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Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

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Let’s be friends

February 28, 2012 by John

In graduate school, my policy on Facebook friend requests from students was that I would only accept them as friends after the semester was over. Since the likelihood of them having another class with me was very low I didn’t worry about them seeing ridiculous pictures of me and subsequently losing all respect for my authority in the classroom. When I started teaching at my current position, where the likelihood of interacting with the same students in multiple semesters is much greater, I changed my policy to reflect this by telling students that I would only accept their friend requests after they graduate.

Recent efforts to keep track of alumni, combined with Facebook’s movement of group management to a more convenient location (thanks Google+!), have led me to change my policy again. It turns out that students are more likely to send friend requests when they are in your classes than when they are not. This makes trying to build an online community of departmental alumni difficult after the fact. My new policy is to accept current students as friends while placing severe restrictions on the parts of my profile they can access. Students don’t see the pictures from my night at the bar with grad school friends, but they can see my status update about a recent sociologically-relevant headline.

Since I have only recently changed my policy and I am not advertising this change to students, I can’t evaluate the success of this change yet. The potential downside is that students may not control what their professors can and cannot see, so I’ll have to be careful to keep their photos of drunken nights and their ability to write and participate in class separate when grading.

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Posted in Student Life, Teaching Tricks, The Electronic Age, Tracking the Transition | Tagged Facebook, Google, Memoirs of a SLACer, Student Friend Requests | 3 Comments

3 Responses

  1. on March 13, 2012 at 9:07 pm Facebook is not for venting, Google Documents are « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] may find yourself needing to explain them to your friends, parents, school officials, bosses, or college professors. If you want to vent, do it in a Google Document that is accessible only to you and a few close […]


  2. on April 14, 2013 at 10:04 pm LinkedOut | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] a better way to keep track of what sorts of professional lives my former students are leading than Facebook. The obvious benefit is that I can keep track of these professional lives without being inundated […]


  3. on February 10, 2017 at 7:13 am You Don’t Have To Let Students Into Your Online World | Conditionally Accepted

    […] ad nauseam. Thus, we must establish a perimeter somewhere. Well, it stops here. Know that your social media space is off-limits; students cannot cross this […]



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