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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."
No bullshit please, clearly she was denied her degree due to pressure from the RIAA. Dressing as a pirate and so on...
Arrr.
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
2005 was 2 years ago, and she's 27 now, that makes her 25 in the photo...how is this underage drinking again?
I'm sure they originally thought she was 20 in the picture, and wanted to withhold her teaching certificate for underage drinking. Then when they found out she was 25 in the photo, they changed their story to not wanting anyone who has had alcohol touch their virgin lips to be teaching young children, rather than admitting they were wrong.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
no
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.
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...
Let me correct that for you: -
only students in the US go to uni to leech music and movies and drink underage, students everywhere else go to uni to drink.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
If its about the pirate thing they should encourage this behaviour as the decline in pirate population is the cause of global warming...
(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.
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?
This whole thing is simply idiotic, it seems obvious someone is out to "get her" and has convinced enough people to start cranking the wheels of "the complaint process". If it's fair game to investigate this womans life then what about the person(s) who put in the complaint, do they have alternative motivations? - Religion, revenge, nappy-wearing-jelousy?
A system of formal complaints that can screw up your life must be accountable, if formal complaints are to be taken seriously then abuse of the system needs to be puni$hed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You already understand that humans are utterly self-centered. Yet many of them have that irresistible desire to control others. It's a paradox, but still frighteningly logical...
Humans seek to control in others what they wish they could control in themselves.
They hate it when other people are having more fun than they are.
And they will cling to their moral rules even after those rules have lost their basis. (Certainly the mutual enforcement of morality is justifiably important in any family, tribe, or society, and certaintly this is an unending chore. But still: moral rules exist to maximize something; they are not divine ends-in-themselves.)
The current war against birth control illustrates all three phenomena of control:
You: "But birth control ends that risk; therefore, there is no longer any basis for condemning promiscuous behavior. Your moral rule is obsolete."
Them: "Then to protect morality, we must ban birth control."
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Arrr.IAA?
This is the picture that is actually in dispute, described in this news article
Apparently, Conestoga Valley School District were threatening to not recruit any more teachers from her university, unless she was punished in some way.
Regardless of the picture, the School District or college have no right to amend her graduation qualifications, based on a single party photograph.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That's what I though too, and since I figured at least one of us needed to actually RTFA I did. Strangely, that archive doesn't mention any other pictures:
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
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.
It is perfectly fine for you to decided that you want to dedicate yourself to a relationship with one person. If you ask my opinion about the potential pitfalls along that approach, I'll tell you want I think, but tell you, "knock yourself out - whatever works for you".
It is not ok for you to decide that I should dedicate myself to a relationship with one person; you don't get to dictate what style of relationship makes me happy, any more that you get to decide what sort of music makes me happy. You are free to report your own experiences, preferences, even speculations: but when you attempt to tell me how I "should" love, you've left the realm of useful discourse. And when attempts are made through public policy to dicate how people "should" love, a sane society would hand those poltiicans a whuppin'.
Non sequitor. B & E is a violation of the rights of others; if my girlfriends and I decide to have open relationships, that's not a violation of anyone's rights.
What in the world does that mean, that you "have a problem" with other people's personal sexual choices? How does my choice cause you any problem?
I hear a lot more discussion and thought from the polyamoury community about the nature of relationships than I do from most folks, so charges of "shallow" fall flat. And I see honest non-monogamous models working quite for many people - certainly much better than the dishonest non-monogamous model that condemnation like yours pushes people into.
Again: whatever works for you, fine and dandy. But your opinions about the choices of others seem based on faulty data.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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." ---
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?
Is it really that hard to believe that people who hold certain opinions and then attempt to force those beliefs onto others really are shittier people?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
A theocracy doesn't sound bad to me as long as the government is just following a good set of beliefs rather than creating new ones.
And that, right there, is what I find most terrifying. People think that an arational theocracy is OK, if the beliefs that it's imposing on others is "good" in their estimation -- meaning that it's their set of beliefs. Of course, What's "good" is highly subjective. There are a lot of people in the world who think that Sharia law is just fine and dandy, and we'd all be a lot better if we buried cheating women up to their heads in sand and stoned them to death. Once you've accepted the premise that arationality is acceptable in government, it's just a matter of degree how far you decide to go in impressing your superstitions on everyone else. You may draw the line at just telling people who they can have sex with, while someone else may go further and tell them what clothes they can wear -- there's no difference in kind there, just of degrees.
Either you reject theocracies on premise, or you have to accept nearly all of them, since there is no rational basis for presuming that any one set of superstitions is superior to any other.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
- 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'