Earlier this week, Rachel Burnette, a contract employee with DTE Energy Company, posted a tirade on her Facebook page; a posting that resulted in her losing her job.

Got to work this morning and we currently have 275,000 customers without power! White people in Oakland county are b****** right now … they got f***** up lol…And don’t call me acting a g****** fool…I will hang up on yo a**! ***THIS HAS BEEN YOUR DTE REPRESENTATIVE PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT***

Even had the posting not included racist overtones, DTE should rightly be concerned about a customer service employee who finds it appropriate to publicly belittle the very people whom she is supposed to assist. But even more alarming than Burnette’s actual comments is that anyone would post such a diatribe on Facebook. Burnett is not the first person who has lost her job because of an ill advised posting to social media.

In his “Is Facebook the Place to Say It,” Chad Abushanaba begins with the acknowledgement that “The temptation is always there.” Abushanaba continues, “Furthermore, as human beings—social creatures who feel the desire to be noticed and to share our victories and to bemoan our faults—we know the impulse to ‘put it all out there,’ to ‘vent,’ to make light of a bad situation in front of our friends and colleagues in order to make it more bearable.” Venting is therapeutic and I will admit that I engage in it—but not on Facebook.

Recently, two colleagues and I had a jolly good time swapping stories about some incidents we had encountered. The three of us have very positive attitudes and are far from being burned out by our jobs. Yet some students, colleagues, and policies can cause frustration that really needs to be vented in order to maintain one’s positive attitude and sanity so as not to become burned out. Yet, such venting needs to occur behind closed doors or, using my partner’s strategy, with our little dogs and other non-human sentient beings. My trusted colleagues could blab, but the little dogs never would.

There are times when I have the temptation to post a “you can’t believe that such-and-such happened” comment on Facebook. Even if we could guarantee that the problem student or colleague or author of a policy is not going to ever see the Facebook posting, public venting would still not be appropriate. However, as Rachel Burnette and countless others have discovered, once something is posted on-line there are no guarantees about who can or cannot see it.

In my courses, I teach students that we have a responsibility toward those about whom we write. Burnette has a responsibility toward DTE and its customers. And I have a responsibility toward Burnette and my students.

One big difference between writing about Burnette and venting about our students is that, when she agreed to be interviewed for the local news, she chose to become a public figure and, as a result, her writing is open for commentary. As a public figure, she has to be prepared for individuals to disagree or even ridicule her position. But such is not the case with our students.

This is not to say that we cannot use examples of student behavior to illustrate inappropriate conduct as a teaching tool. In doing so, our motives should be pedagogical; not venting. It is best to use examples from the murky, distant past; examples that are so old that they would not make amusing Facebook postings or provide any catharsis through venting. Otherwise, as Burnette learned, we might discover that freedom of speech does not come with freedom from the consequences of our speech; that the few seconds of angry venting might result in serious repercussions.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD