Unbelievable...my first reaction was: what kind of a hick university is Millersville? There is "more to the story" all right, and it isn't about Ms Snyder's conduct, or that inoffensive picture (I submit that what made the picture a lame pretext for the vindictive action taken was the word "drunken".

Read the "Lancaster Online" linked story above...she was a victim of political pressure from the school board (where she had been a practice teacher) on the college, and apparently her faculty "advisers" were looking for some dirt on her, and took the best they could find to the administration.

We're hearing every day about how people's "personal" comments made online come back to haunt them, and I agree that many people, especially young people, are naive in what they reveal about their personal lives and thoughts online, but this whole case is so ridiculous that it totally negates Susan's point in that regard.

And have I missed something or am I just lucky to be living in Canada? Teachers, including long-serving ones, are regularly fired for abuse of students...there are clearly drawn lines these days delineating appropriate and inappropriate behaviours in the classroom and community. Unless the American Taliban has firmly taken hold in Pennsylvania, this case falls so far short of that line that it should get laughed out of court in half an hour.

One alternative reading of the situation presents itself--again, this is speculative: what if, as defenders of the ridiculous case presented keep implying, Ms Snyder actually acted inappropriately in the classroom in such a manner as made her supervisors uneasy--but they didn't want to confront the issue directly, for whatever reason, so they came up with this crock? If so they will have to live with the whole thing backfiring on them, and they need to go study Remedial Public Relations to learn how not to make a touchy situation into a media nightmare.

If they had a real concern for the implications of the innocuous photo and its d-word caption, there is an appropriate level of response--they should have phoned Ms Snyder and suggested that she remove it.      

W-O