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February 14, 2006
Of free speech and student materiality
The latest Facebook flap at SU is a complicated one. There's the issue of undergraduates publishing on the internet without considering their possible audiences and the consequences of their speech. (One of the undergrads in question says how sorry she is to have hurt the feelings of her teacher.) There's the free speech issue. There's the gender issue; of course this is a female teacher in the position of public object of symbolic violence. And there's the issue of media contributing to the ongoing injury of the teacher, herself a (graduate) student. As I said in my comments on IHE, that's just wrong.
When Danish newspapers published cartoons that were offensive to Muslims, many U.S. newspapers exercised taste and restraint and did not republish the cartoons, even when talking about them. I wish IHE had exercised the same restraint with this story, rather than attaching a PDF that has not only the offensive remarks but also a picture of the TA in question, a teacher who is herself a graduate student and whose privacy has been violated not only by these students but also by some (but fortunately not all) of the newsmedia covering the story. The free speech issues can be debated without inflicting further injury on the teacher.Regardless of whether SU administrators should or should not have punished the Facebookers, they were surely trying to protect a TA who was injured by the Facebook group. And when a news organ that is purportedly devoted to higher education inflicts further injury on the TA by republishing the offending Facebook page, replete with picture of the TA, they are simply contributing to the problem. Everybody involved in education should have as a Prime Directive the protection of students. None of us—and that includes people who make money by publishing about higher education—should be inflicting public injury on students.
Posted by senioritis at February 14, 2006 10:24 AM
Comments
Was it absolutely necessary to reveal all those details in order to have a rational discussion about this? (She fumes, her ire directed at IHE.) And how silly were some of those comments, really? Pffft.
I like having a Prime Directive. Harley thinks it's, "First, feed and water the cat."
Posted by: susansinclair at February 14, 2006 03:04 PM
I'd be curious to hear a response from the insidehighered.com editorial board about their reasoning behind publishing the TA's photo, revealing these details, etc. Was there a discussion about the ethics of such revelations?
Posted by: Bill at February 15, 2006 09:05 AM
I did hear from the IHE editor, explaining why he had decided to publish the photograph and harassing comments. His thought was that putting that material in a PDF protected readers who might not want to encounter it on the pages of IHE. (I offered to post his response here, and he declined, saying he'd prefer to do so himself. He hasn't done so, but another editor has responded in the Comments on Collin's blog.) I appreciate these editors' concern for their readers and wish it had extended to a concern for the students (both graduate and undergraduate) about whom they are writing. Although IHE has had numerous requests to take down the PDF, they have not done so. And the students are all named in the article. As Collin says, it is shameful. Thanks to the editorial decisions at IHE, the injury that was inflicted by the undergraduates' published comments will now be inflicted in perpetuity upon the graduate instructor.
Posted by: senioritis at February 15, 2006 12:22 PM