Facebook Fences Fail

Schools throughout the country have long ago banned Facebook friendships between faculty and students. Facebook is where one’s personal life is often captured these days, and blurring the line between a teacher’s personal life and her professional one seems ill-advised. Enter boarding schools, where mixing the personal with the professional is what we do on a daily basis. Our home, that most private place, is for many teachers located inside a dorm, a place where we work. The family dinner, that most personal time of the day, happens in the dining hall, where a student is sure to lean over at some point to ask for a signature on an out-of-town form. We have chosen to create a community where we don’t just learn together but also live together. Sacrifices are involved, but the educational experience for the students, we hope, is greatly enhanced. Of course, the nature of the boarding environment in no way implies that we shouldn’t try to set boundaries between the personal and the professional. Such boundaries are essential for the safety of the students and the effectiveness of what we do. The question is, how do we set reasonable boundaries that allow the all-important connections between faculty and students to take place while eliminating the unhealthy exchanges? A new PEA policy, which was handed down to faculty on Monday morning, decrees that one way to set safe boundaries is to join other schools in banning faculty from being friends with students on social media sites. Unfortunately, it is a policy that will not work and will worsen the educational experience we offer students. It is not by building fences between faculty and students that we will create healthy boundaries and filter out inappropriate exchanges. It is by hiring responsible educators, training them and supporting the work they do with kids.The idea of banning student/faculty Facebook friendships to set safe boundaries results, I suspect, from (1) a fundamental misapprehension of what Facebook is and (2) a gross miscalculation of the costs and benefits of such friendships. Let’s talk about Facebook first. Many adults (mostly adults who are not on it) seem to think that Facebook is the source of all evil. But they’re giving it far too much credit. Facebook is just a venue: an (electronic) place where people meet and interact with each other, some of these people being students and others faculty. It is not, in any fundamental way, different from the dining hall, the agora, or the dorms—places where students and faculty can come together informally, without the structure of a class or a required appointment. There is no question that the behavior of faculty in all such venues needs to be appropriate, reflecting our professionalism and our responsibility to put the interests of the students first at all times. But there is no good reason to treat Facebook differently from any other venue. A responsible faculty member will not post an inappropriate status on Facebook that students may see any more than say something inappropriate in d-hall that students may overhear. She will not approach a student with questionable intentions through a Facebook message any more than through a conversation in agora. And he will not keep a bottle of vodka in his dorm study, where he meets with students, any more than he will keep his vodka-themed high school reunion pictures in a Facebook album that students can see. And, by the way, if you think that teachers are more likely to behave badly on-line than in person, then you must be ready to ban e-mail as well. If anything, Facebook makes it easier for faculty to keep the personal away from the students, because it allows more control over who sees what (I can more easily block someone from seeing one of my Facebook posts than prevent someone in d-hall from overhearing one of my comments to a colleague).Now, I don’t question that administrators have the best interest of the school in mind, and I can hear them protesting my lack of pragmatism: yes, faculty should be mindful of their behavior in all settings, electronic or otherwise; but we are human beings and we occasionally slip up. And even if we mean well, we may not have full control over on-line technologies: we may, indeed, end up being tagged in those questionable pictures that it’s just inappropriate for students to see. And so erecting a wall between students and faculty on Facebook is just a sensible way to build safeguards against such oversights. That sounds reasonable, but this is where my second point comes in: we are miscalculating the costs and benefits of this policy. In fact, I suspect we are only looking at the benefits—the safeguards—and ignoring the costs, and that’s not how good policy decisions are made. Think about speed limits, which are healthy safeguards against car accidents: if we only looked at benefits, the speed limit would be zero, ensuring a complete lack of accidents. Or take safeguards against new drugs: the FDA would be most successful at ensuring the absence of undesirable side-effects by approving no drugs at all. This makes no sense, of course. We must weigh benefits against costs. The speed limit is not zero because the costs would exceed the benefits—we want to get places even at the risk of the occasional accident. The FDA approves new drugs because we want to cure diseases—even at the risk of side-effects. And PEA should allow Facebook friendships between faculty and students because we want connections between them—even at the risk of the occasional faculty slip-up.But why bother with social media? Can’t we interact in the dorm, in the classroom and on the playing fields, as we did in the old days? Indeed, many faculty members are not on Facebook at all; and many who are choose not to be friends with students precisely because they consider Facebook a private place. These are perfectly respectable choices, but no more respectable than the choice others make to use Facebook as a venue to connect with students. And we shouldn’t forget that the old days are gone: the reality of today’s Exonians is that they spend a lot of time on Facebook. Lament it all you want—you’re not going to change it. If our goal is to connect faculty with students, and if some of us are willing to be on social media sites with students, denying us that opportunity hurts the students. Those of us who have been on Facebook with students for years have been able to provide adult input when we saw inappropriate exchanges between kids; we have helped students reflect on comments they posted that they probably should not have posted; we have offered congratulations for achievements and encouragement for disappointments; and we have told kids to GO TO BED when it’s late at night and they’re still posting. These are healthy interactions. This is what we are supposed to do at a boarding school, where our job is to help kids grow up—not just to teach our subject. Yet, to save us from the rare instance of an inappropriate crossing of sound boundaries, the school has decided to throw out the many, many desirable opportunities for faculty to be good role models and help students grow and learn.I find myself wondering why the benefits of Facebook interactions were ignored or underestimated. It may have something to do with lack of information. The colleagues I talked to who are Facebook friends with students were not consulted during the making of this policy. I wish someone had asked us why we have student friends on Facebook; what we think we achieve through that; how significant that is in our work with kids. Hearing our views would have led to a more informed decision, and quite possibly a different policy. And a different policy would have stood a better chance of achieving the right balance between protecting students and promoting healthy connections between adults and kids. It might have been as follows. First, hire faculty that you trust to behave professionally. Second, train faculty on appropriate behavior and on new technologies, helping them use such technologies in educationally valuable ways. Finally, acknowledge that slip-ups will occur and be willing to take that risk. We can’t be an effective educational institution if we run away from all and any risk. Instead, support faculty who are going out of their way to connect with kids. It’s our job after all. Make it easier, not harder, for us to do it well. 