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?"

Streisand effect

[saibot834]

Ever heard of the Streisand effect [wikipedia.org]?

Solidarity with this students

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any mean by which we can support this student ?

I mean we, as geeks, should support that guy. Is there any university email adress we can complain to for firing this student on such a stupid basis ?

AC.

Shooting shootings as a pretext...

[betterunixthanunix]

School shootings seem to be used as a pretext for schools to accomplish their non-academic goals these days. At my university, for example, the dining halls recently received several large, flat panel TV's each, which provide us with vital information about the price of food and upcoming "dining hall events" (food that isn't normally served but is just as bad). When I noted to a friend that this all seemed like a waste of electricity, especially since we have a coal-fired power plant right on campus, one of the dining hall supervisors overheard me and said, "Yeah, but these can also be used as an emergency communications system, ..." and went on to talk about how students need to be informed.

It was easy to call bullshit, since we already had a system for that. More to the point, using people's fear of a lunatic going on a shooting rampage to justify ludicrous measures like my school's TV's or this George school expelling this student is a disgrace.

Re:Streisand effect

[Naughty Bob]

The Streisand effect is such a useful concept. I think there's a good chance that future generations will primarily know Babs herself via the eponymous linguistic device, rather than her artistic oeuvre. A kind of Metastreisand effect. Hooray.

University Contact Information

[Anonymous Coward]

President:
[e-mail] [mailto]

University Relations:
[e-mail] [mailto]

Address:
1500, N Patterson St. Valdosta, GA 31698 [google.com]

Telephone
[phone]
or 800-618-1878

For your well reasoned & thought out responses.

More fuel for the fire

[Nazlfrag]

I stumbled across his treatment of free speech on his campus here [thefire.org], basically students have a tiny Free Speech zone where they can speak freely between 12 to 1 pm and 5 to 6 pm, as long as they give 48 hours notice and comply with onerous regulations about maintaining order and decorum. I get the feeling he doesn't quite grasp the whole first amendment thing.

Re:Here's a threat

[Hope Thelps]

Well, if you RTFA, one could infer that referring to the garage as the Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage could be construed as threatening to university president Zaccari.

1. That's pretty weak.

2. If you really think someone is making death threats, you don't send them a letter expelling them ("that'll stop him killing me!"). You call the police.

It's pretty obvious that the university officials are being disingenuous here. I'm quite happy to assume stupidity rather than malice in most cases but there are limits.

Re:VTech just kicked in, yo!

[Mike89]

Sorry to comment jack, but this happened to me too. Well, similar - I wrote a blog showing my annoyance at the school, primarily for the pathetic toilet facilities (which cost like $180, 000 to upgrade, with no improvement..), and that the disabled parking spot was turned into a Principal's parking spot.. I was called in two days later, told to clear out my locker and not come back. This was a month and a half before my final exams - which I was told I could sit elsewhere. (This is in Australia, by the way).

Media War

[Doc Ruby]

They just got their first lesson in Media War 101: the war takes place in the media. But the test asks "where are the bodies buried?", which is "in the lawyer's office".

Since the school has expelled them with the explicit reason that "shooting video to publish is a 'clear and present danger to the school'", but it isn't, they should have an easy case to win. Which is a direct hit to the school, and will probably sink their parking garage battleship once the ongoing story gets back into the media. Because if the mass media loves one thing these days, it's seeing new people making news content for free that it can circulate to pad its ads, especially if the story is about the power of the media.

"VTech backlash" by cowardly schools is ugly. But the backlash to that backlash, if brought by brave students, should decimate that enemy.

Re:What's really interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but isn't talking with the psychiatrist a violation of HIPAA? If so, then the President may have broken a federal law that has significant penalties for compromising the privacy of a person's medical records.

Whenever someone overreacts like this, I pray that their lives are utterly shattered, so as to make an example of them.

Re:Airport security

[vodevil]

Maybe I'm missing something, but the "Shoot it, upload it, get famous" piece sounds more like an advertisement on the page. Why would they punish somebody for that?

This kind of thing happens at lots of schools.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am posting AC because last year this kind of thing happened at my university also. The president of the university was catching a lot of flak from students about putting nearly 50% of his budget towards the football team instead of academic programs or even other sports programs (in fact the other sports programs were so under-funded that they closed the pool and made the swimming team practice at the city public pool.) He got mad and the next thing you know a group of about 10 students were informed that they would not be able to attend classes next term because they had "failed to adapt to campus life." All of them had been vocal members of the groups opposing the president. Three of them were seniors due to graduate that year. All of the students were allowed to return after they threatened to play the lawsuit game. I think that the student from the article could probably do the same since the comment from the picture seems to have been taken totaly out of context.

Re:Here's a threat

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, this may be of interest: At work one time, to two coworkers born ~1955, I jokingly referenced a "Bob Memorial Golf Course", where Bob was one of the two, the joke being that Bob would have a lot of money to fund those things. The both immediately assumed I was joking about Bob's death.

This suggests to me there's a generational difference in the connotation of "memorial".

Too far?

[loraksus]

Has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?

Is it really relevant here? Someone in the school administration wanted to silence a single student who raised awareness about a project that was pissing away a significant amount of student money. So they went out, found a flimsy, bullshit excuse and ran with it.

It isn't a matter of active and sustained surveillance of students - it's the matter of a administrator (or one of his minions) doing something stupid that will cost the school quite a few bucks in legal fees and the upcoming settlement in order to protect one of his pet projects.

We all know politics in the real world has pork and corruption, but the academic world takes it a step further in some cases. When you factor in the effect of tenure, it can get ugly very quickly, especially if the tenured employees feel threatened.
Quaint notions such as "the law" are ignored - primarily because even though their actions put the school at legal jeopardy, the actual employee really is unaffected.
Besides, college students aren't really known for their ability to retain lawyers easily.

I speak with some authority, since I was VP of student government and finance director PCC Sylvania. I've spent a few years in student government and suffice it to say, I've seen a few things.
For a bit of background, PCC Sylvania is a campus w/ ~24,000 students. Roughly 86,000 students currently attend PCC's multiple campuses, making it one of the largest schools in terms of enrollment in the USA.
Granted, PCC isn't a university, but from what I've seen, student fees are handled in more or less the same manner at any school.

Student government didn't get all the student fees - a significant portion of the collected fees went to projects run by (factions in the) administration and only a few percent trickled down and could be spent by the elected student government.
I'm not going to say it was all wasted, but I can completely understand how people can get pissed at how large portions (5-6 figures, year after year) of it were spent.

What can you really expect? After all, you are talking about a funding source that is essentially guaranteed, with virtually no oversight and run / spent by tenured administrators / professors. You're going to have corruption, you're going to have abuses of power and this is really nothing new.

The only thing different here is that it made the papers because even though this type of arbitrary expulsion isn't exactly new (it has been on the rise for the last few years - it's not a result of Virginia Tech), it still makes a fairly good story, especially with the "early departure".

Yet again, the kids loose because of the idiots

[Doug52392]

I am getting sick of this sick and cruel world the Bush administration have created, where even saying 1 word in a non-threatening manner can get you kicked out of school. According to dictionary.com, terrorism is defined as " the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes." Key word: threats. Political purposes. So the Bush administration are terrorists. The federal government are terrorists. The principals of schools that suspend and expel students for even so much as saying something in a context where it could be somewhat threatening are terrorists. All these people use threats to make people fear terrorism so they can make shitty legislation to pretend to help us but screw up the country instead (perfect example: the USA PATRIOT Act).

I've seen this first hand in my own city. My sister's middle school have just banned hugging. In some Spanish and Hispanic cultures, hugging is the proper way to greet someone.

And then my friend at my high school was suspended for 10 days and almost expelled from school. What was his crime that caused the school to think he posed a significant threat to the schools saftey? He made a political statement about the exact same thing I mentioned above. The school, in their attempts to make sure we were safe, and after hours of Googleing, finally found something. The date he referenced to was a holiday in London, on that day someone tried to blow up London. So they thought he was going to BLOW UP LONDON! He is an horner student, extremely smart, never even had a detention before, and a popular student. So since the school decided he was a terrorist and trying to "blow up" London, they searched his belongings using a another shitty policy that they can search students stuff for no reason with "probable cause", and found a money clip with a 2 cm blade. 2cm. That is barely long enough to cut a piece of paper. But the school brought the poor kid out of school in HANDCUFFS and charged him with possession of a weapon. He was processed, booked, and thrown in a holding cell like a criminal. He has since been put back in school (even the cops thought the school screwed up big time here), but its on his perminate record that he was suspended, so if he tries to get to collage, he might have big problems. The good news is he has the ACLU about to sue the school if they don't remove everything about this from his record. But many victims of the system don't know about that stuff, so they just have to suffer. I never thought that would happen in _MY_ school. But it did. So now we all live in fear at school. Because the principal is a terrorist. Hell, if the principal were to read this, the cops would probaly be here in 5 minutes saying I'm making "terroristic threats" or something like that.

Re:Maybe, maybe not

[DavidShor]

Not true. At least according to the Supreme Court, the 14th amendment insures that states are bound by nearly all of the constitution just as strongly as the federal government.

Not only that, but the university most likely receives an enormous amount of federal funds.

Cool.

[Vegeta99]

Bwahaha. That's cool. I'm glad PSU isn't the only campus with the fake parties. And the administration claiming it was noise violations is full of shit. We've set up fake events in empty apartments, just to have four cops show up and pound on the door of some scared-shitless freshman who just got out of the shower.

Fuck em. Noise violation? Maybe they meant that they were raising the noise /floor/ by adding junk to the system =)

The democratization of the double-life.

[Lemmy Caution]

People in positions of authority, or with public profiles of some sort, learn early on (especially if they've been raised to expect it) that they need to lead two lives: that things they write, say, and record are part of a public persona, and that they have to consider the impact of them at all times.

Most of the population didn't have this concern, and this was, in fact, one of the consolations of a life of obscurity that most of us lead: that we had a certain freedom to do and say what we think without real consequences.

Google changes that, as one can now fairly easily find the online traces of just about anyone who has an internet presence at all. Sites like Facebook, LJ, and MySpace give one the ability to express themselves to the world: realizing that this is a double-edged sword is a painful apprenticeship to segments of society that never realized it.

Wow ... the BEST REVENGE EVER!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate that guy from down the hall in your dorm?

- Take a picture of him
- Create a FACEBOOK homepage for "him"
- Trashtalk the most senior professor of his major, and criticize the university
- Wait for the idiot to be expelled

Of course, I would never do this personally....but if I can imagine it, someone has already DONE this...and for this reason alone, this case should be dropped. Unless they can prove beyond reasonable doubt that some anonymous coward did not FAKE the FACEBOOK page in question...but it doesn't sound like they gave this guy a chance to prove that or not.

Re:What's really interesting

[absurdist]

I went through a somewhat similar situation while working for an agency of the State of California. Morale was in the toilet due to management being exactly the kind of clueless, pompous buffoons that management so typically is. So they brought in a psychiatrist and set up mandatory meetings for every department. At the first meeting he made a very big show of assuring everyone that this was all confidential and he was bound by law and professional ethics not to divulge anything said in these sessions to anyone. When I brought up immediately that the state Supreme Court had recently ruled that, contrary to his assertions, whoever was PAYING for the service was considered to be the client, and therefore entitled to have the information divulged to them, and that his misleading statements really didn't reflect well on his professional ethics, he tried to deflect it in every possible way... WITHOUT actually denying it. The point was made, however. The sessions were abruptly ended about a month later when it became clear that no one was talking to him. The bottom line is that the Doctor - Patient relationship isn't nearly as sacrosanct as people make it out to be.

Contact Infor for Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Toll-Free: 1-800-618-1878

University Relations
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698-0215

229-333-5980
229-245-3891 (Fax) jltanner@valdo

President
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698-0180

229-333-5952
229-333-7400 (Fax) [e-mail]

Re:VTech just kicked in, yo!

[LeafOnTheWind]

Just to note, Americans were not "twisting" the meaning of college when they used it for the original colleges - they used it exactly as they meant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#The_origin_of_the_U.S._usage [wikipedia.org]
Also, American English is closer to original Shakespearean usage:

In some ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is. Some expressions that the British call "Americanisms" are in fact original British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of lend, and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through Hollywood gangster movies).

It's you guys that screwed up our beautiful language ;)