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Students Punished for 'Vulgar' Social Media Posts Are Fighting Back

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To Kimberly Diei, a pharmacy graduate student at the University of Tennessee, her posts on Twitter and Instagram were well within the bounds of propriety. She was just having fun. “Sex positive,” she called them. Posting under a pseudonym, kimmykasi, she exposed her cleavage in a tight dress and stuck out her tongue. In homage to rapper Cardi B, one of her idols, she made up some raunchy rap lyrics. By this week, she had racked up more than 19,500 Instagram followers and 2,000 on Twitter. But to the university, her social media messages were more than just a bit racy. After an anonymous source reported them for a second time, a disciplinary panel declared Diei’s posts “vulgar,” “crude” and not in keeping with the mores of her chosen profession. In September, it ordered her expelled. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “I was sick to my stomach,” Diei, 27, recalled. She was given two days to appeal, and she scrambled to find a lawyer. With the threat of a lawsuit looming, the dean of the college reversed the decision to expel her. But the experience was so jarring, Diei said, that Wednesday she filed a federal lawsuit with the help of a pro bono lawyer, arguing that the public university had violated her constitutional right of free expression “for no legitimate pedagogical reason.” In the age of social media, when platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are struggling with how much to police their content, universities are finding themselves in a similar position. They are fumbling to translate policies around decorum, civil speech and personal expression into the world of social media, where the line between public and private communication is fuzzy at best. And young people are fighting back, contending that their off-campus speech is no business of their school. The conflicts, which have often been resolved by court settlements, have intensified during the coronavirus pandemic, when the boundaries between work and home or campus and

The university said it would expel Kimberly Diei for Instagram and Twitter posts it deemed inappropriate.

She was given two days to appeal, and she scrambled to find a lawyer. With the threat of a lawsuit looming, the dean of the college reversed the decision to expel her. But the experience was so jarring, Diei said, that Wednesday she filed a federal lawsuit with the help of a pro bono lawyer, arguing that the public university had violated her constitutional right of free expression “for no legitimate pedagogical reason.

Universities generally do not hunt through the social media of their students unless a member of their community, like a student or graduate, complains of threatening, inappropriate or harassing language in a post, or unless it puts the university in an “inappropriate light,” said Mark Merritt, a former general counsel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After getting kicked off the team, she sued and won reinstatement. But the Mahanoy Area School District is appealing, in a case being closely watched by school authorities who are hungry for clear answers as to how far they can go in punishing off-campus social media speech. Civil libertarians say students should be allowed to hang up their backpacks and stop worrying about how they reflect on their school when they leave campus.

A spokesperson for the University of Tennessee, Melissa Tindell, said she could not comment on pending litigation. It was the second time in a year that someone had reported Diei for her social media posts; the first time, the university ordered her to write a letter of reflection. This time, she got a letter Sept. 2 saying that her “conduct is a serious breach of the norms and expectations of the profession.” One of her public posts, it said, included an image identifying her as a pharmacy student at the school; Diei disputes that.

 

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There’s a lot of ass-swinging and cleavage flaunting on social media these days. But I don’t consider them to be the business of the schools or places of work where these people belong. A lot of people feed off of attention. If that’s what would keep their sanity, then let them.

I seen the photo get real that wasnt vulgar

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