Allegedly bright collegians don't Facebook facts

Students at Oxford University are among the smartest anywhere in the world -- but even students at one of the world's most elite colleges apparently don't have enough sense not to post incriminating photos of themselves on Facebook -- even after they learned that university officials were using the popular social networking program to gather incriminating evidence.

Martha Neil writes about it in an April 18 post on on ABA Journal.com. The post is a follow-up on an article Neil originally posted in July 2007.

In that first post, Neil wrote that university proctors had obtained access to supposedly "private" Facebook pages and were fining students for celebrating exams by "dousing others with champagne, flour and worse." Neil's first article cites Alex Hill, a math and philosophy student at Oxford's St. Hugh's College. Ms. Hill "received an e-mail from Oxford citing her for 'disorderly' conduct after administrators spotted three photographs on her Facebook profile in which she is slathered with shaving cream."

"I don’t know how the proctors got access to it," Neil quotes Hill as saying. "I thought my privacy settings were such that only students could see my pictures."

The Oxford student union got into a lather about "the 'disgraceful' intrusion into" student privacy. It "e-mailed every common room advising how to prevent [Oxford professors from] viewing the photographs."

So.

That was July 2007. These are brilliant students. Did they really figure out how to keep the proctors out of their Facebook pictures? No! And yet, Neil writes, "many haven't been able to resist participating in--and posting online photographs of--excessive celebration of their upcoming graduation."

Thus, according to Neil's article Friday, "the proctors in charge of enforcing Oxford's code of conduct have had a field day fining students for dousing one another with champagne, shaving cream, flour, eggs and worse." University officials have levied "individual fines of between £40 to £500," imposing "penalties totaling more than £10,000--that's almost $20,000 in U.S. dollars, and far more than last year's excessive celebration payday for the university."

You'd think smart kids would know better, wouldn't you? But it isn't just Oxford students who don't understand that, if it's on the Internet, anyone can find it.

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Neil's April 18 post cites to this article in the April 17 London Times.