Facebook is all the rage in Britain, and if an article in The Guardian is any indication, the nation's professoriate could scarcely be less excited.
The article notes ominously that Facebook "threatens untold damage to relations between students and staff," and it chronicles a number of instances in which students have taken to the site to make disparaging comments about lecturers they don't like. In the past, disenchanted students might grouse to their roommates or scrawl epithets on a bathroom wall, but now, says Helen Smith, a tutor at the University of York, Facebook "makes permanent all the things that usually people would chat about in the pub."
That's true enough. And the article does mention a couple of genuinely troubling abuses of Facebook — including a false profile that accused a University of Oxford professor of having been a member of the Hitler Youth.
But the article's main point — that Facebook has plenty of unseemly vitriol — seems true of the Web in general, not just one particular social-networking site. If embittered students want to bash their lecturers, they can log on to MySpace, post to RateMyProfessors, or vent on their own blogs. It's hard to imagine the Web without uncivil discourse, so professors may just have to have thick skin. –Brock Read
