With the rise of social media, college administrators will inevitably learn more about the personal lives of their students, faculty, and staff. What they do with that information, however, remains a gray zone, with legal implications that are still being defined.
At the National Conference on Law and Higher Education here on Monday, presenters and attendees wrestled with many of the thorny questions that Facebook, Twitter, and other social-networking sites pose for colleges. At issue for many is whether colleges have an obligation to monitor what students and employees post online, and if in so doing they invite the seemingly impossible task of policing behaviors across cyberspace.
Several presenters and audience members at the conference, which was sponsored by Stetson University’s College of Law, suggested colleges should tread carefully, noting that a policy that suggests Internet behavior will be monitored creates an obligation that colleges do so fairly and effectively. The rub, of course, is that few institutions could or would make such an implicit promise, presenters said.
“We are not obligated to react to every bit of student speech online,” said Anne E. Bilder, senior legal counsel for the University of Wisconsin system.
But even colleges without formal policies on social media are likely to face incidents that force difficult conversations about how to respond to online behavior. A frequently referenced case in point was a highly publicized incident at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, where a student was denied a teaching degree after administrators discovered a photo on her MySpace page that was captioned “Drunken Pirate” and showed her sipping from a cup and wearing a costume hat. Stacy Snyder, who earned an English degree rather than a teaching degree after the incident, sued the university. A federal judge, however, ruled against her.
Some colleges are already amending conduct-code policies to explicitly address social media. Among them is Concordia University, which has declared students “assume the responsibility for the content posted and are subject to sanctions” if the content runs afoul of established policies on student conduct.
The potential for students to be harassed through anonymous online taunting is also a concern for colleges. One of the most egregious examples, cited by several panelists, was the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University who killed himself after a surreptitiously recorded video of him being intimate with a man was posted online.
Despite the collective concern provoked by Mr. Clementi’s death, articulating clear policies against online harassment remains difficult, said Jonathan R. Alger, senior vice president and general counsel at Rutgers. Where is the line between online speech that is merely offensive and that which falls into the category of harassment or violates other existing university codes?
“The problem with a term like ‘bullying’ is, What does it mean?” Mr. Alger said.
Colleges should focus on crafting codes that zero in on student conduct that legitimately interferes with another student’s educational activity, Mr. Alger said, rather than speech that may simply be offensive.
