Brown U. taps into Facebook to keep tabs on some student parties
By Kristina Kelleher

Brown Daily Herald (Brown U.)
10/24/2007

( PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The Office of Student Life is now periodically perusing Facebook for information on upcoming parties, Margaret Klawunn, associate vice president for campus life and dean of student life at Brown University, told The Herald.

Klawunn said there has been an unusually high number of complaints this fall from area residents about students' off-campus parties, and "we just want to remind off-campus students that the same rules and regulations apply to them," she said.

Additionally, students hosting off-campus parties are responsible for obeying city ordinances and can be cited for serving alcohol to minors and noise complaints, Klawunn said. The Office of Student Life is using Facebook to identify students who may be hosting parties so it can make them aware of those policies.

The main goal of using Facebook to collect information about upcoming parties has been to better know what is happening on a given weekend, Klawunn said. She also encourages students to send party - and Facebook - invitations only to the Brown community.

Recently, Associate Dean of Student Life Terry Addison used Facebook to find the students responsible for an off-campus party after he had been made aware of it through a neighbor's complaint. In that situation, he contacted the students to make them aware of their responsibilities as both Brown students and Providence residents, not to discipline them.

Both Klawunn and Addison have profiles on Facebook, as do many other University faculty and staff. Facebook currently includes roughly 280 profiles listed as Brown faculty and 440 as Brown staff, though not all indicate a current position at the University.

Klawunn currently has no friends on Facebook. Addison has three.

"I don't know of a single disciplinary case where Facebook was a main component," Addison said, adding that Facebook would never be the only piece of evidence used against a student in a disciplinary action. Instead, the Office of Student Life relies on Department of Public Safety reports or incident complaint forms.

The officials at the Department of Public Safety only check Facebook when investigating complaints, said Mark Porter, chief of police and director of public safety.

"If an official complaint is filed involving Facebook or MySpace, we would contact the network to investigate," he said, but "we don't monitor those sites at all."

Once in the past, a Facebook profile a student had made under the name Ruth Simmons was taken down at Klawunn's request. But Klawunn said University officials aren't going to monitor student drinking through Facebook profiles, saying that the University doesn't have the resources to check every student's profile even if it wanted to. "We know people are drinking. We're not going to do anything about" pictures on Facebook of students drinking, she said.

People posting on Facebook should realize that it is a public forum, said John Palfrey, clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He equated posting on Facebook to shouting one's message out loud, in the sense that anyone can theoretically gain access to that information now or in the future, and one cannot know who will access that information.

As for school administrators' use of Facebook to gain information for disciplinary procedures, Palfrey said, "I don't think it is by any means a violation of a (student's) legal right to privacy." But, he said, he doesn't know if the tactic is appropriate. "I do think it's a little creepy," Palfrey said, adding that universities should consider what kind of relationship they want to build with their students.

"Personally, I very rarely use Facebook -- just on occasion to follow up on something or when I am sent a message," Addison said. "I don't make a habit of checking Facebook -- it's not part of my professional routine."

"It's also a choice for me, as the chief disciplinary officer for the campus, not to spend a lot of time on Facebook. If I did, I would see things that I would have to act on -- and I rather not -- I don't want to go looking for things to act on," Addison said. Though some things "are brought to my attention, I don't go digging around."

A Facebook representative wrote in an e-mail to The Herald, "I can tell you that as long as the administrator is on the site legitimately, they are permitted to see those on their network. We encourage users to restrict their privacy settings if they do not want others seeing their profile."

"I think most of us students know that things we post on our Facebook (profiles) aren't nearly as private as (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg might have us believe," said Rahul Banerjee '10. "But on the other hand, I wonder about the wisdom of assigning a dean to do this at Brown. I think we have enough problems with shortages of deans as it is, and to assign deans to stalk students on Facebook seems like somewhat of a distraction from more pressing issues that I'm sure Brown is facing at the moment."

Sounds like the university is putting due dilligence via profiling into practice.