When Medill sophomore Coco Keevan decided she wanted to be friends with journalism Prof. Eric Ferkenhoff, she made it official. Facebook official, that is.
“I was intrigued by his life and wanted to know more about him,” she said. “I wanted to see pictures of his kids, for example, because he talked about them all the time.”
Keevan, a former Weekly contributor, is not the only student to “friend” a professor. It is customary for college students to expand their Facebook network to include co-workers, family members and, now, college professors. But there still remains a vague sense of how Facebook can affect professional boundaries between students and Northwestern staff.
Chemistry Prof. Owen Priest said since he created a Facebook page a few years ago, he has received plenty of friend requests from students in his classes.
“I’ve never said, ‘Hey, why did you friend me?’ I do know sometimes students will hear about something on my page from a friend,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, you should check out a video (of Prof. Priest) rapping.'”
Faculty members may be using their Facebook pages as an outlet to show students another side of themselves, Priest said.
“I hear from students about how they can’t talk to a professor because he or she is so intimidating,” he said. “I’m like, no, they’re not. So some professors use it to show that softer side, so kids can see them outside the classroom – they have pets too, they have kids.”
Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education Ronald R. Braeutigam wrote in an e-mail he is not aware of a University policy on Facebook relationships between faculty and students.
Gary Alan Fine, an NU sociology professor, said the Facebook relationship requires negotiations on the part of both students and professors.
“We are all part of the same institution, but what does that mean?” he said. “In terms of rights, in terms of distance, in terms of closeness – where do you draw the line?”
Despite the lack of a University Facebook policy, Priest never initiates friend requests with students.
“I just have decided that any students who want to ‘friend’ me, that’s fine and I’ll accept it,” he said. “But I hear students joking all the time about ‘Facebook stalking,’ so I don’t want anyone to think I’m ‘Facebook stalking’ my students.”
Students and professors must also consider the nature of ‘friending,’ said Political Science Prof. Jerry Goldman, who has ‘friended’ students for a project or class purposes.
“I wanted to have better communication with my freshman seminar students,” he said. “As I’ve come to know my students, it’s easier to forge a more congenial friend relationship in the original sense of that word.”
Students should realize if they ‘friend’ faculty members, it may change how they should use their Facebook pages, Goldman said.
“Do I really want to know how much a student in my class partied over the weekend?” he asked. “Students should recognize what is made available may be accessible for decades, and that information may come back to haunt them.”
Keevan said students’ decisions to friend professors often depend on the nature of their relationship in the classroom.
Being in Medill, she said, lends itself to Facebook ‘friending’ professors because the classes encourage additional student-teacher communication.
“I think the smaller programs in general give you a more hands-on relationship with professors that make it more acceptable to become closer,” she said.
While ‘friending’ a teacher would have been frowned upon or not allowed at all in high school, Keevan said, the student-professor barriers are different in college.
“In high school, those teachers I was friendly with were very strict about the fact that they couldn’t accept requests until after I graduated,” she said. “In college, the tables kind of turned and it became less taboo.”
