Venting to her friends on Facebook one night, a religion professor at Dartmouth College updated her profile to say that she had just consulted an online encyclopedia entry on “modernity” to prepare for her class the next day.
“I feel like such a fraud,” she wrote on her profile. “Do you think dartmouth parents would be upset about paying $40,000 a year for their children to go here if they knew that certain professors were looking up stuff on Wikipedia and asking for advice from their Facebook friends on the night before the lecture?”
Her profile featured other comments as well, including a dig at her colleagues: “Some day, when i am chair, we’re all going to JOG IN PLACE throughout the meeting. this should knock out at least half of the faculty within 10 minutes (especially the blowhards) & then the meeting can be ended in a timely manner.”
Ouch.
The professor, Reiko Ohnuma, thought that only people she had designated as “friends” could see these zingers, but she had accidentally set Facebook so that anyone at the college could peer in — including her students. One of those students took a screen shot of her Facebook profile and posted it to the student newspaper’s blog in December, and soon other blogs were linking to the tale of the professor who clearly needed to take Facebook 101. Now when you search for Ms. Ohnuma’s name on Google, stories about her online misadventures rank high in the results.
I e-mailed Ms. Ohnuma soon after the blog reports surfaced, and she described the incident as “a highly embarrassing situation.” She declined to be interviewed, and instead sent a statement in which she apologized and stressed that all of the comments were made “entirely in jest.”
For years college administrators have warned students to watch their step in online social realms, noting that sharing too much could hurt them later on if future employees saw their drunken party pictures or boorish writings. Now that professors and administrators are catching Facebook fever, they should heed their own advice.
When Professors Say Too Much
Generally speaking, professors don’t do as much boozing and carousing as students, so they may have fewer embarrassing photographs to post online. But professors do have plenty of colorful things to say about their students and colleagues, and social networks offer new ways for those catty comments to fall into the wrong hands.
At least one alumnus complained to Ms. Ohnuma’s department about her Facebook behavior. But officials have defended the tenured associate professor.
“We understood the context of this,” Ronald M. Green, acting chair of the religion department, said. “She’s an excellent teacher — we know her to be an individual prone to humor and irony, and we’re not surprised” that she might make such comments privately to friends. Mr. Green said that he considered his colleague brave to even venture into social networking, calling her Facebook use “an indication of Reiko’s youth and vitality.”
Did Mr. Green feel insulted by her comment about his meetings? “Meetings are boring things,” he quipped, “and there are moments even when I’m chairing a meeting that I want to get up and jog.”
People have learned to be more careful with e-mail. Many have heard horror stories of a professor who accidentally sent an e-mail message that was intended for one colleague to everyone in his research area, thanks to the magic of e-mail lists. Mr. Green says he remembers a time, while he was working at the National Institutes of Health, when a co-worker sent a sexual e-mail message intended for her boyfriend to everyone at the agency.
Such incidents have probably declined over the past five or 10 years. But people are still finding their way with newer tools like Facebook, a service that is only a few years old. Four years ago, only 8 percent of adults online had a profile on a social network, but that shot up to 35 percent this year, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Theodore J. Marchese, a senior consultant with Academic Search, which works with colleges looking for top administrators, advises people that employers will do a Google search, so scholars should be careful with any online tool they use. Even sites like Rate My Professors, where students post anonymously about the quality of their teachers, can have an impact. Is that fair? Well, no, but such is life, says Mr. Marchese. “Never mind if the information is true or not, people are going to look at it, and if it’s negative, it’s a hard burden for people to get behind,” he says.
It would be tempting to just chuck the computer out the window (and there were rumors of professors doing just that in the early days of e-mail). But Facebook, like e-mail, yields more pros than cons, so the trick is to learn to master it rather than ignore it. That’s according to Nicole B. Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, who spent the past three years researching student behavior on Facebook, and who uses it herself. “There’s tremendous potential with these social networks for developing relationships and being exposed to different perspectives,” she says. They are particularly well suited to academic work, where researchers need to keep up with a number of far-flung colleagues.
Just don’t forget that what you say on Facebook is often flung far, and you should work to control, or at least be aware of, who your audience is.
“Once faculty read this story, many of them will immediately go and check their privacy settings” on Facebook, said Ms. Ellison.
Here’s what you should check: Under “Settings,” look for the “Privacy” section. Click on “Profile” to control who can see your pages. The default is to share with anyone on your network — many professors join the network for their college, but some might choose the one for the city where they live — along with anyone marked as a “friend.” You may want to change that setting to “Only Friends,” to keep out others who happen to be on your network.
Just Between Friends
Ms. Ellison has about 300 friends. She generally does not allow current undergraduates to join her friend group, but she does befriend some of her graduate students.
Setting such personal boundaries is often the first quandary professors face when setting up a Facebook profile. (For more on that, see a Chronicle article dated December 7, 2007.) It is generally seen as somewhat creepy for professors to initiate friend requests with students — just as most professors don’t wander up to their students at a bar and ask to sit down with them. But some students invite their professors to join their online networks.
Some professors use different social-networking services for different kinds of socializing. S. Shyam Sundar, founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, joined a network called LinkedIn to talk with colleagues he doesn’t know well, and he uses Facebook to commune with friends — to share details about vacations or send birthday wishes. He does include some students on his friend list, though, and he says reading their profiles gives him a richer sense of his audience when he stands at the front of the classroom to lecture.
Since Mr. Sundar knows that some of those undergraduates can see his Facebook profile, he says he would never make the kind of comments that the Dartmouth professor made.
Students got the jump on the social-networking trend, and by now they are probably the savviest users of Facebook, having logged far more hours than their professors. Perhaps they should teach a few workshops on it for their elders.
College 2.0 explores how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com.
