Dental Student Suspended Over Blog

Posted on December 7, 2005

First bloggers were fired because of blogs. Now students are getting suspended. In this case the suspended student was a Marquette Dental School student who apparently made a negative comment about a professor in their blog. A blog called the Marquette Warrior has a detailed post on the incident. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also has an article about the suspendend student blogger story.

A dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.
Scott Taylor, the student's attorney, said his client, a 22-year-old in Marquette's School of Dentistry, was brought before the committee for a conduct hearing last week after a classmate complained about his blog, a Web site that contained musings about topics ranging from his education to videogames and drinking.
The focus of the hearing, Taylor said, were half a dozen postings including one describing a professor as "a (expletive) of a teacher" and another that described 20 classmates as having the "intellectual/maturity of a 3-year-old."
Taylor released what he said was a complete transcript of the blog, which is no longer available online. Taylor said the student did not want to be identified, and his name could not be confirmed.

The Marquette Warrior post also said the student's lawyer, Scott Taylor, said they will appeal the ruling. It looks like a big overaction on the school's behalf. But bloggers need to be careful what they post in public blogs especially if it is about a place they work at or a school they attend. Even anonymous blogs sometimes get found out so be careful.