Networking by the 'book'
Vt. college students cull, gather friends on facebook.com
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Lauri Sybel, director of career development at Vermont Technical College, looks at Web sites posted by VTC students. Stefan Hard / Times Argus |
Toolbox
By SUSAN YOUNGWOOD Staff Writer - Published: February 26, 2006
Lauri Sybel, the director of career development at Vermont Technical College, is used to getting calls from employers. But the one she received last November threw her off balance.
A VTC student had applied for a job at a Vermont engineering firm. The company peeked at the student's profile on Facebook.com, a social networking Web site for college students. What the employer saw gave him second thoughts about hiring the student.
Sybel quickly got herself an account and logged on.
"I spent six, seven hours looking at this Web site that my students are using," she recalls. "I hit the roof on this. What the heck are they doing? How can they be that stupid? Whatever they want to do in their personal life, they should do it. But this – this is a public domain."
Sybel saw many Facebook profiles that were fine. But she saw others that were, as she put it, "in poor taste."
"There were pictures of students smoking joints. One student, her opening photo was a picture of herself holding a gallon jug of vodka; she was trashed," Sybel said. "And most of these kids are under 21."
Launched in the winter of 2004, Facebook.com is one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet. Coined after the so-called "facebooks," or directories, of college students, which provide thumbnail photos and brief bios, Facebook was the brainstorm of Harvard students that quickly spread to 2,137 colleges and universities and 22,000 high schools. Facebook operates a lot like MySpace.com, a social networking Web site used by many teenagers that was the subject of a two-part series this month in The Times Argus/Rutland Herald.
But while Vermont college students have embraced Facebook wholeheartedly, college administrators are scrambling to figure out how to approach the multiplying issues arising from its usage. Potential complications run the gamut from legal and liability issues to public access and privacy rights. Educators, employers and security departments are debating the use of Facebook as an investigative tool as they weigh students' rights to privacy and freedom of expression and speech.
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"Stan Smith" (not his real name) is a sophomore at Norwich University. He is majoring in criminal justice – even though he admits to shoplifting on his MySpace page. His birthday is in June; he's from New England but was born in a southern state. He poses in camouflage in his dorm room, posts pictures of an extensive bar from a recent party and in his public blog describes how he broke "13 laws in 90 minutes."
"I'm shocked I didn't get arrested," he writes.
Anyone searching MySpace for this 19-year-old Norwich student under his real name would find him instantly. Another seconds-long search brings up his Facebook page.
"We need to have students understand that this electronic depiction of them is not private but public," said Greg Stone, dean of students at Castleton State College. "And if they don't understand that, the first time they don't get a job, when their mother says, 'Why are you smoking dope?' – they'll understand."
Facebook is like a gated community. Each college has its own Facebook community. Students at a particular college can freely visit the Facebooks of their fellow college students, learning what dorm they live in and what classes they are taking. Unlike MySpace, where every member can look at every unlocked profile, Facebook members are restricted to viewing their fellow classmates' profiles.
Its popularity among college students is evident from the large percentage who sign up. Chris Hughes, a Harvard student who is spokesperson for the company, says that on average 85 percent of students register with their college's Facebook community. At the University of Vermont, for example, there are 9,736 registered Facebook users, of which 7,996 are students (UVM has 10,084 graduate and undergraduate students, according to its Web site.) The remainder are alumni, staff and faculty. Hughes says that there are 19,883 registered users at six Vermont colleges; he didn't supply the numbers for the other 13 colleges that have Facebook communities.
Joining Facebook is free; it is a privately held company that makes its money through advertising.
The keys to unlock this gated community are not that difficult to acquire. Friends from different colleges befriend each other, opening up their profiles. Anyone with a valid college e-mail address ending in .edu can open a Facebook account.
Facebook strips away the anonymity of the Web. Students' full names are listed, along with reams of identifying information. Students use Facebook in many ways. They check out the profile of the student sitting next to them in biology class. They send each other messages. They post photos. They befriend each other, in a quest to have as many Facebook friends as possible. They list their favorite movies, books and music, and see who else on campus agrees with them. They keep in touch with high school friends at other colleges.
Facebook, writes Andrew Cushing in The Vermont Cynic, UVM's newspaper, is "a new tool of communication that has changed some aspects of social interaction and created new opportunities for meeting people."
Students also join groups of students with similar interests. Some of these groups are based on existing clubs – like the 67 members of the St. Michael's College Snowboard Club. Others are silly ones created exclusively for Facebook – "I Heart Naps" has 1,304 members at UVM and the "Anti-Collar Popping Coalition" boasts 318 members at Middlebury.
An article in the Middlebury College newspaper explains. "The facebook feeds into the delicious vanity of its users. In the same way that having 300-plus friends makes you feel all warm and tingly inside, so does creating and being part of a group."
But then there are the groups that worry Vermont administrators, like "Whale Watchers," which reportedly posted photos of overweight women on campus, or "It's Sunday, let's get drunk" and "Alcoholics not so anonymous because it's a really small campus."
While Facebook is hands-down the most popular networking site used by college students, many also have MySpace accounts. A search on MySpace.com showed approximately 7,000 Vermont college students have a MySpace profile.
Facebook has expanded to the high school market. Hughes says there are 90 Vermont high schools on the site.
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Students and staff applaud Facebook for helping create a cohesive online community for college students. Students use Facebook for socializing and communicating, believing they are safe in their gated community, but many are now getting a wakeup call. A search of Google news revealed hundreds of stories from college newspapers, showing that Facebook is anything but private:
u At Williams College in Massachusetts, three students were asked to leave after an investigation into illegal drug use. According to the Williams Record, student members of the Facebook groups "Puff, Puff, Pass" and "Phyllis Chandler Bong" were questioned.
u The Daily Orange, the Syracuse University student paper, reported that as a result of freshmen using Facebook over the summer to check out their roommates, 20 parents complained to the school when they learned the roommates were either gay or of another race.
u Fisher College in Boston expelled students (including the student council president) because of comments made on Facebook.
u The New York Times reports that Facebook groups at Indiana University and the University of Virginia caused racial tensions on campus by poking fun at Asian students.
u The Digital Collegial, the online newspaper of Penn State University, reported that police used Facebook to identify and discipline students who rushed the field after a football game last fall, using a Facebook group called "I rushed the field after the OSU game (and lived)."
Phone interviews with career counselors, athletic directors, campus police and administrators at Vermont colleges, and the dearth of articles in Vermont college papers, suggest that similar incidents are not happening here. But college staff is aware of, and concerned about, the growing use of Facebook. And most campuses are buzzing about the online directory.
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In November 2004, two Middlebury students wrote this about Facebook in the campus newspaper:
"Call it pathetic, lame, even sick, but the facebook.com has become an epidemic at our quaint, remote haven, and truth be told, we don't plan on stopping it any time soon. We're obsessed. And stop lying to yourself because you know you are too."
At first, as Vermont colleges signed up, the discussion focused on how many friends you had and how many groups you belonged to. The conversation is slowly changing.
"There has been a lot of discussion on campus about Facebook," said Christine Clary, co-director of the student resource center at St. Michael's College. "Students want that freedom of expression, a place where they can socialize with friends and use any language they want. They feel like their privacy is violated because employers or college administrators look at it. Our attitude is: It is public."
The discussion was set off at St. Mike's when Geri Knopf, the college's athletic director, started exploring Facebook after six months of reading about it. Like VTC's Sybel, she logged on, and was disturbed with what she saw.
"I sent an e-mail to the coaching staff and let them know what I discovered," Knopf said. She asked coaches to talk to athletes and advise them to cleanup their profiles.
"We're concerned about any photos showing an athlete breaking the law, through underage drinking or worse, drug use; obscene gestures, or showing someone in a compromising situation," she said. However, she added, she doesn't plan any disciplinary action since, "I don't know when those photos were taken."
In a recent editorial in The Echo, St. Mike's online student paper, executive editor Morgen Thiboult wrote that "a lot of people are angered by these coaches' requests." She also expressed concern that Student Life sent out a warning that students shouldn't promote parties on Facebook. Thiboult decries students who post inappropriate photos, but says that many students express "valid concerns and questions: They are just college students looking for a good time."
Many students react with shock when they learn that their Facebooks are being viewed by adults who are not fellow students. "They are not thinking that this can hurt them," said VTC's Sybel. "They think it's funny and cute."
Leo Sevigny, associate dean of students at Lyndon State College, held a community forum on Facebook in November attended by 150 students. Many students told him that Facebook "is a pretend world. 'What I put on Facebook is not really me,'" students said.
Middlebury College students Nura Suleiman and Isabel Yordan explain this position in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article: "The facebook is a place to post your 'look how drunk and yet put-together and, oh wait — strikingly gorgeous in a casual way' picture. If you missed this memo and actually have a good-looking photo of yourself, stop, go back to your computer and take it off. It's just plain rude and annoying. In fact, everyone is laughing at you."
Pamela Gardner, director of the career center at UVM, said when some students hear that employers and college administrators look at their Facebooks, their "eyes open and their jaws drop. Their response is, 'No, that can't be true. That's unethical. That's a violation of privacy. That's illegal.'"
A more recent editorial in the Middlebury paper cautions restraint.
"Your Facebook profile is the key to Pandora's box — once accessed, companies know exactly how to target you as a consumer and the government knows exactly where to find you and who to ask need they go looking. Just know that Big Brother is checking you out too, and getting to know your face pretty well in the Orwellian community called Facebook.com."
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Many college administrators are debating how to use Facebook, and pondering their students' use of the site. Most say there aren't enough hours in the day to monitor student profiles.
Sevigny has his own Facebook account that he uses to communicate to students. He runs two Facebook groups, and sent out a Facebook message to the entire Lyndon State community to advertise an event.
UVM police do use Facebook in investigations. Gary Margolis, the UVM chief of police, says that while he does not monitor it on a regular basis, Facebook has provided useful evidence. "The last investigation was connected to a sexual assault. (Facebook) gave us some identifying information that we didn't have," he said.
Career center staff at Vermont colleges are integrating advice about Facebook into their workshops. "We have begun to advise students that putting things out on the Web is never secure," said Jaye Roseborough, Middlebury College's executive director of career services.
Hughes said that Facebook's creators never dreamed that the Web site would be used by police or employers. "We intended it to be used for students to share information about themselves and interact online. (It was not meant) to be a policing tool," he said. A solution for concerned students, he said, is to use Facebook's privacy settings, which can be set to block the site from the prying eyes of staff, faculty and alumni.
Greg Stone at Castleton has several concerns about Facebook. One is the amount of time students are devoting to this Web site – according to Hughes, two-thirds of Facebook users visit every day, and spend an average of 18 minutes every day on the site. (He says that Facebook's 12 million unique visitors each day make it the seventh most trafficked site on the Web.) On wired campuses, with students wandering around with their laptops, they can – and sometimes do – check Facebook obsessively.
Stone worries about the students' supposition of anonymity. "Even though they say very, very, very, very private things, they do it because … they don't have to look someone in the eye. We're real concerned about them understanding that."
Stone also points out that "there is no way to determine truth from fiction on Facebook. You can write whatever you want, put whatever picture you want. The picture doesn't even have to be of you. … Photoshop," he says, "is a wonderful thing." For this reason, he thinks it's not prudent for employers or college administrators or police to make judgments based on students' Facebook profiles.
Finally, Stone worries about liability issues. Castleton is writing a statement that "tells students and the world that we don't monitor it." He feels that the school could become "very exposed if … we're in there poking around all the time."
For example, he explains, say a student describes her plans to commit suicide in her Facebook, and then does. "If someone expects me to be monitoring that, (they can say) 'You should have known.'" Because of this, Stone does not have a Facebook account, and thinks college administrators who do are being "foolish."
Robert Corran, the athletic director at UVM, has browsed student profiles. But he is struggling with what his response should be.
"It does create a real ethical dilemma and practical dilemma on how to use the information brought to you by someone else or that you stumble across inadvertently," he said. "I don't want to get into the business of scouring these online programs to see if student athletes are conforming to our code of conduct. … It creates a whole different dynamic we haven't had to deal with before. … We want to be respectful of their privacy as well. It's a real ethical dilemma – where does our responsibility end, and their rights as private citizens begin?"
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