final ethical dilemma ppr 04.10.13

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Running head: CYBERBULLYING ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
Cyberbullying on College Campuses:
Exploring the Ethical Response to a Case Study Between Staff and Students
Kate Curley
Penn State University
Author Note
Kate Curley, Department of College of Student Affairs, Pennsylvania State University
Correspondence concerning this paper should be directed to Kate Curley, College of Education,
The Pennsylvania State University, 400 Rackley Building, University Park, PA 16802. Contact:
kmc430@psu.edu.
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Cyberbullying on College Campuses:
Exploring the Ethical Response to a Case Study Between Staff and Students
On Sept. 19, 2010, Rutgers University first year student, Dharun Ravi allegedly secretly
filmed his first year roommate, Tyler Clementi, having a sexual encounter with another male
student. After the video was streamed online, Clementi committed suicide. The case spurred
widespread controversy. In the legal proceedings, Ravi was found guilty for secretly observing
Clementi, but not intending to intimidate him for being gay. The problem is, as reporters and
researchers point out, is cyberbullying on college campuses is largely outside of the law. In fact,
before Tyler Clemnti’s case, the conversation surrounding cyberbullying was largely focused on
K-12 education. Although the conversation has now started spawned from this event,
cyberbullying remains an unresolved ethical dilemma on college campuses. Furthermore, recent
research highlights the growing and significant impact cyberbullying can have when surveys
found that almost 22% of college student respondents had been cyberbullied and a little under
9% said they had cyberbullied someone else (MacDonald & Roberts-Pittman, 2010).
In order to explore this issue, this paper will attempt to address the larger issue of
cyberbullying through a particular fictitious example that will be used to illustrate how one can
use multiple ethical paradigms and frameworks to resolve such an issue on one’s own college
campus. Although the process includes significant bias because of my own personal values, the
hope is that the discussion can be applied to more general situations. The resulting proposed
resolution will be a combined product of my various personal and professional ethic codes as
they pertain to legal issues and the ethic of justice, the ethic of care, the ethic of critique, and the
multidimensional ethic of the profession. Limitations of the case study will be addressed and,
finally, future implications and directions will be given.
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The Case Study
Imagine, for example, you are the Vice President for Student Affairs at Lombardi College
in the state of Pennsylvania (specified for the sake of knowing the applicable state laws). One of
your staff members, Dr. Amy Winters comes crying in your office and says she is going to have
to quit her job and never will be able to work again. She tells you that there is a fake Facebook
page online of her making fun of her appearance, placing her in inappropriate sexual positions in
“Photoshopped” photos, and insulting her in both in the biography section and through posts by
various students. Assumedly in response to this Facebook profile page, Dr. Amy Winters had
been recently been subjected to anonymous notes referencing some of the insults and pictures on
the page. Dr. Winters was notably upset and informed her grad assistant about the note. Hearing
this, Dr. Winters’ grad assistant said she had also found the page and friended the “person” to
show Dr. Winters the fake profile. The grad assistant also showed you the page and you saw that
many Lombardi students had wrote disparaging comments on the wall and in the “about me”
section such as “fuck that ugly b****” and racially charged slurs such as “that [n word] is better
fit for a slave than an administrator.” However, clearly stated on the page is: “This is not the real
Dr. Amy Winters and does not claim to be.” After some investigation, you find that one
Lombardi student, Mark Fitzgerald, was responsible for the creation of the page.
Throughout the page, there are a few mentions of a recent disciplinary action Dr. Winters
implemented. Recently Dr. Winters had to act as the “bad cop” amongst the students. Over the
past few years, you and the administration have sought to cut down on a major student “drinking
holiday” in the area. Coupled with significant law enforcement increases, Dr. Winters was given
the responsibility to force Fraternity and Sorority houses to completely shut down during this
drinking holiday. There was significant push back and you come to find out that Mark created
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this fake Facebook page and friended all his friends in Greek Life in response to the restrictions
put against them. The Facebook page was created while they were on the Lombardi wireless
network, but it is created as a private Facebook page by friend request only. Dr. Winters feels
like she cannot be an effective administrator with this Facebook page out there. Mark feels like
the internet is public domain and they have the right to free speech. What do you do? Can you
reprimand the students? Do they have free speech and what responsibility do you have to protect
your staff? What action is in the best interests of the students?
Legal Considerations
Before identifying the ethical components of this scenario, the situation needs to first be
proven unsolvable by the law and legal precedence. Currently, North Carolina is the only state
that has a law that prohibits students from creating a fake profile of their teachers (Miller, 2013).
For the purpose of this case study, therefore, you are not in a state with any legal precedence. It
is important to note, too, that even though the law in North Carolina exists, few arrests have been
made and the law has been proven very hard to enforce. More generally, schools have a very
hard time enforcing any cyberbullying policy even if they have a cyberbullying policy in their
code of conduct (Willard, 2007)
In K-12 schools, the most recent cases are two almost identical scenarios with opposing
rulings, both released on February 2, 2010. In both cases, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School
District and Layshock ex. rel. Layshock v. Hermitage School District, students used an offcampus computer to create an offensive fake profile of their school principal. In response to both
incidents, the school suspended the student (Davis, 2011). The question the court asked was did
the school violate First amendment rights by suspending the student? In one case, they did and
the other case they did not. The grand majority of the time, fake profiles defaming
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administrators has historically not been seen as “substantially disruptive” to the school in court
and, thus, no legal recourse is required (Hinduja & Patchin, 2011).
On the other side of bullying laws and policies is the First Amendment. The ACLU
(American Civil Liberties Union) argues that cyberbullying laws go against the U.S.
Constitution’s First Amendment that gives each citizen the right to free speech. According to
this law, they conjecture, a student has every right to say and do whatever he/she/ze wants on the
internet.
Cyberbullying remains a heated topic on either side with no current answers in the law.
Legal precedent is important in order to realize that the law has been involved in the past, but the
goal of a university should instead be to avoid a lawsuit. Even if laws are made, too, there
remains the question if laws can ever truly keep up with society’s cyberbullying dilemmas since
technology changes and advances faster and faster throughout time. Therefore, due to the
confusing legal climate surrounding this issue, the case study remains an ethical issue and
requires further ethical discussion. In the following sections, I will explore the scenario from
multiple lenses which will ultimately build on each other and starting with the ethic of justice.
Ethic of Justice
Related, but differentiated from the discussion of legal consideration is the ethic of
justice. As children, most people operate in this framework. Children have a keen sense of what
is fair and the concept of equal treatment is the primary determinant of what is right and wrong.
While helpful in starting one’s ethical deliberations, the ethic of justice cannot paint a full picture
for the proposed resolution.
There are several ways to analyze the situation from the ethic of justice. According to
Bentham (1948), the most ethical decision is that which gives the most favorable results as
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defined by the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In this scenario, therefore,
the ethical decision would likely be to fire the administrator and appease the many contributing
students by hiring a new administrator. Even adding Mill’s (1978) view of the social contract
where an intervention should only be used if the minority is harming the state is too simplistic
for this scenario. Would the students be the minority because they do not have power or Dr.
Winters because she is only one person? In this way, one can only intervene if students are both
the minority and harming the state (which, in this case, could be argued). With confusing and
often simplistic results, utilitarianism seems to be an incomplete and insufficient framework for
this scenario. Even using Rawls’ (1999) simple conception of fairness and equality as justified
by equal distribution does not provide a complex enough argument to break down this scenario.
The most compelling argument in this orientation, however, comes from Kant.
According to Kant (2004), “all rational beings come under the law that each of them must treat
itself and all others never merely as means, but in every case at the same time as ends in
themselves.” (n.p.). To me, this argues for an intervention on all sides: Mark, Dr. Winters, and
the entire student population. One could argue that the reason Mark is doing this is to push his
own agenda or “end” to get Dr. Winters fired and does not attend to the personhood of Dr.
Winters. More generally, the students do not truly realize or seem to care that Dr. Winters is a
person who will personally hurt from seeing this Facebook page. On the flip side, Dr. Winters
sees Mark and the Facebook page as a means to her end of stopping the disrespect. In the
process of removing the student and the Facebook page, again disregarding personhood and the
person behind the page, Dr. Winters achieves the end she desires. Hidden and forgotten in this
scenario are the other students who are receiving the messages from Marks page and acting with
disrespect towards Dr. Winters. When did the harmful message most directly target Dr.
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Winters? The greatest harm of Mark’s retaliation, notably, was not the Facebook profile per se,
but the disrespect from the student spurred by the creation of the profile. The root of the
problem, therefore, is a misunderstanding of Dr. Winter’s decision-making in the mind of
students. In this case, Dr. Winters, I believe was in the right. She acted in the best interests in the
students to attempt to curb underage drinking (which is against the law) and was wrongly
retaliated against. The students see Dr. Winters as a means to defame in order to reinstate the
Greek drinking holiday—their end goal.
So, the question becomes how does one find a resolution so that each party sees the other
as ends not means to an end? In order to explore this relationship, I believe, more ethical
frameworks need be used. First, from a lens of critique to explore the relations in terms of power
differentials and societal systems of privilege and then from an ethic of care to attend to the
emotions involved in the relationship.
Ethic of Critique
As described in the ethic of justice discussion, there are three separate parties actively
involved in the scenario: Dr. Winters, Mark, and the rest of the students. In the ethic of critique,
one must ask who is in power and who is making the rules. In this case, Dr. Winters has the
formal power in this situation. At the same time, Mark’s retaliation is an action of power against
Dr. Winter’s act of power. Reframing the situation, then, Mark’s actions can be described as a
symptom of disempowerment. The students, feeling equally disempowered are acting out—
perhaps extremely immaturely, but the alleged intent is to criticize the status quo nonetheless.
The solution that resonates most in this framework for me is described by Paulo Freire
and bell hooks. One of the guiding principles of student affairs work is giving students a voice
and agency over their own education (Evans & Reason, 2001; Schuh, Jones, Harper, &
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Associates, 2011). Being a micro-manager, providing prescriptive feedback, and hand-holding
students through decisions are all completely against who I seek to be as a student affairs
practitioner. Instead, I attempt to operate contrary to the typical information transfer view of
education described by Paulo Freire. While Dr. Winters acted in the best interest of the students,
if she did not communicate her disciplinary action as an educational moment in partnership with
the students, Mark and other students may have felt disempowered. Freire (2009) states that the
goal of education is to combat the traditional system that sees education as a “banking system”
where teachers deposit information into students’ brains so that the students can then regurgitate
or spend the info without thought. Hooks (1994) takes this assertion a step further and describes
education as the practice of freedom. The goal, therefore, is to get students to act ethically free
in partnerships with the administrators.
Working in student affairs, I truly believe in both the education of the whole person and
fostering critical thought. Rather than ascribing or seeking to teach certain meanings to student’s
lives or simply depositing knowledge, I am committed to fostering the “meaning-making
process” or the way one constructs meaning outlined by Baxter-Magolda (2003) or Kegan
(1982). Therefore, instead of placing empty punishments, the goal of an educator is to get the
student to think of what he or she is doing. The hope is that through this fostering of a voice or
“building a compass” (Baxter-Magolda, 2009), students are better able to face problems and
issues in their adult life (Baxter-Magolda, 2009; Kegan, 1998). In the growing use of technology
in this day in age, students are going to continue to have the opportunity to participate in
cyberbullying throughout their adult life. This means that “stop because I said so” does not
provide a powerful enough deterrent for students and future adults. Instead, how could Dr.
Winters remove the systems of power, address the marginalization of the students, and create
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what Baxter-Magolda (1993) calls a learning partnership? Students do need to take
responsibility for their actions, but it is also important to help them feel empowered because selfdirected education is, most simply, the ultimate goal of an educator. What is the best way to
both make students empowered, but also learn from the experience? How can they be kept
accountable without being further marginalized? Free speech is everyone’s rights and taking that
away takes away power and freedom of another; how can one enable free speech and still care
for the needs of the administrator? For this last question, the ethic of care used to examine the
relationships in this scenario provides some guidance.
Ethic of Care
In order to more intimately recognize the emotions and complex relationships involved in
this scenario, the ethics of care can be used.
Noddings (1999) and Beck (1994) argue that the ability to step in another’s shoes,
understand the interconnectivity of human relations, and attend to the needs of others are
essential to ethical educational work. In doing so, the carer can best commit to the growth of the
student (Noddings, 1999). The Dalai Llama (1999) describes this ethical framework as
employing the simple concept of empathy driven by both love and compassion. The orientation
in this discussion, therefore, can be illustrated through the exercise of metaphorically having
each person step in the other person’s shoes.
Dr. Winters, an administrator is presumably very committed to the best interests of the
students and feels at a loss for why shy she is the recipient of such hateful comments. Her very
identity is being misrepresented and disrespected through the creation and maintenance of the
fake Facebook page. Mark, on the other hand, feels hurt from her disciplinary actions and feels
that online is a productive way to get out his anger. He never actively talks to Dr. Winters
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herself and, instead, sees the Facebook page as a harmless, productive, and private way to get out
his anger and hurt. Finally, students who contribute to the page probably do not feel attached to
the creation of the page and, therefore, feel a certain anonymity to the action. They feel like they
have free speech in their private lives and on their own computers and see nothing wrong with
also adding to the electronic outlet of their anger.
On the side of Dr. Winters, empathy is most required to realize the naïve intentions of the
student. Developmentally, the students are still learning and growing and there is a large lack of
knowledge on how to be an active and knowledgeable online citizen in the technological age. A
common misconception of students is that Facebook and other social media sites are private. As
Dr. Winters most likely knows, this is not the case. However, while this may be common
knowledge for her, recognizing that it is not for Mark and the other students enables her to
understand their perhaps misguided intentions and thoughts on the web.
The biggest directive stemming from the ethic of care is getting Mark and the students to
empathize with Dr. Winters. By creating the Facebook page and commenting on the wall,
students completely disregard the feelings of Dr. Winters. Dr. Winters is reduced to an object
and there is no attempt to understand and feel compassion towards her by the students. The
accountability aspect of the solution, therefore, needs to address this lack of empathy and attempt
to either build the empathy or make the students accountable while still taking into account
where they are developmentally.
Ethic of the Profession
Outside of the scenario itself, but connected to the solution, is the relationship between
me and Dr. Winters in my profession. In any workplace, there exists a large amount of personal
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responsibility to be a respectful, dependable, and trustworthy colleague and institutional
representative. Contrary to the experience of faculty (especially tenured faculty), student affairs
professionals’ first allegiance is not to the discipline and the growth of the discipline’s body of
knowledge. Instead, my allegiance working at Lombardi College would be to the college itself.
This includes, of course, first and foremost the attending students, but this concentration is
derived from the institutional mission. My actions do not occur in a vacuum and this differs to
Shapiro and Stefkovich’s (2011) ethic of the community. Their description of this ethic
describes the ethic of community as almost a moral responsibility to engage community
providers and interested parties. In this case, Lombardi is my community, my work, and my self.
The field of student affairs is exceedingly small and creating positive, meaningful connections
between me and my colleagues is important to my professional career. Therefore, estranging
Amy from me would be incredibly damaging to this professional definition. By ignoring the
complaints of my colleagues and supervisees, I lose the respect and trust of people in my field.
Doing this not only jeopardizes my effectiveness as a supervisor, but also the employability and
respect in student affairs work. Supervising employees is difficult and part of being a supervisor
is ensuring they feel supported in their work. While each supervisee requires something
different, attending to the needs of each is important for a healthy work environment
Related to this principle of being a collegial colleague and school representative is the
importance of looking at the case from a public relations perspective. Although most legal cases
did not result in any legal action, a lawsuit is still a likely occurrence if the situation is not
handled appropriately. If this happens, the entire school of Lombardi will be defamed and that is
directly contrary to the best interests of the students. Keeping everyone informed and closely
connected to the resulting action is, thus, given a sense of heightened urgency. While not
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everyone is likely to be pleased, those involved must deem the action at least appropriate enough
to not want to file a lawsuit and, ideally, respect both my authority and the school a whole. The
implementation of the proposed solution requires being political savvy in a way that this paper
can not fully describe. In the field of student affairs, this means having sufficient “contextual
intelligence” about the many moving parts and people in the college university so that a program,
intervention, or project will “stick” (Terenzini, 1993).
In order to create this fair and appropriate action, I and the school must be incredibly
intentional. In student affairs work, one of the primary standards of the profession is to be
incredibly intentional, mapping the actions and programs to learning outcomes which eventually
map to the missions of offices and the institution (Council for the Advancement of Standards in
Higher Education, 2012). Most generally, institutional missions often include three components:
education, service, and research. In order to have collective buy-in, then, the intervention in this
scenario must also fit within this generic mission. In the case of Dr. Winters and Mark, this
means I must help them serve and educate each other.
Now looking at the case study from multiple frameworks, the goals is then to synthesize
the seemingly disparate parts.
Final Note on Method
Thoroughly examining the situation to examine the larger implications of my ethical
decision is important to my personal ethical decision making process. As Badaracco (1997)
states, “right-versus-right choices are best understood as defining moments. These are decisions
with three basic characteristics: they reveal, they test, and they shape” (Badaracco, 1997, p.6-7).
For me, the most trying ethical dilemmas such as this one will do just this: reveal discrepancies
and consistencies between my various ethical frameworks, test the value of my codes and the
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relation they have with one another, and shape my operationalization of the joint codes of ethics
and my own personal understanding of my ethic of the profession.
In order to explore how I wish this scenario to be shape me and form my ethical
framework, reflection is important. Connecting each of the previously discussed ethical
frameworks, reflection provides a common thread and both helps develop and apply each ethical
orientation. While not for everyone, I do believe Aurelias’ (1964) claims that silence,
meditation, and reflection are critical components of seeking truth in the decisive actions of
ethical enterprises. To me, this practice enables connections between the multiple frameworks
that were not visible at first glance. In both my personal and professional life, I truly believe in
the theories of self-authorship which are based on the learning power of reflection. In the
theories of meaning-making and self-authorship, reflection is central to not only student
development, but adult development (Baxter-Magolda, 2003, 2009; Kegan, 1982, 1998).
Furthermore, in an early adaptation of these theories, Kohlberg (1976) used the meaning-making
process to describe moral development—and one could argue the development of ethical
codes—throughout the lifespan. In each of these theories, the “development” does not come
from what you choose, but how you choose it. The higher one is in his/her/zir own development,
the more able one is to refer to an internal compass forged through reflection and a deep
understanding of the interdependence of all, in this case, ethical orientations. The goal, therefore,
is to not choose one, but to integrate the multiple ethical paradigms in such a way that mirrors
Starratt’s (1994) reasoning of joining the ethics of critique, care, and justice. The question to
ask, therefore, is where are the patterns? How can the different frameworks support each other
so a decision can be made?
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The first pattern in the multi-dimensional synthesis is respecting personhood. In the ethic
of justice and Kantian philosophy, the ethical issue was that both Dr. Winters and Mark saw each
other as means not humans that should be seen as ends in themselves. Inherently in the
discussion of the ethic of critique, learning partnerships, fostering student voice, and education as
the practice of freedom require mutual respect between teacher and student. Similarly,
demonstrating empathy in the ethic of care inherently recognizes the personhood of the other
parties in the case study. As for the ethic of the profession, attending to the particular needs of
supervisees is attending to the specific personhood of all the members of a university.
Additionally, using the ethics of profession, thus, requires a sense of personhood in oneself as a
multidimensional being responsible to oneself, the university, and others.
The second pattern is the balance between accountability and free speech. In legal
considerations, First Amendment rights clash with the right to protect people from harm and
provide consequences for those who harm others. While free speech is obviously important in
the practice of freedom and questioning authority, Dr. Winters is also responsible for challenging
students in the ethic of critique. Applying the pillars of the ethic of care, Dr. Winters needs to
recognize the need for students to exercise free speech and Mark and the students need to be
accountable for recognizing the hurt they caused Dr. Winters. Furthermore, as a representative
of Lombardi, I am both responsible for supervising and supporting my employees and protecting
the free speech and wellbeing of the students.
The third pattern is the importance of fostering functional relationships. In the ethic of
justice, a functional relationship is that which all parties see each other as ends rather than means
to an end. The ethic of critique and theories of self-authorship concentrate on the learning
partnerships between student and teacher to foster student voice. Most apparent in the ethic of
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care is the love, compassion, and empathy central to all decision making processes. The answer
based on the ethic of care would be to foster a relationship between Dr. Winters, Mark, and the
rest of the students. Lastly, functional relationships include those between me as the supervisor
as well. Healthy supervisee-supervisor relationships are central to create an effective work
environment in one’s college and in the larger field of student affairs.
The fourth and most important pattern is the importance of education. In the ethic of
justice, the unjust retaliation of Mark and all the students stemmed from a widespread
misunderstanding of Dr. Winter’s ruling on Fraternity and Sorority parties. Education as the
practice of freedom is central to the ethic of critique; using education to think critically and
fostering one’s own voice. This fostering of one’s voice could, therefore be done using
Noddings’ (1999) ethic of care which seeks to foster the growth of another through empathy—
using the relationship as an educational moment. Finally, education is the primary mission of
student affairs work and operating on this assumption is critical to being intentional and ethical
in my work as a supervisor.
Proposed Resolution
Given these patterns, the proposed solution will have four parts: collecting information,
providing transparency, implementing educational programs, and rebuilding relationships.
The first part is to collect all the information regarding the issue so that the personhood of
all the parties is heard and self-authorship of the incident is allowed. This means bringing Mark
in, bringing Dr. Winters in, and consulting with my own superiors, the college’s legal body, and
campus experts on the issue of cyberbullying.
The second course of action is being transparent on the reasoning behind Dr. Winters
decision to curb underage drinking with a university-wide statement. The statement will be
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devised through collaboration between students and administrators to foster collective buy-in and
relationships to support the need for such a ruling and to challenge students to think critically on
the issue. The joint statement will then be disseminated across the university through a video or
a letter, for example.
Thirdly and most importantly, the case study allows for an educational moment. In the
case of Mark and other students, the creation of the fake profile suggests a lack of understanding
regarding online citizenship and internet safety and literacy. In such a way this response seems
to approximate the mean similar to Aristotle’s (350 BCE) conception of ethics. One extreme is
to disregard the administrator and simply respect free speech of the student and the other extreme
is to disregard the student’s right to free speech in favor of administrative efficacy and shut down
the site and expel the student from the school. The answer, however, as Aristotle asserts, need
not lie in the extremes and the most ethical answer is exactly in the middle. Education provides
the mean or the middle answer. The first educational intervention would involve speaking with
Amy about the developmental capacity of students. The second would be educating students on
the harmful effects of cyberbullying so that they can make an informed decision and hopefully
not act similarly in the future. These educational intervention could include, for example, all
staff training on online citizenship, cyberbullying and student development theory presentations,
and all student courses in orientation about the impact of cyberbullying. In addition to online
citizenship courses and due to the racially and gender specified comments, a mandatory or more
intentional diversity education programming would also be essential in similar forms.
The fourth course of action is to attempt to rebuild the relationship between Mark and the
students and Dr. Winters. On the micro-level, this could be having Mark and Dr. Winters foster
a professional, but close relationship. If there is resistance at first, connecting Mark to other
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administrators and Amy to other students first to rebuild trust before building a direct
relationship with each other may be necessary. Re-establishing the trust between administration
and students will again be a practice of transparency and, in the future, creating avenues for
students to get involved in (almost) all decision making processes. In making sure everyone has
a voice, relationships of mutual trust and respect will be created between administrators and
students.
Limitations and Concerns
Despite the extensive discussion of this particular case study, there are a couple of
significant limitations and concerns. The first concern regarding the application of my
multidimensional ethical framework to issues of cyberbullying is the question of timeliness. Or,
will we ever be able to keep up with technology? Technology is increasingly complex and
taking into account the laws and idiosyncrasies of the online components is becoming
exponentially difficult.
The second limitation is that this proposed solution works primarily in an ideal scenario. I
understand that there are most likely times where Mike and the students take it too far. For
example, perhaps the students are defiant and are unable to work with the University. At this
point, I do think that there needs to be a community-oriented response to the situation. If the
Facebook page continues to create a toxic and hateful environment, consulting for legal action
against the page and threatening expulsion or suspension of Mark and the other students may be
necessary. Starting with this, however, I believe, would alienate the students. While one may
think this may be the appropriate action ultimately anyways, from a public relations perspective,
it is important to give students the chance even if the administration believes that they will not
take it.
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Discussion and Future Implications
Despite these limitations, the proposed solution remains an incredibly viable course of
action for an administrator. By taking into account the legal cases, the ethics of justice, critique,
care and the profession, I am able to analyze the case study on cyberbullying between Dr.
Winters and Mark. Of course, the discussion holds significant bias being seen in my personal
ethical framework, but the integration of multiple perspectives will hopefully provide questions
to ask in cyberbullying cases in general. As stated in the intro, cyberbullying remains a
significant and growing problem on college campuses (MacDonald & Roberts-Pittman, 2010).
As college student affairs administrators, therefore, asking questions about one’s own ethical
framework as it applies to online citizenship in the lives of students, faculty, and administrators
is critical to being an effective leader.
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