Fired Harvard Blogger Shares Her Tale
Blogger and former Harvard employee Norah Burch shares her thoughts about losing her job over content on her blog in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. (The article does not seem to be available online, sadly.) She says she used her blog as a place to vent about frustrating events and people during the day. The URL for her personal Web site is in the signature of her e-mail. Her Web site links to her blog. Some of her colleagues followed that path and read some of her posts.
She realizes now how threatening the posts sounded, but she meant them only as angry rants, not as threats she would have acted on. The lessons she’s learned, she writes, is to be much more cautious about sharing her blog and how she identifies people in her blog posts.
She raises some important questions about whether employers have the right to fire someone for ranting online. She asks, “What if I had gone out to lunch with friends and read aloud from a diary I kept beside my bed? Could Harvard have fired me for that?”
The Crimson, Harvard’s student paper, wrote about the incident in May.
Thanks for letting me know about the article, Garrett!
Addendum 7/9: We talked about this incident at last night’s blog meeting, so it was interesting learning that someone linked to this post when I checked my referer log tonight.
I dug out the Boston Globe Magazine article and will try to remember to share it with interested bloggers.
