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Student Expelled For Facebook Photo Description
flutterecho writes "A sophomore at Valdosta State University was expelled after criticizing his university's plan to build two new parking garages with student fees. In a letter apparently slipped under his dorm room door, Ronald Zaccari, the university's president, wrote that he 'present[ed] a clear and present danger to this campus' and referred to an image on the student's Facebook page which contained a threatening description. 'As additional evidence of the threat posed by Barnes, the document referred to a link he posted to his Facebook profile whose accompanying graphic read: "Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is searching for the next big thing. Are you it?" It doesn't mention that Project Spotlight was an online digital video contest and that "shoot" in that context meant "record."' In a post-Virginia Tech world, has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?"
Perhaps the court of public opinion can lend a hand.
Nah, given the circumstances, he'd be able to file a lawsuit, and be taken seriously enough for the college to settle out of court. It should be pretty simple to factor in reinstatement to the college (or enough $$$ in damages that he'll be able to comfortably finish up at another college without taking out student loans).
A public university is held to a different standard that a private institution in regards to being able to expel students for arbitrary and capricious reasons since public institutions are partially tax-funded. I wonder if the ACLU would like to step up to the plate on this one.
I sure the hell wouldn't want to be in any way affiliated with such an oppressive institution. After he wins his case and gets his money back, he should consider an institution that upholds certain concepts like freedom of speech and independent thinking.
How do they know the students were not the victims of identity theft? A fellow student who hated them could very well set up fake Facebook accounts, fill them up with nasty photos, with the purpose of letting them to be discovered by the campus security. Even if a profile is owned by the students themselves, there is again no reason that a photo is not some kind of fake used for fun or just incorrect information as an inside joke between participants.
That's a very big stretch. That statement could be read in another, more likely and more innocuous way, that the president of the university wanted the garage named for him (I guess there weren't any other buildings left). It hardly seems to be a threat, and you would need counseling yourself if you started walking around with plain-clothed policemen because you thought that the collage was a threatening document. The threat was to this president's plan to build the garage, and so he just found a clever way to rid himself of that "problem."
Palm trees and 8
The school's president should be dismissed with prejudice for his actions, especially trying to bully the school's counseling service into providing him with "evidence" that the student was dangerous. I'd also dump the spineless jerks on the Board of Trustees.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'd like to see him sue his educational institution for millions and millions to make an example out of them. Sue for a refund of tuition, lodging, lost time, and the rest for mental anguish then he can use that money at his next school which hopefully won't be as ignorant as this one. There is one thing that people seem to forget is absolutely needed: a healthy disrespect for authority. When someone is held above reproach they tend to turn into a dick. Accountability and it's prerequisite transparency allows the separation of people and jobs they don't deserve. It makes me fume and recall a quote from "Scent of a Woman" where Al Pacino's character states flatly: "If I was half the man I was five years ago I'd burn this school to the ground." when he is confronting the same type of idiots who don't care who's life they ruin as long as they're "right".
Shh.
After all, "Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" has a certain ironic ring to it. As if the University President really thinks that in a hundred years, he will be remembered for a parking garage. It's the sort of thing that if I were a student there and immersed in this issue when seeing that sign, I would probably laugh and think "what a fool Zaccari is."
When a communication has several plausible innocent meanings, it hardly presents the threat of a clear and present danger just because someone chose to take it out of context and give it the threatening meaning. Based on TFA, Zaccari pointed to a couple things from an online profile (one of which was a mere advertisement placed there by Facebook). Who among us could not be characterized in an unfair way similarly to the way this student was characterized?
so you need a cause to stand behind? why don't you lead it... look up the school and see what contact info you can find. then come back and post it. lead the revolution!!
Challenge it, and if the school still expells you, consider a lawsuit. After all, you poured a lot of money into the college. They are operating as a business. They failed to provide you with the service they promised. They should have to give you a full refund for wrongful expulsion.
I don't know all the details, but I probably wouldn't buy their argument that the student threatened them. The college might not simply like what they have to say, so they do their best to exaggerate something in order to have grounds for expulsion. Schools don't like it when students challenge their spending habits, or so I think.
If I were a president of an institution and I thought that someone was a lunatic just waiting to shoot up the school, the last thing I would want to do is expell him under flimsy pretexts. It seems like that would be the LAST thing you would ever want to do. If this kid didn't have a motive, he sure as hell has one now.
Taking that into consideration I have a hard time believing the president acted in the best interest of the university whether Barnes was a threat or not.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
University administrators looking at students' public facebook pages is perhaps a bit odd, but for administrators to have access to counselling records and private medical records seems like a far more important invasion of privacy to me.
This case demonstrates why privacy of medical records is so important - you complain about a car park being built and a paper-pusher with an axe to grind accesses your medical records and paints you as a madman if you ever set foot in a psychologist's office.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I don't know the case, but the most common reason to believe the information in this kind of cases is that the accused stand behind their words.
As the student in this case is politically active, he is probably much more likely to grab an opportunity to defend himself, rather than go for denial.
What about the rest of the students who weren't expelled and are being educated by these idiots? That's the real story.
Interesting story, but I think the question shouldn't be whether the University has the right to look at your profiles online....you're putting them in a public forum - one must assume that the information you present in said public forum is viewable by the public. I mean seriously, it's like having a loud conversation in an airport terminal and suing someone for overhearing your conversation.
This is not a privacy issue, it's an issue of the university overreacting in a way that I'm sure would be inconsistent with their code of conduct. If it's not, then the student needs to bring suit and talk to his student union about policy changes.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
I think what you're proposing already exists. It's called "China".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's likely to be reversed. It's a state school, so they have an additional legal obligation to not violate free speech and due process rules. Even with a private school, if they don't follow their written judicial procedures to the letter, they'll often lose. Schools like to tell students and their parents not to retain lawyers during internal judicial / discipline proceedings, saying it makes the process "adversarial". They're trying to kick you out or impose some other sanction. It's hard to imagine it getting any more adversarial than that.
they're stretching... that's why.
the second i read that i knew what it meant (considering it was called "project spotlight"). if a university president can't understand that it means take a picture with a camera, then he probably doesn't deserve his position to begin with.
the president wanted to shut this kid up. gave the false notion that he would go to therapy and when approved be allowed back in. when the kid went through therapy with flying colors and didn't shut up about the parking garages, the president did a 180 and wouldn't allow the student back.
what the kid should really be looking into is the school's counselor who violated their professional obligation to not share information about their clients except in extenuating circumstances (such as the client admitting to murder). however, fearing for his/her job when the president met with him/her, i'm sure he/she just crumbled under pressure and said whatever the president wanted to hear.
please me, have no regrets.
What this sort of thing does is to generate adults who keep their heads down and won't make negative comments no matter what the government, their employer, ... does. This means that the few who run the country/company/... can commit outrageous acts and get away with it because the population is too scared to complain.
It is just this sort of mentality that lets the government get away with some of the huge restrictions of freedom that it is imposing.
This sort of thinking is what kills democracy.
I am talking about the USA here, but I am a Brit and can see this sort of thing will also happen here... where our government ignores us and the law anyway.
It's a state university. That means they're bound by the Constitution and cannot expel students without affording them due process.
Had this been a private school, he would have had utterly no recourse: expulsion at will for any reason, even none at all, is one of the perks (if you're an administrator) of being at a private school.
I move that whomever uses /that/ phrase be summarily shot.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The only "foolish" part of it is that these people haven't taken the time to mess with the privacy settings on their fucking profiles. Photos, Notes, even your basic profile can have their visibility changed to various classes of user. If you're doing something questionable, but still want that media shared, learn to protect your content.
However, this particular case at Valdosta is irrelevant and ridiculous, seeing as the content was totally innocuous.
OMG! Wau!
In a post-[Event X] world, have needless appeals to emotion gone too far?
/. user - I thought we were supposed to be more informed and enlightened than knee-jerking idiots?
A couple of days ago I posted a comment against the constant references to 9/11 being used to justify or explain things that have very little to do with preventing terrorism or other terrible event, and this is another example, and the shame this time is that it's a comment from a
In a post-Virginia Tech world, has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?"
What has Virginia Tech got to do with university surveillance, ever? Seung-Hui Cho was well known on campus for being weird, handing in obviously violently disturbed plays for class assignments, and even writing a story about a school shooting which the university was aware of. Now I know that what one writes is not neccessarily a reflection of what one intends to do, but it's not like anyone needed to spy on Seung-Hui's Facebook page, if indeed he had one, to see that he had serious issues going on - his social problems were far more severe than some kid writing a comment about his teacher building a parking garage, and were being waved in the face of his tutors for more than a year before the horrendous act took place.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Well, if students were to start thinking independently and having opinions, it would get in the way of their Education.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Hate to point this out, but I don't think we're talking about another university here,... the fact that he referred to "Principal" and "locker" should indicate that he's talking about a high school. The rules do tend to be different between high school and college; for one, high school students are generally minors, having not reached the age of 18; most college students are adults, with full legal rights.
Settling is the last thing he should do. A settlement, while providing for him, does nothing to fix the mess that higher education has become, all hidden behind federal law. A public court case, however......
Sunlight is the thing colleges fear the most, because it will show them to be gulags where freedom is only a faint notion.
The Facebook angle is beside the point. A university president summarily dismissing a student by slipping a note under his door is extremely bizarre. Ordinarily you'd expect lower-level administrators to be involved, for there to be meetings and hearings and counseling offered. The president wouldn't be involved at all, except to sign off on the decision (if that.) It sounds like the president is making a very rinky-dink attempt to intimidate the student while bypassing the official channels.
Sometimes you see this sort of petty thuggery by corrupt small-town public officials (or College Republicans), but they usually don't ascend much higher than that. Their careers are self-limiting because once they rise to the level where their behavior is subjected to the slightest scrutiny, they scurry like cockroaches from the light.
Please learn how the Constitution is construed before you attempt to argue it.
If I'm shouting condemnation against George Bush, Bush has absolutely no right to suppress me. But you're entirely within rights to yell at me "either shut up or get off my lawn!"
The Bill of Rights is a prohibition on what the government or its functionaries may do. It has absolutely nothing to say about what private citizens or groups can do.
It's a *degree* you receive after you've already *graduated* from college. I see nothing redundant or ambiguous (which are contradictory!) about it. If it was redundant, you could remove part and it would retain its meaning, but that's obviously not true here. If it was ambiguous, we wouldn't know what one meant by it, but that's obviously not true here either.
"Hopes of appearing authentic"? Damn, you're even more full of yourselves than usual. First of all, I don't know that any American university (short of a couple of the more elitist Ivies) thinks that being British makes them "authentic". Second, *every* university I've ever visited had colleges. For example, the University of Washington (definitely not in the Ivy League) has a College of Arts and Sciences, a College of Engineering, a College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and so on. It's not unique to the Ivies or British-kiss-ass-colleges or anywhere else.
Meh. I kind of like freedom of association. Are you old enough to remember the 1970's? Did you guys like having the top tax bracket be 98%? No wonder you are so proud of your ancient schools; between the funding and the rules and the taxes, nobody can ever afford to start a new one.
Under the current set of laws, it seems to be a meaningless concept in America. The article spells out that "age of license" (which varies by activity) is what actually determines what you're allowed to do. It even claims that "Age of majority pertains solely to the acquisition of control over one's person", and yet, consuming alcohol isn't granted by majority, even though it seems to be purely a matter of "control over one's person". (Tobacco has a younger age of license, and other drugs are never allowed.) Age of majority is the "legal recognition that one has grown into an adult", but apparently this "recognition" is completely independent of any actual things you may do.
The home of Cockney rhyming slang is accusing *us* of being confusing? What cheek.
It's great when the English visit American webpages and then presume to tell us how we're using the language all wrong. No wait, the other thing. Tedious.
The idea that discourse on elite campuses is a nontrivial degree to the left of discourse in the nation as a whole is not born out of some study -- sound or not -- it is a pretty obvious fact about college campuses that anyone who had attends a prestigious university notices. It may not be as extreme as some think-tank neocons think, and it certainly isn't as alarming as the David Horowitzes of the world think, but there is a definite tilt. I don't think there's much to the old liberal media bias trope, but on campuses, there is definitely not a equal mix of liberal and conservative advocates.
And why would there be? People who can afford to compete for spots at the top schools are more likely to belong to a social class that is more liberal. Students at a campus are likely to be people of an age where many people are at their most liberal. The current crop of specialty academic departments are more likely to interest liberals. Beyond that, staying in school long enough to become a professor means you've thrived in a liberal environment for long enough.
But so what? That doesn't stop conservatives from getting a good education. And there is little evidence that liberal academia hurts the conservative movement or its ideas -- maybe even the opposite.
And who cares about an entire university faculty's party preferences, really? A lot of profs are scientists, whose ideology matters very little, and who usually average out to be center-left moderates, like many people in their social class. That the Woman's Studies department is overwhelmingly leftist doesn't matter that much to me. You know that going in and you avoid the department if that sort of thing bothers you.
All that really matters is that students learn how to think critically, do their own research, and write their ideas well. As long as you learn how to learn, you'll be okay even if what you learned wasn't ever so perfectly balanced.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Some countries employ complete morons who can't read, so explain how being deported is such a bad thing.
...
Some companies employ complete morons who can't read, so explain how being fired is such a bad thing.
Some insurance companies employ complete morons who can't read, so explain how losing your insurance is such a bad thing.