Faculty with Facebook wary of friending students

One professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in an e-mail that she originally set up her account as an experiment while she was teaching a course on privacy. She explained that she wanted to show her students the potential risks of making personal information available on Facebook.

“I set up the account feeling it was only ‘fair,’ ” she said. “If I was teaching about FACEBOO[K], I should ‘experience’ it.”

English professor Jeff Nunokawa said he also created his account as an academic experiment, adding that he decided to start writing brief essays daily in the form of Facebook notes. Nunokawa explained that he writes his notes for an audience of Facebook users, treating the site almost like a blog.

Nunokawa, who has written 1,326 notes since he created his Facebook profile, described his use of the site as a “zero-pressure [form of] education.”

The friend request

Several university faculty members are Facebook friends with their students, but some are more discriminating.

The anonymous professor said she only sends friend requests to students who are abroad, have graduated from the University or have otherwise “moved on.”

Facebook is a vehicle for her to converse with former students, especially those who need recommendations or just want to stay in touch, she added. “I only accept friend requests from students whom I know well and who studied closely with me,” the professor explained. “I really only care about a few students … and honestly am appalled at the detailed information people give away about themselves.”

Nunokawa said that he is happy when students send friend requests to him, but he added that he would never send a friend request to a student himself.

“I don’t actively friend students so they don’t think I’m weird,” he said, adding that “the student might experience that as a form of pressure.”

Psychology professor Kenneth Norman said he interacts with graduate students and undergraduate students on Facebook differently, explaining that he only sends friend requests to graduate students whom he considers collaborators and friends.

Checking in

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In general, faculty members say they do not use Facebook to investigate their students.

“I do NOT check up on my students … unless one is, say, giving a concert, and I am curious about the concert,” the anonymous professor said.

Nunokawa said that he does not inspect his students’ Facebook profiles because it is intrusive, but he admitted to looking at the “little news feeds” sometimes.

Students seemed largely ambivalent about their professors’ presence on the Facebook.

Schuyler Softy ’11 noted that she is friends with a few of her high school teachers. “After graduation, it’s not as weird to be friends with them.”

“[Using Facebook] could be crossing the line in some instances and in other [instances it could be an] extension of … what goes on in the classroom,” Ben Weisman ’11 said. Weisman is also the director of national sales and development for The Daily Princetonian.

A link to the outside

University faculty members said they often use Facebook as a means of keeping in touch with people off campus.

“I use [Facebook] mainly to keep in touch with ... people who are not here in Princeton,” Norman said, explaining that he uses the website to keep up with people from “other phases of life, college, high school, friends from conferences [and] people at other universities.”

Nunokawa echoed that sentiment, saying that for him Facebook has become a “modality by which I find myself reunited with people my age that I have lost contact with.”