It’s weird to think that our professors exist outside the lecture hall — never mind on your newsfeed.
In a culture where everyone has a Facebook, cyberspace run-ins with the person who grades your exams are highly likely.
With an official UF Faculty network on Facebook, where does that leave our professors? Facebook etiquette isn’t exactly on the syllabus, so it’s up to students and professors to make their own guidelines.
Professors and students can invite each other into their personal and professional lives with a simple friend request. While some professors only accept requests from former students, others use it as a tool to connect with current ones.
“I think it gives me good insight about my students and what their interests are,” said journalism professor Jean Chance.
But Joe Meert, a geology professor, said a friend request doesn’t guarantee a passing grade.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re my friend on anything,” Meert said. “You get what grade you deserve in my class. [My students] understand that.”
Thanks to a constantly updated news feed, it’s easy to keep up with our friends’ statuses or photos of their drunken escapades. So when it comes to keeping their Facebook image in tip-top shape, professors say they stay away from putting anything risky online — but are often amused by their students’ posts.
“If I get updates about [former students] uploading pictures, I’ll go look at them, and sometimes there are these embarrassing pictures of them drunk off their asses partying,” said Sean Witty, a linguistics professor.
That’s a visual that’s all too familiar to history professor Steven Noll.
“The pictures my students post are not shocking to me,” Noll said. “I’m shocked more at the fact that they’re stupid enough to put it up there.”
Chance said she has no sympathy for students who miss assignments — especially when freshly tagged party shots show up on her news feed.
“The Monday night before a paper was due I got an email from [a student] around ten o’clock saying he wasn’t going to have the assignment and wanted an extension,” Chance said. “Just out of curiosity, I looked at his Facebook page. I saw all these comments about this great beer party he had on Sunday, and I just laughed.”
