Personal Information Monash has a legal duty to maintain in confidence personal information relating to students, including names and addresses and photographs taken for ID purposes. A department should not provide the names of its graduate students or display photographs of students on the Internet without obtaining the students' permissions. The same applies to information about staff members. It is prohibited to include defamatory, objectionable or restricted material in a Monash University publication. A contravention of this direction will be treated by the University as an act of misconduct.
Defamatory material is any statement which tends to lower a person in the estimation of others.
Defamatory matter includes aspersions upon a person's private character, trade, profession or office, whether by direct statement, irony, caricature or any other means. For example, statements concerning the alcoholic habits of a member of a university department put up on the Internet with the intention of providing a humorous portrait of a colleague could be actionable as libel.