Archive for December 31st, 2007
Persons with no desire for self-control, anxious for the security of lives planned and controlled for them by others, may view with patient resignation the prevailing trend aways from freedom in the United States and in most other lands. Things are going their way. But anyone who views with alarm the growing interventionism will want to plan his escape soon. By tomorrow, or next month, or next year, he might have lost the will — and the capacity — to be free. The escape route, the path to freedom, lies in self-help, self-control, self-responsibility, self-reliance, self-improvement. And slow starters are unlikely to make it.
— Donald W. Shorack
Bill Online Easily, Fast & Free with PayPal. No Software Needed. Sign Up Now!
Keeping your job, in some states, could be tough in 2008. Watch what you post online.
In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.
Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.
Millersville University, in a motion asking the court to dismiss the case, contends that Ms. Snyder’s student teaching had been unsatisfactory for many reasons. But it affirms that she was dismissed and barred from re-entering the school shortly after the high school staff discovered her MySpace photograph. The university backed the school authorities’ contentions that her posting was “unprofessional” and might “promote under-age drinking.” It also cited a passage in the teacher’s handbook that said staff members are “to be well-groomed and appropriately dressed.”
Read it all: How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time - New York Times
