Some Interviewers Google College Applicants; This Cornell Interviewer Gets Googled

The moral quandary posed in yesterday’s The Ethicist column in the NY Times Sunday Magazine was the flip side of my own recent experience as an interviewer of applicants to my alma mater, Cornell University. Cornell’s been good to my entire family, so I felt I owed it some small service.
Interviewing seemed like a natural, since it’s something that I know more than a little about. But I limit my role to providing a bit more information about the applicant to the university and vice versa. I’m not interested in being a judgmental gatekeeper, although I do express extra enthusiasm for the candidates I particularly admire.
The first thing I tell my assigned aspirants is that there’s no downside to talking with me: I don’t write negatives. (I suppose that those whom I interview professionally wish I’d put them similarly at ease!)
So imagine my surprise when read in the Times yesterday that Keith Lublin of West Bloomfield, Mich., has nothing better to do with his time than to “routinely Google” his unfortunate interviewees, whereby he “discovered that one posted information on his blog that reflects poorly on him. May I ask him about the blog? May I mention it to the university? Should it affect the score I give him?”
Since when have the interviewers of these hapless applicants become private investigators? Should we check their credit scores too?
The Ethicist, Randy Cohen, wisely counseled Lublin:
Put down the mouse and step away from the computer. You should not Google these students in the first place, let alone make your dubious discoveries a factor in college acceptance.
But at the end of his morality tale, Cohen appended this shocking update:
Lublin checked with the university and was told not to ask the student about the blog but to include its URL with his report.
Blogger Beware: Your invented posting persona may be taken dead seriously. (My vainglorious alter ego, CultureGrrl, has been similarly misconstrued.) Your adolescent fantasies may reach the humorless Dean of Admissions, via the Google snoop.
In the college admissions game, cybersleuthing works both ways, as I recently discovered: I interviewed a student of Greek heritage and we naturally got to talking about my trip to Greece and the Parthenon marbles. I asked her opinion about the controversy, and mentioned that I had written a NY Times Op-Ed piece urging that the sundered portions of the frieze be reunited.
“I know,” she coolly informed me. “I Googled you.”
I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me, but I was momentarily dumbstruck. It just proves once again that in this search engine-driven world, everyone knows more about you than you think—even (or maybe especially) high school seniors.