Dental Student Suspended Over Blog
Posted on December 7, 2005
First bloggers were fired because of blogs. Now students are getting suspended. In this case the suspended student was a Marquette Dental School student who apparently made a negative comment about a professor in their blog. A blog called the Marquette Warrior has a detailed post on the incident. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also has an article about the suspendend student blogger story.
A dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.The Marquette Warrior post also said the student's lawyer, Scott Taylor, said they will appeal the ruling. It looks like a big overaction on the school's behalf. But bloggers need to be careful what they post in public blogs especially if it is about a place they work at or a school they attend. Even anonymous blogs sometimes get found out so be careful.Scott Taylor, the student's attorney, said his client, a 22-year-old in Marquette's School of Dentistry, was brought before the committee for a conduct hearing last week after a classmate complained about his blog, a Web site that contained musings about topics ranging from his education to videogames and drinking.
The focus of the hearing, Taylor said, were half a dozen postings including one describing a professor as "a (expletive) of a teacher" and another that described 20 classmates as having the "intellectual/maturity of a 3-year-old."
Taylor released what he said was a complete transcript of the blog, which is no longer available online. Taylor said the student did not want to be identified, and his name could not be confirmed.