To ‘friend’ or not to ‘friend’: Professor-student Facebook relationships


Student-led Facebook groups rail against the presence of faculty on the site.

Kathryn Linder used to accept Facebook friend requests from her students, until the Suffolk University official considered the repercussions of blending her social and professional lives.

Linder, assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Suffolk in Boston, activated Facebook’s most stringent privacy settings when she realized students could see her profile page and various posts, comments, videos, and photos.

“Eventually all they could see was my name and eMail address, so it didn’t seem purposeful to accept friend invitations anymore,” said Linder, who published a list of suggestions for how instructors should interact with their students on social media sites. “It’s important to keep in mind that it is the instructor’s responsibility, not the student’s, to create and enforce appropriate boundaries for social networking in the classroom and out.”

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Few in higher education faced the dilemma of “friending” students on Facebook when college students first flocked to the site in the mid-2000s. But as Facebook accounts become commonplace among all ages, faculty members find themselves in the awkward position of accepting or rejecting students’ friend invitations, and according to a 2010 research paper, most instructors choose the latter.

Three out of four faculty members surveyed said interacting with students on Facebook could jeopardize the “balance between being a teacher and being a friend” to students, according to a report published by researchers at Lee University in Tennessee.

The hesitancy to “friend” students on Facebook didn’t stop professors from clicking the “accept” button when they received student friend requests.

Almost nine in 10 faculty members said they were friends with students on Facebook, according to the Lee University report, “Faculty on Facebook: Confirm or Deny?” Ninety-three percent of college students surveyed said they had friended an instructor on Facebook.

These statistics may not give a clear picture of how faculty chooses to interact with their students on Facebook. In interviews with eCampus News, professors and instructors said they were happy to connect with students on Facebook – as long as they weren’t current students.

Dennis Marquardt, educational technology manager at Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas, said connecting with students on Facebook or a social networking site before their academic fate has been decided is a bad idea for any faculty member who wants to remain objective and professionally detached.

“I do not want [students’] personal lives to consciously or subconsciously affect my view of them,” he said. “I enjoy interacting with former students on Facebook and see it as an opportunity to continue a more personal, mentoring relationship with them, where grades aren’t on the line.”

Keeping a distance with current students also helps instructors avoid even the appearance of favoritism, said Ronald Yaros, an assistant professor in journalism at the University of Maryland (UMD) College Park.

It’s impossible to know what other students will think – and say – if an instructor consistently comments on his or her student’s Facebook posts, he said.

“I believe I risk the perception of being closer to other students than others … and I don’t want to look as if I’m playing favorites with my students,” said Yaros, who teaches mobile journalism and multimedia use at UMD. “I just don’t want to get into that.”

Yaros has found a way to maintain his social media detachment from students even as his courses have included official class Facebook pages. A teaching assistant monitors the page, and Yaros said he doesn’t join the group, keeping his profile guarded from students.

“Since virtually every student is on it, you can’t ignore Facebook,” he said. “You just have to be careful about it.”

Faculty should even be cautious when friending students who aren’t currently enrolled in their class, Linder said. Those students, once they’ve connected with a professor on Facebook, can see that professor’s interactions with other faculty whose classes they might be taking.

“We don’t always keep our teacher hats on while posting to friends and colleagues and I wanted to make sure that I was protecting the privacy of my colleagues as well as myself,” she said.

There are several Facebook groups that address the presence of faculty members on their beloved social media site. The group, “Faculty in ur Facebook,” where members discuss the pros and cons of Facebook-frequenting professors.

And a group of students at Dallas Baptist University (DBU) started a Facebook group called, “I love being stalked by the DBU faculty on facebook!!!” The group rails against university employees’ monitoring of student profiles, calling the effort an “absolute joke” and a waste of time.

A student at the Illinois Institute of Technology started a Facebook group called, “Students against faculty members joining Facebook.” A group administrator asks college students to join the group and protest the presence of “Big Brother” – faculty members – on Facebook.

With only 26 members, the group’s activity is limited, although one student wrote, “I’d love to not have to worry about what my friends or I put on facebook because I could get in trouble for it.”

Faculty members said they encourage students to communicate with their instructors, but to do so during office hours or through eMail.

“Very personal experiences are shared in a very impersonal manner [on Facebook],” Marquardt said. “I think it is not really the place for student-instructor interactions. If students share personal experiences with instructors, I think it should be in a more formal, one-on-one manner.”

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