Meanwhile, college instructors are increasingly in precarious employment situations. This may help explain the degree of Facebook venting. Some of the instructors whom undergraduates call “professor” are actually graduate students whose future in the profession is uncertain. Many others are adjuncts earning far less than schoolteachers, and without benefits or job security. Instructors can feel powerless, and at the beck and call of students who imagine anyone teaching at a college has endless time and energy for their concerns. The system can put instructors on edge, and in an antagonistic relationship with their students. Demands that might be reasonable of a tenured professor with his or her own office may come across as entitled.

But as hilarious as student-anecdotes can be, and as justified (if misdirected) the grievances, instructors should, resist the urge to share these tales online. Students will find them. Privacy settings—assuming an instructor has thought to use them – are not ironclad. Errors that make for funny quotes – especially those involving inadvertent innuendo—are that much more likely to be shared. Even when no name is given, students who come across these posts will know who they are. This may not only impact their experience of this one class, but also sour them on school more generally. What student wants to think that every time they make a mistake on an exam, the result is a lower grade plus your teacher having a good laugh about it? A mistake “liked” by dozens of your teacher’s friends? How many students would be thick-skinned enough to laugh along as an instructor and colleagues used his or her mistakes as a pretext to lament the state of Western civilization?

And there may be an unpleasant class component as well, especially at the college level. The very students likely to feel least culturally prepared for university life are the ones whose missteps—in terms of glaring errors in so-called common knowledge, but also in how to interact with professors—are likely to provide the most entertaining material for a Facebook post. Instructors may not consider this, and may think what they’re mocking is just the ignorance of today’s youth.

The responsibility here should not fall entirely on teachers themselves. Administrators should set clear guidelines about this kind of sharing, given how many otherwise stellar instructors (many of whom are relatively new to social media) regularly mock their students online. Departments can and sometimes do set guidelines, but more need to follow suit. A lack of explicit boundaries in this area will only lead to more unnecessary shaming of ordinary student behavior, and, conversely, more punishments of instructors for posts they might never have guessed would be a problem. Teachers are often over-policed as it is, wary of being photographed drinking wine or having racy private photos on their own phones for fear of losing their jobs. The focus should shift away from condemning teachers for existing as adults in their spare time, and onto addressing directly school-related social-media insensitivity.