Despite our editorial presented during the first week of classes, the development of information surrounding the Steven Salaita case has left the Editorial Board split on our stance over whether we believe he should be hired.

We’re reluctant to say he shouldn’t be hired because we don’t know him. We don’t know his teaching style. We know only what his curriculum vitae and online profile can tell us.

But, based on that online profile, we agree about one thing: We wouldn’t want Steven Salaita to be our professor.

Before a semester starts, students do everything they can to get a glimpse of what their professor will be like. They go to RateMyProfessor.com. They search for anything about the professors, whether they’re on Wikipedia, LinkedIn or Twitter, whether they’re young, old, attractive, kind, open-minded or an easy grader.

If the first thing we saw were Salaita’s tweets, we wouldn’t feel like we were going into an open learning environment. If we saw a professor who said that anti-Semitism was honorable, it wouldn’t match an “Inclusive Illinois.”

His presence on Twitter made quite the first impression, just like our generation has been told over and over.

We’ve been taught that what you put on social media could make or break you. We’ve been told that our future prospective employers will look up our Facebook and Twitter accounts. A lack of professionalism on social media — whether it’s pictures of us drinking or vulgar and anti-semitic tweets — can hinder our careers. It can be more than enough to get an employer to choose another candidate.

We’ve been told that our degrees don’t matter if our tweets are inappropriate. Our experience is worthless. Our talent is moot.

We’ve been warned. In this day and age, everyone has been warned.

We are all for free speech. As a newspaper, we cherish and take full advantage of the First Amendment.

However, professors need to be open-minded and accepting. They need to help guide students to engage in civil discourse. When a professor’s tweets makes a student uncomfortable before the first bell for class even rings, that’s a problem.

That’s the effect social media can have.