The "Loco" In "In Loco Parentis" Shouldn't Be Taken Literally By Universities
Anemona Hartocollis writes in The New York Times that students are being disciplined by their universities for their online speech -- and the students are fighting back:

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 the rapper Cardi B, one of her idols, she made up some raunchy rap lyrics. By this week, she had gained 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 Ms. Diei's posts "vulgar," "crude" and not in keeping with the mores of her chosen profession. In September, it ordered her expelled.

"I was sick to my stomach," Ms. 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, Ms. Diei says, that on 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 another case that raises similar questions of decorum as Ms. Diei's, the University of Missouri expelled a student for reprinting an offensive cartoon and a vulgar headline in an underground newspaper, saying it violated a university policy requiring students "to observe generally accepted standards of conduct" and prohibiting "indecent conduct or speech."

The Supreme Court found in 1973 that the university had violated the First Amendment by expelling the student and held that "the mere dissemination of ideas -- no matter how offensive to good taste -- on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of 'conventions of decency.'"

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.

"Do they lose their ability to be anything other than a student at any point in their daily lives?" said Vera Eidelman, a lawyer with the speech, privacy and technology project of the American Civil Liberties Union ...

About Ms. Diei:

According to court papers, the school's professional conduct committee, composed of nine faculty members and three students, cited several examples it considered objectionable in Ms. Diei's posts.

Those tweets, her court papers say, include one in which she was "contributing to a trending discussion on Twitter about the song 'WAP' by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion by suggesting lyrics for a possible remix."

Her suggestion -- "He ain't my pops but I call him DAD" because he is good in bed (her wording was less polite) -- was "well within the normal bounds of discussion on social media," her complaint says.

It was the second time in a year that someone had reported Ms. 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 on 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; Ms. Diei disputes that.

The letter referred her to the student handbook, which says that university staff "may monitor social networking sites on occasion and egregious unprofessional postings could lead to disciplinary actions." But it left her to extrapolate what was egregious, she said.

The pharmacy dean overruled her expulsion three weeks later, after a telephone conversation in which, Ms. Diei said, the dean asked her to try to block people affiliated with the school from her accounts, and to minimize her affiliation with the university. "It's hard for me to do when I have so many followers," she said.

...If her posts have a sexual aspect, she said, that is "because I'm a sexual being."

Ms. Diei graduated from the University of Chicago in 2015 as a biology major, and then taught physics in a charter school. She wants to specialize in nuclear pharmacy, handling radioactive materials.

She believes she may have been singled out by the University of Tennessee because she dominated her class, often asking questions, which she said her classmates had complained about on Facebook.

Ms. Diei expects to earn her doctor of pharmacy degree in 2023. Her suit asks for monetary damages and for the court to declare the College of Pharmacy's professional policies "unconstitutionally overbroad."

She still posts. But she says she perpetually wonders: "Can I say this, or am I going to get into trouble for it? I truly don't know."

This should not be the university's business, and I hope she wins her case.

This NYT commenter says it well:

Mike L, SC
Schools have no business moderating what students say online. Period. Nor should employers be allowed to use social media against their employees if the posts were made during off work hours. This has gotten ridiculous. I cannot imagine being a kid today growing up in America. Police & metal detectors in schools. If we treat our kids like they're in prison then they'll act like criminals. But this nonsense has spread to every addict of American life. We can't even go to the airport without being strip searched. How did we get here?