Students misbehaving could pay price for posting photos online

About a week after Courtland Beale held a Super Bowl party for about 20 friends at his apartment, the University of Washington junior got an e-mail from the university telling him that he violated his apartment contract.

He met with a UW housing employee, who questioned him about the early February party. Was there underage drinking? A keg?

"They wanted to know what was in the cups," Beale recalled. "They just didn't like the fact that (it was the) Super Bowl, and people were having fun."

The basis for the summons, Beale believes: photographs from the party that were posted on Facebook.com.

The Web site -- a sort of collegiate version of MySpace.com -- has attracted millions of students and is now drawing college administers who use it to gather evidence of underage drinking, cheating and other student misconduct.

On some campuses outside Washington, administrators reportedly have used personal information and pictures from Facebook to sanction students, even expel them.

"I don't want people giving me grades seeing what I do on the weekend," said UW junior Jerome McCuin, who is trying to educate his peers about the potential effects of what they post the Web site. "I'd prefer to keep those two parts of my life separate, especially (when) what's on there could be misconstrued easily."

Officials at the UW and other state public universities say they investigate possible misconduct exhibited on Facebook if a student or staff member tells them about it. But officials say they don't troll the Web site looking for violations.

A Harvard undergrad launched Facebook just two years ago, and in that time, the site has become an essential part of college life for many students. It has more than 7 million registered users, according to Facebook, including more than 27,500 from the UW alone, a university whose autumn enrollment was 42,974.

Anyone with a university or college e-mail address that ends in ".edu" -- students, faculty, staff and alumni -- can register on Facebook. Users can create their own Web profile with photographs, course schedules, personal interests, even dorm room and cell phone numbers.

A student's profile is open for viewing by anyone who is registered on Facebook from the same campus unless the student changes privacy settings. A student could prevent, for example, anyone registered as faculty or staff from accessing his personal information.

A search of Facebook uncovered photographs of UW students -- some underage -- posing with plastic cups, beer cans or champagne bottles. A few even depict students drinking from bottles or shot glasses. In some cases it's not clear what's inside the cups or glasses.

The Seattle P-I viewed UW student profiles by registering on Facebook as an alumnus with the e-mail address of a P-I staff member who is a former UW student.

University administrators say some of the images or writings that students post on the Web site suggest violations of campus regulations -- an underage student drinking in a dorm room, for example.

The UW has relied on material from the Web site to look into potential housing violations about a half-dozen times, said Derek Levy, administrator for Residential Life, Housing and Food Services.

In those cases, a student or staffer found the information on Facebook and passed it on to the department, he said. Officials used the material as grounds to call in students to discuss the incidents.

"If it was brought to our attention by a student or staff member, then we would look at it and utilize it in our investigation," Levy said. "It's never going to be the decision maker for us."

UW senior lecturer Stuart Reges logs on to Facebook when considering cases of academic misconduct.

Just last quarter he suspected that a student copied a computer program from a classmate. He looked up the student's profile on Facebook and discovered that the two lived just four doors apart. It turned out that the classmate didn't even know that the program had been stolen.

"It hasn't been part of our formal evidence," Reges said, who said he uses a friend's student account to search Facebook because he hasn't had time to register for his own account. "If we didn't have a case absent that, we wouldn't pursue it. ... It helps me to figure out whether I believe students who claim this is a coincidence."

Students are slowly beginning to realize just how university administrators and faculty members are using the information they figured only friends would want to look at. And they don't like it.

When Beale discovered that university employees were looking at his Facebook profile, he removed the Super Bowl party photos from the Web site.

The gathering did not cause any disruptions at the apartment complex, he said, and the university made a "big deal" about it after the fact. Beale, who turned 21 earlier this month, declined to comment when asked in an interview with the P-I if he or anyone else underage had alcohol at the party.

He is now planning to move out of his apartment to one that the university neither owns nor operates.

"If they're going to use Facebook to violate my privacy, I don't want to live under a service that ... spies on you like (Housing and Food Services)," he said.

Most universities do not have online informants or spy on students, said Sheldon Steinbach, general council for the American Council on Education.

The larger issue, he said, is that many students do not understand that the information they voluntarily post on Web sites such as Facebook is not private.

"It's a public document," he said. "You've put it out there. It's like the equivalent of making a signed confession."

And their photographs and writings can be used against them, he said.

Facebook officials do not know how many university and college administrators mine the site looking for evidence of alleged student misconduct, but it's not how the creators intended the site to be used.

"It's pretty lame," Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes said. "It's certainly not what we originally designed the site for. We originally and still continue to want Facebook to be a reflection of real-life student communities. (We) want students to be able to share information about themselves and one another."

But some question whether what they share is appropriate.

One Central Washington University student, for instance, recently published an expletive-laced posting on the Web site about an employer who didn't hire her for a job. When Richard DeShields, director of Residence Life and New Student Programs, read the post, he cautioned her that the employer might come across it.

She ultimately sent him an e-mail saying she hadn't thought about the repercussions of her writing.

"In a way I felt good, but in another way I felt like, 'Wow did I have to be the one to persuade her to make a change?' " DeShields said. "(Students) probably need to understand that every action has some type of consequence."

Some college officials are exploring ways to inform students about the implications of what they publish online. The UW is forming a work group to address the issue and hopes to begin teaching next year's freshman class about the pitfalls of posting too much, Levy said.

Concerns over how administrators are using Facebook has prompted UW junior McCuin to encourage his friends to think about what they post on their personal profiles.

There has been talk, he said, of at least one staff member registering on the site as a student instead of as a university employee -- gaining access to more profiles.

Facebook does not verify that person is who he or she claims to be when registering, but students can notify the company if someone has misidentified him or herself on the site. That person would be removed from the site and barred from registering with the same e-mail address, according to the company.

McCuin wants to prevent faculty members from misrepresenting themselves. He intends to ask the student government to recommend that university officials encourage faculty and staff to present themselves accurately on the site. He also plans to organize educational groups on campus to talk to students about what can happen to the information they post on the Web.

A lot of the content on the Web site is "just a joke," McCuin said. "It could become a really useful community where faculty and students can interact in ways they couldn't before."

For UW assistant professor of communication David Silver, it already is.

He looks up the profiles of students in his classes to attach faces to the names. He checks what television shows are popular among UW students -- currently "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons" -- so he can incorporate references to them in his lectures. He even asked students to write an analysis of the Web site for this past quarter's final project.

In return, students write him with suggestions for bands and movies that he might be interested in.

Silver does not use Facebook to police his students; doing so, he said, would be a "shame."

"I don't know that the students are doing anything that they haven't been doing for decades, and it seems like a real infringement of their private space. ... Students have been drinking alcohol forever, students have been talking about drinking alcohol forever," he said. "Now, however, students are ... sharing publicly. That's the difference."

More headlines and info from University District.