says "Argh, matey, I'm mighty thirsty", but that's about it.
Perhaps some bored grad students at Millersville University, those who aren't working on OSS projects of course, will snap a few pic's of the University's administrators so others can jump to conclusions about them too.
Students only go to uni to leech movies and music and drink underage, getting a degree is just a bonus!!!
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 thought I was the only one who got hammered off those Goodbar shooters. Whew, that's a relief.
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.
Well.. that's what the cup says anyway. No sign of beer or stronger stuff. It's not even hot coffee.
The only reason I could think of to punish her is for the bad pirate costume, and the fact that the plastic cup is out of character.
For fucks sake, you think she needs counselling or an ethics class over a picture of her in a pirate hat drinking a cup of drink?
-M
# grep slashdot access.log | grep html | sort | uniq | wc -l 2604
Isn't it obvious? People who are underage may only drink from clear, plastic bottles! By using a cup, she was promoting drinking from opaque liquid carrying devices.
Hmm, there has to be more to the story than the picture..
That's an opaque cup and could contain ANYTHING.. (Even DiHydrogenMonoxide, insidious stuff that it is..)
If the picture is all the University powers-that-be went on.. They deserved to be slammed for everything
she can get out of them.. If there's more to the story, (and NOT fictional documentation by the school),
then she's got another issue.
Good luck to Mrs. Snyder..
Rocketman56
If its about the pirate thing they should encourage this behaviour as the decline in pirate population is the cause of global warming...
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.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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
While I agree that the school is acting outside of there bounds, why is it that people are still so obsessed with posting there "party" pictures on the web?!? Does anyone really care? If all of this says anything to me it's this. Now that the web is made up of "user generated content" it is staring to feel a little too much like MTV. Does anyone remember when the internet and computers where un-cool and we spent all of our time talking about why Picard could kick Kirks ass?
Now, I disagree completely with what has happened here, but wanted to clarify some things...
The 'Promoting Underage Drinking' argument isn't about her age, obviously - that's why they didn't block her English degree.
It's because students (you kids can laugh all you want) view teachers as role models - thus if a kid gets on the net, goes 'Hey, miss so-and-so is a drunk!' it changes the perception in their mind slightly that 'drinking is a bad thing'. Hence the promoting-underage-drinking.
Oh, and the article doesn't say this, but I read an article on this (in Australia!?!) a week or three ago, and it mentioned that part of the degree was something to do with 'being of good character'. Which is where their argument, I believe, comes from.
Note: that last paragraph comes from my own, alcohol-abused memory, so it may be slightly off. Lucky I'm not a teacher... oh wait...
I got fired from my job as a kindergarten teacher because I was a part time pete townsend impersonator.
Looks like a fairly opaque cup to me. Sue the bastards. Then sue the school district for defamation of character. That ought to teach the fundies (and the people who kowtow to them) to mind their own fucking business.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
(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.
Yeah but that's neither illegal or immoral. As a society we allow and tolerate adults drinking, even, gasp, for recreation.
It'd be like the teacher having a blog talking about her sex life. Are we now to disallow teachers from copulation as well? Well we don't let kids vote either. So teachers shouldn't vote. And most kids can't drive. Therefore no driving, etc...
TEACHERS ARE NOT [supposed to be] KIDS!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Sometimes, I really dislike the behavior of some of my fellow Americans.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Nonsense, there nothing wrong with drinking or posting a picture of you doing it. The only thing that would justify their claim is if there were children around her during the drinking - in the picture or described in the caption/accompanying text. There is nothing morally wrong with dressing up for Halloween and having a few drinks with friends and sharing your good times with your online friends. If glamorizing is defined as not doing it in a closet with the lights off where no one can see - guess its time to move to Canada cause who wants to live in a country like that. Whoever made this decision should lose their job IMHO. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find a picture of our current president with a beer in his hand (hint: try google image search, a name, and the word drinking). Hope shes wrings them dry in the courts and uses some of the money to gets drunk on them.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
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.
Arrr.IAA?
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.
A picture demonstrating that you're not a joyless machine doesn't make you a bad teacher.
I've had plenty of teachers who dressed up in costumes from time to time, whether based on the subject at hand, or just for classes on Halloween...
As for "beer," well... She's drinking out of a cup, there's no indication whether she's drinking beer, milk, soda, slim-fast, etc.
And even if there was, there's absolutely nothing illegal, or morally wrong about drinking beer, or being seen drinking beer by people of any age... Now, if it was a beer bong, or drinking a full bottle of hard liquor, or something else clearly suggestive of irresponsible behavior, then you might have something. As is, from her picture I see nothing to suggest anything but a responsible adult.
What's next, should we throw out teachers that put up pictures of themselves at a target-shooting competition, or driving in a professional or armature car race, because it promotes minors using guns, and speeding?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The real problem is that there is a generational shift in attitudes and opinions in the US. And it scares the shit out of the older crowd. People have more sex, drink more freely and are generally more open about everything. Honestly, if I were a parent I'd reserve judgment for those teaching my kids based upon my childrens progress and learning. It scares me that so many people think that children should somehow get their morals from people they'll see actively for maybe a year or two. Any kid that bases his decision to drink on what his teacher did in a photo on myspace deserves the hangover.
On a side note my 5th grade teacher told us about how he used to hunt jackrabbits from the back of a speeding pick up truck with his ex military brother. God that would've been a picture to see. A 35+ year old 5th grade teacher in the bed of a pick up with a high powered rifle. I wonder if that would've gotten his teaching license revoked. That sort of stunt could lead to far worse than drinking before you're 21.
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
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.
Oh, I think it is for the worse.
Irrational harshness is a sure sign of incompetence. We don't know how to protect kids, but we'll cover up our complete ignorance of anything that might do any good by setting up anybody who comes across our desk as an example. Nobody can say we don't care if we indulge ourselves with in an appalling tantrum.
Just don't ask us to think, evaluate evidence, or have a real strategy. We're reacting here.
Let's not root out the bad or abusive teachers. That's too much work. Let's string up some student for dressing up like a character from a Disney theme park.
There is no evidence that this person thought "underage drinking was cool at 25". There is no evidence that she was drunk. There is no evidence that she has alcohol in that cup. The only thing she did was put a comical caption on a picture of herself.
This kind of foolishness is indefensible. It is not only unjust to the prospective teacher, it is not only unjust to the students who might have benefited from her service, it mollycoddles incompetent bureaucrats posing as moral crusaders.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Excerpt: "However, school district solicitor Howard L. Kelin said Tuesday that criticism of the teachers contained in the lawsuit is unfair.
Kelin disputes the allegations the teachers, Deann Buffington and Nicole Reinking, influenced the college to withhold the degree.
Snyder was given a poor evaluation based on her performance while teaching at the high school and was warned not to direct students to her MySpace page, which contained the questionable photographs, Kelin said.
Despite being warned to maintain a professional relationship with her students Kelin said, Snyder continued to direct students to her Web page.
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
By posting this, you are leaving evidence of your "I have better judgment than you" attitude on the internet. Have you considered the impact this will have on your career? And I'm showing my "attitude", too.
It might be a good idea for all potential employers, whether would-be puritans or scowlers, to consider that any "attitude" gleaned from the web about someone could be a fictitious persona. To overlook good candidates for reasons like this is just a sign that it's a bad place to work. Because, unlike internet personas, that attitude taints an entire organization. And it leaves the good candidates to work for Cogswell Cogs, instead.
I am not a crackpot.
Actually someone else posted this elsewhere in the thread, but there is definitely more to it.
http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315
Seems she'd been reprimanded as a student teacher several times and she knew she was in the wrong. It doesn't seem to be as cut and dried as the original article would have us believe. Also, the picture posted in the original article is different than the one in the above article. Two very different images that give completely different impressions of a "teacher" if seen by students.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
But what can you do with an English degree? It she doesn't teach, the only other thing she could probably do is open a Poem Repair shop.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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:
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
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.
"Class of 2005":
Carla, Brian and Phil: IP Lawyers
Dental surgeons 'Be' and 'Mole'
'Tone-toke': Astrophysicist
Messy Mel: Brain surgeon
'Liz': Senator
Wufus: Neurologist
Lighten up Millersville, sheesh
Those who can't do nor teach work as administrators at educational institutions.
[alk]
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.
She was reprimanded for giving out her myspace page to students - if she hadn't, they would have found it anyhow. She might as well use it as a way to connect to them. And the new picture is slightly goofier than the old one, but still fairly innocuous. Sure, she probably didn't show the best judgment, but if she already had tenure (ie, worked in a district for 3-5 whole years) there's no way she could even be fired for this, let alone have her certification stripped. No one involved has to give her recommendations when she tries to get a job, but if she fulfilled the certification requirements she should be certified.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
> 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.
What's to say that this isn't water? Are teaching students supposed to swear off all liquids? Even assuming it is 120 proof grain alcohol, does that school have a rule against adult students drinking?
I keep thinking that Rod Serling is going to step out from behind a door and say, "A quiet campus in a quiet town becomes the stage for tragedy when teetotalers go on a witch hunt, in the Twilight Zone."
-- QED
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." ---
FERPA applies to all students, and covers more than just academic scores and academic file. It can also include whether or not a student is enrolled, their name, status, class, any contact information, and a lot more. In certain cases a school cannot even confirm whether or not someone is a student there.
- 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'
Some historians point to a declining birthrate as the cause of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Decadence and homosexuality (which avoided children) caused massive drops in birth rates, and eventually Rome collapsed.
If you think about the economics of inheritence, it's even more stark. Now we split inheritence by all children (traditionally only male, or lesser shares for daughters), but the number of children determines the wealth build up. A family with 4 heirs will pass along half the wealth as a family with 2 heirs. The secular families not only fail to maintain their share of the population, they build up wealth quickly over a few generations. Now we have wealthy children with trust funds... they aren't likely to take up arms and defend Rome... Rome's vassal system of poor soldiers from slave colonies and client-kingdoms let by officers of Roman stock simply collapsed when there weren't younger sons of aristocrats willing to become officers searching for glory. Apparently with enough wealth, one need not have glory.
Not terribly ironic, how did the Abrahamic faiths spread to cover half the world. The rules are quite simple:
1. Take virgin wives, be fruitful and multiple with them
2. If you don't have a child within 10 years, she's infertile, dump her
3. Don't have gay sex (which doesn't create children), but have lots of sex with your wife/wives about 10 days after her menstruation (when she's fertile)
4. Never use birth control, keep having children
5. Preserve and build the community, the community trumps the individual
That is a methodoly for taking over the world.
Contrast that with the secular ethos:
1. Sex is fun, have it as much as you want as often as you want, preferably for years (the most fertile ones), but make sure to use a condom
2. Marriage is something risky, push it off a while, just keep having sex for recreation first
3. More education is better... Age 16 isn't enough, a high school diploma @ 18 isn't enough, a college degree at 22 isn't really enough, how about some grad school (24-28)... DO NOT GET MARRIED BEFORE YOU FINISH OR WE TAKE YOUR FUNDING AWAY
4. Start your career before starting a family, wait a few more years
5. Don't have more than 2 kids, you're a breeder and sucking up resources... Let's cap every woman at 2 kids, and not wonder what happens when not all women have kids
6. Spoil your children, so they push off real life an extra few years...
7. Oh, and gay sex should be idealized, not stigmatized, and considered an innate behavior
8. Screw the community, individual liberty is all that matters, whatever makes you happy.
Which one will take over the world in a few generations?
The only reason I bring up the gay sex is that while I don't really care what people do, it certainly isn't a precreation-supported behavior. While a certain amount of sexual desire is innate and certainly biological, there is definitely some social shaping of it... Bisexuality amongst women moved from taboo to "sexy" and a MUCH higher percentage of teenagers poll as "bisexual" than the general population... Doesn't mean that they are acting on it for real, but social factors can certainly influence behavior. A man who mostly feels urges towards men but occaisionally does towards women might be able to marry and have a family if under social pressure to do so, but if gay sex is an equally valid option will most likely go that route and probably be happier... if you goal is individual happiness, than gay rights is a civil right, if your goal is societal growth, then it's to be condemned (perhaps by
AAAH I get it. In the picture she is a "drinking pirate" so she they assumed she was incapable of using correct english! I side with the university now.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Why try to apply logic to a bureaucracy? They continue only through inertia, much like a totally off-topic thread on /...
From information gathered after reading other sources on this issue, it seems that Ms Snyder's issue stems from one of her advisers at the school where she did her student teaching had found the photo and reported it up to her student adviser at Millersville. The adviser at Conestoga Valley High School (where Stacey had apparently been described as "one of Millersville's finest graduates") called Stacey to tell her that there was an "issue" with the picture and Stacey's adviser at Millersville told her that she "might lose her teaching certificate" over the issue.
Millersville's mascot is a pirate. In modern pop culture, the "drunken pirate" is ubiquitous. Stacey's wearing of a pirate hat is not unexpected, due to her being a student at school where the mascot is, in fact, a pirate. Stacey is drinking from an opaque plastic cup whose contents cannot be discerned. If she was similarly dressed, drinking from the same cup, with the same caption, and the picture would have been of her DRIVING A SCHOOL BUS, then MAYBE there might be some validity to this knee-jerk reaction. Otherwise it's much ado about nothing. And that is EXACTLY the type of issue that those entrenched in a bureaucracy LOVE to champion; let's get behind a policy that sounds good on paper but is inherently flawed from the moment of it's inception. These guys have a bright future, if the college admin field doesn't pan out for them, then there is always the RIAA, the MPAA, or Microsoft. I'm sure there are quite a few more grandmothers out there to prosecute and persecute, more criminals to create.
I hope she sues these pretentious prigs into bankruptcy and expands her damage claim to include personally, the Dean of students at Millersville, her student adviser, J. Barry Girvin, and the adviser at Conestoga Valley High School. Further, if a single person in her graduating class accepts a degree from this so-called institution of higher learning then they are the worst kind of hypocrite, by demonstrating they actually know nothing of right and wrong and are too weak to make a stand based on conviction and reason.
My guess is getting Slashdotted is probably the best thing going for this woman. Two things can buy justice in American courts, money and eyeballs. Money makes the world go round and with the exception of certain eyeball cases is all that is needed for a victory. Eyeballs on the other hand guarantee that if a court gives a fucked up ruling they'll suffer for it.
It's unfortunate it comes down to needing one of the two for justice to happen.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
What we know:
From Millersville University's website: The University notes, however, that all of its educational decisions are based on a full range of academic performance issues, not solely on a student's personal website or social networking site. The University is committed to maintaining the academic integrity of its academic programs and degrees and will vigorously defend itself and the actions of its employees in legal proceedings related to the lawsuit.
The University claims that Snyder didn't receive her degree for academic performance issues. Snyder claims that she didn't because of the mySpace picture. I found another article that said this:
Stacy Snyder, a 27-year-old single mother of two, was a student-teacher at Conestoga Valley High School at the time she posted the picture on her "MySpace" account last May. Earning her teaching degree at Millersville University, she was all but done with her requirements before graduating. But then, her cooperating teacher at Conestoga Valley found out about the posting, and confronted her. "'(She said) There's a problem with your professionalism. You're not able to attend our school. You can't come back,'" said Snyder from her Strasburg home.
So what it sounds like is that she got booted from her student-teacher internship at Conestoga for the photo. I assume that the Millersville then decided that because she didn't complete her internship, a requirement for graduation as a teacher, that she didn't merit a teaching degree. If there's any "mySpace police" in this story, it's not the university - it's a school, who can certainly have their own standards to which they require their teachers to uphold.
What we don't know:
1) We have no idea of Snyder's actual academic record at Millersville. She could very well have had a spotty record, and getting booted from an internship was "the last straw" for the Teaching Dept at Millersville. Or she could have had an exemplary record, and getting booted from the teaching program was a weird administrative requirement. Point is, we don't know.
2) We have no idea of whether or not Snyder could, if she chose to remain, complete another internship to get her teaching degree. All we know is that she can't get it *now* because of the internship. She could very well be able to re-do the internship, but is just too impatient and thinks that suing is easier than teaching. Or she may not be able to do that, and is totally screwed out of her degree. Point is, we don't know.
So, all I'm trying to say is that I think we're jumping to a whole lot of conclusions without enough facts.
http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/203603 i guess the issue was more that she was posting to her student's websites and promoting her own myspace to them. Also she had other images on her site other than the seemingly innocuous one where she was making gestures etc. She was asked to stop conversing with her students online and did not stop. So this was not a single incident. She was also getting bad evaluations as a student teacher outside of this issue. So this doesn't seem to be just about someone having a myspace that was found by an employer.
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.
You forgot about the .00001% chance of a necrophiliac robbing your grave and raping you.
Hi;
:-)
While I recognize that you cannot comment on the ongoing federal lawsuit, I would like to send my sincere thanks to your institution for teaching us all a very valuable civics lesson regarding the current state of our Constitutional liberties in our great republic.
As a state university, your officers are agents of the state. Just as the Bush Administration (like the Clinton administration before it) has gone out of their way to suggest that any of their compelling interests (like the appearance of security) take precidence over our essential liberties, so too have you shown that you the once-cherished Freedom of Speech seems to be dead if one might misinterpret the ideas as supporting even in the abstract the possibility of lawless action.
I would sincerely hope you start encouraging law schools to omit Brandenburg v. Ohio (and the previous cases such as Yeates and Whitney) from their curriculums since these might too be taken as supporting ideas which are dangerous to our sense of right society. Once we can ensure that these pesky precidents are forgotted about, we can get back to the business of creating a society of pleasant appearance, free from those pesky liberties which are the source of all bad choices.
And no, I am not a lawyer
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It is not enough to show up in the office, work diligently during our working hours and then some.
We are also suppossed to behave in a way our feudal lords, sorry, employers, deem appropriate in accordance to their more out of office hours, in our private time.
Charming concept.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.