Posted by Ilya Somin:
Should Lawprofs be Facebook "Friends" with Students?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_02_01-2009_02_07.shtml#1233644130
Rob Vischer of Prawfsblawg has [1]joined the ranks of law professors
concerned about the ethics of facebook friendship with their students:
What does FB mean for the professor-student relationship? I'm not
talking about whether the law school should use FB as a
professional networking venture; I'm talking about what students
know about you and what you know about your students. I still base
my image of the law school professor on Phil Areeda, who I'm
certain would have had me arrested if I had dropped by his office
to chat about the weekend....
And now what have I become? Going out with students for a beer,
fielding a flag football team, and playing basketball with students
has always made me an enthusiast for the friendship that dare not
speak its name, but now I've taken it to another level -- I'm FB
friends with my students. I'm all up in their business, and they're
in mine. Is it wrong? Is it a concern? Do any other faculty FBers
deny student friend requests? Do you keep them on a separate friend
list with more limited access to your page? At least for me, the
notion of keeping a mysterious distance between students and myself
was a non-starter, but have I (or my students) lost something in
the process?
I commented on these issues in [2]this post last year, responding to
[3]an earlier post by legal scholar Gene Koo. I still think that there
is no problem with Facebook friendships between professors and
students. It's a far from intimate relationship, to put it mildly. Of
course, I don't put any extremely intimate or private material on my
Facebook page; people who can see it are not "all up in [my]
business." They just know a few basic facts about my work, background
and interests. Putting much more than that up on Facebook is unwise
for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with academic ethics.
Students who see my Facebook page probably don't know as much about me
as those who stop by my office regularly to talk about law, policy, or
baseball. If the latter is a permissible form of student-faculty
interaction, so too is Facebook "friendship."
References
1.
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2009/02/would-phil-areeda-have-been-my-facebook-friend.html
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_08_17-2008_08_23.shtml#1219440068
3. http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/08/facebook-and-th.html
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