impression management at its worst...yet again

so, i was reading my friend sara's blog (which is linked on this blog so you should read it because it's rad) and she posted an article about my former employer. i'm writing this in the hopes that i won't somehow get retroactively in trouble from them, but i'm pretty sure that won't happen. and i've been talking about writing an exposé for a while now so i might as well get started.

the gist of the article that sara posted was that a student at said university was suspended for posting some negative things on his blog about his classmates and professors. for some reason, the university decided this was a violation of some sort of code of ethics and that his post was unprofessional. i share sara's political concerns about this...especially because we're supposed to have that whole freedom of speech thing that's..i dunno..protected by some crazy document that we hold very dear. however, having worked at said institution for a year...i'm concerned on a different level.

i was a resident hall director in what was considered a party hall. literally from day one i was dealing with disciplinary problems. almost every weekend there were issues. by the end of the semester...almost half of the people in the hall had a file in my office for breaking some kind of policy (both serious and not so serious.) i dealt with vandalism, intoxication, drugs, racial harassment, a fire....the list goes on and on. i even heard a case for another building that involved a student being in trouble for his fifth..count 'em FIVE...drug violation. were any of these students suspended for their conduct? the answer is no. so why is it that some fiesty blog posts are worse than students endangering their lives and disrespecting other students and their community every damn weekend?

the only logical answer that i could come up is that this particular university was able to keep negatively publicity away from the constant misconduct of their students. that's the nice thing about being located in an economically-deprived part of town...you don't have to worry about pissing off the neighbors too much. BUT...if someone posts something negative about you on the interweb there's a good chance that the impression management will fail. so that student has to be punished. maybe i'm missing part of the story...but it really doesn't make any sense. we saw students in fights, who had severe drinking problems, who destroyed property, who broke state law...and yet these student's actions were not considered a poor reflection on the university?

the end of the article makes an important point about how this action by the university will have a big impact on student bloggers in the future. i have no doubt that it will. it just makes me sad that a university would make this stand and ultimately censor their students. but who gives two shits if they are bribing homeless people to buy them beer. no need to make a stand about that.