We love Facebook, for many reasons. It lets us stay in touch with everyone we know, keeps us from forgetting birthdays, and provides an insight into what our friends and family are doing. Also, apparently, it lets college students land smack on their faces in front of the entire campus, not to mention the rest of the world. Here are five scandals that prove the point.
#5) Marques Slocum Really Hates Facebook Quizes
Marques Slocum, known to Michigan fans as “Grand Marques,” was a popular athlete at the Maize and Blue, and as a result, had many Facebook friends. One day, presumably out of boredom, he filled out one of those Facebook quizzes that people send to you, because you don’t get nearly enough obnoxious email forwards in a given day and you need them from Facebook too.
Marques made … well, let’s just say he was brutally honest about questions like “Will you ever get married?” and “Do you have a pet?” Modesty and standards forbid us from reprinting the quiz in question, although not linking to it, but suffice to say, if f-bombs were explosives, there would be no campus.
Marques didn’t get in much trouble: having everyone snickering at him was apparently punishment enough.
#4) There’s Such a Thing As Too Honest
Ahhhh, 2006. It was such a joyous, innocent time. Social networking wasn’t yet a buzzword, Justin Bieber was still in grade school, and people above the age of twenty-five were discovering, for the first time, that Facebook existed, and that people could put their opinions on it.
Then everybody, especially at LSU, went a little, well, crazy.
The problem were two athletes, members of the swim team, who were hanging out on a Facebook page, offering, shall we say, rather pointed insights about their coach. Now, of course, everybody is on Facebook anyway, so nobody cares if you’re saying that your coach drives you crazy, but LSU apparently feared the Internet and its endless destructive wrath, which is why these two swimmers were thrown off the team, thus putting their scholarships in jeopardy.
What’d they say, precisely? That they didn’t like their coach. But it was on the Internet! That must be bad, right?
Although considering our grandparents keep sending us quizzes, maybe the old days of no old people on Facebook weren’t so bad.
#3) Marlon Brown Says It Like It Is
One of the sad things about college athletics is the pretense that it’s not all about money, but about giving underprivileged athletes a chance at a better life by having them earn their education. It’s a dearly held tissue of lies that anybody can see through, but woe betide the young man who admits the truth on Facebook.
Like, for example, Marlon Brown.
What really stands out about this scandal is not that Brown admitted he was taking the college for all it was worth: it was the fact that his loving school, the University of Georgia, immediately tried to cover it up. First, they claimed it was a fake Facebook account. Then, they said that Marlon Brown did have a Facebook account, but he wasn’t the one who posted that awful message. Finally, they just admitted that, yeah, maybe Marlon Brown was just a little too honest in public.
At least he didn’t say anything bad about the swim coach!
#2) Some Photos Do Not Need to Be Posted on Facebook
We’ve all done it: we’ve posted a photo we never should have put up on Facebook. It could be that night you were really drunk and didn’t realize what you were uploading until it was too late. It could be a photo of a costume party where you wore an embarrassing costume. Or, in the case of two USC students, it could be photos of you having sex on a roof.
And not just any roof, either: the roof of Waite Phillips Hall, one of the tallest buildings on campus. In broad daylight. In front of hundreds. All of whom took photos and posted them on Facebook. And then YouTube, and then pretty much everywhere else, to the point where the couple got a Facebook fan page (since taken down).
USC kind of wasn’t sure what to do, especially since the woman in question didn’t even go to USC, so it settled for sanctioning him and allowing his fraternity to throw him out. The fraternity, Kappa Sigma, complained about “conduct unbecoming a gentleman,” although since one of his fellow fraternity members had sent out a memo a few weeks beforehand referring to women as “targets,” we can understand his confusion.
Memo guy wasn’t thrown out, as far as we can tell. So, misogyny is OK, but sex in public is not. Nice standards, guys!
#1) Yeah … About That Admissions Letter
The story goes like this: a student managed to get admission to Yale, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Columbia, and so on, but all of that paled in light of receiving the one, the true, the golden envelope that high school students stress over and that parents dream of receiving in the mail: the Harvard acceptance letter, complete with a scholarship that amounted to a full ride.
So, as a joke, the student posted a joke status on Facebook saying, essentially, “F**k Harvard” as a “Gotcha!” kind of joke. Unfortunately for him, Harvard didn’t find it quite so funny: they pulled the scholarship, the acceptance, and left him to…
Well, to go to another Ivy League school with a full scholarship.
Hmmm, you know, there’s a lesson in here, but we don’t think it’s the lesson Harvard wanted to teach everyone. We did learn that Harvard takes the Internet far, far too seriously! Is that what we were supposed to learn?
