Last week, this post on the Journalism department by Alana Taylor caused a little bit of a buzz – you may recognize it from my post on a similar theme the next day.

In fact, Alana’s post turns out to have caused enough of a buzz that the teacher whose class she wrote about read it – and wasn’t too pleased.

The whole post is worth reading closely. My impression is that there’s a legitimate debate to be had over the ethics of what Alana did – quoting a lecture at a private university without first letting the lecturer know that she was on the record – but on the whole, it doesn’t seem like she did anything wrong.

The professor’s response, on the other hand, appears to have been pretty unambiguously bad.

Not surprisingly, Quigley was not happy with the story and was upset that Taylor had not sought permission to write her first-person report about the class, and told Taylor it was an invasion of privacy to other students in the class. By Taylor’s account, Quigley had a one-on-one meeting with Taylor to discuss the article, and Quigley made it clear that Taylor was not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again.

I’m not quite sure I understand the rationale there. How does this intrude on the privacy of the other students? None of them are mentioned by name, quoted, or even physically described. And if Professor Quigley wants to spare her students embarrassment, she certainly has a funny way of showing it.

“She told the class to read the article,” Taylor said. “Then she asked, ‘You all read Alana’s article, what did you think about it?’ There was silence for a good 30 or 45 seconds, and it was awkward and weird. And she said, ‘OK, we can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class.’ It was weird. It seemed like the students were scared to say anything.”

That’s not exactly encouraging the free exchange of ideas. It sounds to me more like bullying.

The sad thing is that Alana’s original post raises a lot of the thorny questions that would make for great discussion in a journalism class. As opposed to, say, 30-45 seconds of silence followed by a blanket ban on followup pieces.

Photo Credit: Dean Stattman