A student at my college was expelled today for an entry in her Livejournal. She was summoned to the office of the Dean of the College at 9am, informed that the contents of her Livejournal were threats to the school, and as such were grounds for expulsion.
She was ordered to leave the campus by 5pm this afternoon or else be arrested for trespassing. After this sudden pronouncement, she was escorted back to her room where security guards kept watch outside her door.
She was never informed as to what exactly was so threatening, though she surmises that it was an entry wherein she hoped that a dead rat was shoved up her philosophy professor’s ass. The entry, she says, was locked to Friends Only.
Protests abound. The school is abuzz, and the RAs want to go on strike. They’ve all been warned that if they protest in any way, they will be fired.
How did the Dean get hold of it if it was meant for ‘friends only’?
Either one of her ‘friends’ is a spy or she didn’t send it to friends, but rather accidently did a Joey from Dawsons creek and sent it to everyone.
How did you hear about it? Because we all know how rumours quickly get screwed up… in 2 weeks from now the story will be that she actually DID shove the rat up not only her Prof. arse but the Dean himself and it wasn’t a rat but a small dog wrapped in barbed-wire… or something like that.
This thing spread like wildfire, superstar. While in her room (which she wasn’t allowed to unpack) she told her roommate everything, as well as spread the word to her IM buddy list.
As for the Friends List fiasco, she claims (even I think this is dubious) that her journal had been hacked before, and that said hacker may be someone at school.
World Eater, she apparently has already thought about legal action. Her friends have been busy planning a sit-in for the Dean of Students office, and her best friend has gone so far as to call the local news media. It’s Lynchburg VA for heaven’s sake. WHAT news media?
Hey, I got in trouble at my high school for saying that if people wanted to send ninja after an admissions department, they should send them after Barnard’s admissions department rather than MIT’s. MIT had deferred my application and I made an angsty post about it, but then found out that a friend had been rejected outright from Barnard. Friends had volunteered, in a completely nonserious way, of course, to send ninja after the MIT admissions people, but finding out that a friend had gotten rejected outright made me feel kind of silly and whiny, so I made that entry. A paranoid bitch I knew apparently read my LiveJournal and construed that as a threat on her life, since she, unbeknownst to me, had gotten into Barnard. Ninja! Who the hell thinks something involving NINJA is a serious threat?
There are several ways she could’ve been found out, even if the post was friends only.
A friend ratted her out.
She or a friend set their preferences to stay logged in to LiveJournal on a non-secure computer, and someone else saw and informed the administration.
The university’s monitoring what students access on the internet, not just sites visited but content downloaded.
Good luck to her. I hope she gets plenty of cash and gets to go to a better school.
Oh, and also someone getting her password. Duh, thanks for reminding me about that, SUPERKARLENE. That happens to a lot of people who don’t choose good passwords or don’t keep their email addresses secure, unfortunately, and there’s not much LJ can do about it if people won’t take the necessary steps.
You know, in this case I actually wouldn’t be averse to her getting some compensation. Not anything near the astronomical they dole out like candy these days though.
That’s not enrtirely true Haj. She may have signed away her freedom of speech rights in a direct contract with the school, (which she can do, even in public school) this though, sounds like it might be protected.
It isn’t libel, it’s not slander, nor is it a threat, it’s just opinion, and generally speaking (because so little is actually known about the case) opinions are protected, in fact, she maybe protected by the journalism laws, in that the ‘friends only’ portion of that could, in some small way, be her own personal ‘publication’ to which people of like mind ‘subscribe’ but that’s best left to the lawyers.
IMO, this is shitty on the part of the school, and FWIW, the dean, principal, HMFIC, or whoever meted this out, ought to have that same rat shoved up his or her keister, rather than the prof.
Why not, Guin? Why should someone continue to employ someone who talks nasty shit about them?
I certainly wouldn’t have that rule if I ran a private university but private entities can and should be able to set their own rules. I don’t think that they are considering this to be an actual threat, I think it’s more along the lines of they don’t was students (i.e. paying customers) who talk that kind of shit. It’s their choice. This may backfire in their faces if masses of people unenroll in protest but I doubt that will happen.
buttonjockey308 has a good point. First of all there may well be a contract one signs as part of being accepted to the school where you cannot criticize the school in any form as he said. That’s kind of what I was getting at. If the school has certain rules, and you agree to them when you enroll, you have to follow them. What also might come into play is that the student could have used school bandwidth, computers and ISP services to “publish” this stuff. That might also be forbidden by the rules.
