Paging the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, paging.
A University of Minnesota mortuary-science student was flunked for something she wrote on her Facebook wall — and also required to take a clinical ethics course and undergo a psychiatric exam, and placed on academic probation for the rest of her undergraduate career for writing the following silly, ridiculous posts:
“Amanda Beth Tatro gets to play, I mean dissect, Bernie (her cadaver) today. Let’s see if I can have a lab void of reprimanding and having my scalpel taken away. Perhaps if I just hide it under my sleeve.”
In addition, she mentioned taking out “aggression” on the cadaver and “updating my Death List #5.”
The smartest thing to post on Facebook? Probably not. But gallows humor, which is a staple of anything having to do with the macabre, apparently wasn’t allowed in her classroom. True to form, the following politically correct pantomime took place.
Michael Lubrant, the program’s director, met with department faculty and notified police, who concluded Tatro had committed no crime.
But Lubrant told Tatro that she would be banned from class until further notice.
Tatro responded by going to the media, and her story appeared on KMSP-TV and in the Minnesota Daily, the university newspaper.
A short time later, she was allowed back in class. The university pursued the case, however, filing a formal complaint that accused her of violating the student conduct code.
The complaint alleged that Tatro engaged in “threatening, harassing or assaultive conduct” and violated the anatomy laboratory course rules. Those rules included using only respectful language when discussing cadavers and refraining from blogging about the lab or the cadaver dissection.
Perish the thought. We wouldn’t want to offend the cadaver’s feelings, now would we?
Mr. Lubrant persisted and said he found the Facebook posts sufficiently menacing. Unfortunately, a court agreed with him — but only after using a standard used for cases involving junior-high and high-school students, effectively stripping Ms. Tatro of her rights.
Naturally, this sort of stuff goes on all the time on campus.When a student, unbeknownst to me, left a door open for me to a computer lab, the head of the department at my college — Claremont McKenna — accused me of inviting another “Virginia Tech” on campus. He threatened to ban me from all the computer labs on campus, which would have made completion of my academic year all but impossible. I protested both the decision and the imperious nature of the director.
Ultimately, cooler heads prevailed — especially after I threatened to call a lawyer (sorry, but nowadays, you have to) — but it just goes to show that no administrator ever ought to be given the power to decide for himself what constitutes a threat. We have police — who must discern prudently what is and is not a threat — for a reason.