It's sad for a person without a law degree to think like this

Internal college e-mail on failing students goes to all on campus

A private e-mail alerting a dozen fellow academic advisers to a list of students at risk of failing was inadvertently forwarded by the dean of students at a Delaware college to every student on campus, The News Journal of Wilmington reports.

Among the phrases describing one Wesley College student's academic condition: "The hole she has dug is deeper than the mine shaft in Chile."

The e-mail, which went out to all 2,400 students on the Dover campus, was eventually retracted, but not before copies were saved, the newspaper reports.

The breach potentially violates the college's obligations under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the paper says.

The school has apologized to the 18 students listed in the e-mail.

The system authorizing only a small number of officials to send a campus-wide e-mail has how been revised to require the sender to get approval from a second administrator before it goes out, the newspaper says.

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First, all I have to say is: hahahahahahahahahaha.

Second, this is why we recommend you stay off academic probation. God knows I might have tried harder to pass calculus if I knew I’d get publically called out!

It’s actually kind of sad, these poor kids. Though, to be honest, how many mass e-mails did you receive from the Dean (or in my case, the President of the University) that you ignored? God knows I ignored most of them.

The worst part is that someone’s probably going to sue for libel. And believe it or not, e-mails are legit forms of communication for libel to occur. The issue here will boil down to if it was done with “actual malice” or not. In the Dean’s case, no actual malice occurred, it was a genuine accident.

However, the advisor who referred to the hole a student dug being deeper than the Chilean mineshaft might have a harder time defending that one. It actually meets the criteria – the statement was sent to multiple people, and it was written with the intent to damage one’s reputation. The only thing it doesn’t meet is that it doesn’t damage or adversely affect their occupation, though one could easily argue that this person’s occupation is student and that other professors who might have seen it could, albeit unconsciously, write her off in their classes.

I’m not saying it’s going to happen, I just happen to know libel law and I know how litigious our society is, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Two years of First Amendment law moment has passed, I would now like to resume what I started.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.