Insensitive or Clueless Professor? Both?

Gloria Gadsden, please promptly place your foot in your mouth. I'll wait...


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Apparently,/ yet another / teacher has been / suspended for forgetting that / what she posts online is not private. Yes, there are five different links in that sentence to five different teachers that forgot the same thing.

Gloria Gadsden, a sociology professor at East Stroudsburg University, posted "threatening" comments (as interpreted by the dean of ESU) on her social networking site on two separate occasions. Read the original story, my sources, here and here.

On Jan. 21, Gadsden wrote, "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day..."

Yes, witty commentary to be sure.

Then, this past Monday, she said "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..."

She deleted that comment later, but she was too late. A student alerted university officials of their unhinged professor and Gadsden was suspended.

"No, no! She looks well-adjusted! Not crazy at all..."

Obviously Gadsden has been living in a cave and never heard of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members on Feb. 12. of this year.

I realize that most universities have gone overboard with punishing their faculty for online networking, but Gadsden was not merely posting pictures of herself drunk. No, instead she exhibited actions parallel to Bishop (loose parallelism, I know).

The point is, Gadsden should have known the three things every teacher knows before ever opening a Facebook account:

1) Nothing put online is ever truly private
2) Once it is online it remains there FOREVER
3) You don't joke about shooting your students. Ever.

Gadsden deserves her suspension and if EMU, my university of choice, ever catches wind of something similar I hope it reacts the same way. Universities would do well to ignore the drunken and bikini-clad professors' pictures and focus on those professors that choose to "joke" about shooting their smart-ass blogging students.