<p>I think both sides are being ridiculous, but the onus is on the professor to be the bigger person, as she is older and supposed to be a professional.</p>
<p>Nobody in the academic community takes RMP seriously. Any intelligent academic realizes that the site exists primarily as a place for disgruntled students to air their grievances publicly. Given that it’s not required and at many colleges not even the culture to rate their professors, it’s a completely biased sample. So let’s say that this professor wanted to move from UW-Whitewater 5 years down the line to another university - that RMP review would be meaningless, unless the video of her is really bad (and in that case, that’s her fault). All of her other reviews are positive (and I don’t see the bad review and video up there anymore).</p>
<p>So I’m really confused why a professor (even one at a small regional college) would waste the time, money, and energy suing a college student to remove commentary from a dumb website like RMP.</p>
<p>However, on the other side, I want to say that this student sounds kind of unhinged. A quick search for this professor’s name (I was trying to find her faculty profile) turned up, on the first page of results, FOUR Blogspot websites that this student created. I’m about 95% certain it’s the same student. The original one was [url=<a href=“http://uw-whitewaterabusesallyvogl-bauer.blogspot.com/]this[/url”>http://uw-whitewaterabusesallyvogl-bauer.blogspot.com/]this[/url</a>] Blogspot site that was set up specifically to criticize this professor. There are also five other ones - three on the first page, and two on the top of the second page. He even created one that was clearly designed to net people searching for her book (with one of the first lines being “I’ve not read this book, but if it’s any reflection of one of its authors…it’s worthless garbage.”)</p>
<p>This is very unprofessional, and honestly reflects worse on the student himself than the professor. Even if his complaints were justified, I would never want to hire this person! If he got the slightest bit disgruntled at my company or any of my employees, I’d be afraid he’d run all over the Internet creating defamatory/negative websites.</p>
<p>As a graduate student myself, I read through the students’ grievances. While the student did have a few minor justified annoyances with the professor, it actually appears that the student wasn’t well-prepared to do graduate work and is upset because this professor held them to a grad student standard.</p>
<p>For example, the student was upset because the professor deducted points for an improperly written opening statement; she states that the professor never explicitly stated what kind of opening paragraph she wanted, and that graduate students should know what she’s looking for. But that’s true - a grad student SHOULD know how to write an opening paragraph by the time they get to grad school. And if you haven’t, you learn by getting points deducted on your paper and fixing it later.</p>
<p>Also, the student didn’t know how to properly identify scholarly sources and seemed upset because the professor deducted points for this. But again…this is graduate school. I had points deducted for not using scholarly enough sources in a freshman sociology course. If you don’t know what’s scholarly and what’s not by the time you’re a graduate student, you don’t belong there. This student is also expecting the professor to give the student notes about what he missed after he missed a class period, which is just…I mean, they don’t even do that in undergrad.</p>