Our View: Broad interpretation of privacy law is limiting your rights.
The primary federal law protecting your academic records is also being used to limit your free access to information.
Along with providing students access to their own academic records and a way to contest incorrect information, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act protects those records from public access. This seems like a worthy goal. But FERPA doesn’t actually protect much of our private information, such as phone numbers and addresses. The university is allowed to release those without prior consent.
Some sensitive information, such as social security numbers and transcripts, it does protect. And it’s important to have these restrictions. After all, individual students’ grades are nobody’s business.
But the current law essentially defines academic records as any record maintained by a university about a student, regardless of academic content or personal information. The broad letter of the law allows interpretations that far outpace the spirit, which was simply to protect the sensitive personal information of individuals in an academic setting.
This vagueness comes from the ambiguous relationship between this broad general definition of a student record and the more specific guidelines layed out in the rest of the law. The former implies a broader restriction and the latter implies only specific kinds of records should be closed.
So universities across the country can choose to use FERPA to deny the public access to everything from parking ticket logs to phone records of athletic officials. The Daily has recently been denied access to unredacted versions of football coach Bob Stoops’ phone log with all phone numbers intact.
If you contact a public official, you are entering into the public sphere. You and your fellow citizens help pay for these officials and therefore have a right to follow their actions. As such, in order to maintain that access, you give up your expectation of privacy when you engage with them publicly. And since FERPA defines phone numbers as non-protected material, these records shouldn’t fall under its protection anyway.
Records such as Stoops’ phone log allow us to check his compliance with NCAA regulations and to monitor how he is using a taxpayer-funded phone. Yes, OU has a compliance office charged with watching for any violations, but public scrutiny, whether individually or through the press, offers an independent validation that the rules are being followed.
As we’ve said before, it’s not that we have a vendetta against any university official. But your money pays for these individuals. Everyone wants to trust them, and it’s completely possible that they are deserving of that trust. But how can we, or you, know for sure unless the public is able to ask questions and monitor what they do?
Other universities have seen legal struggles over access to something as simple as parking ticket records.
Parking tickets are clearly not academic information, and should fall under the same category as campus police reports, which are not protected under FERPA. Access to these records would allow the public to hold the Parking Office accountable to its own rules and to watch for unfair enforcement.
In states like Maryland and North Carolina, courts have recently ruled to limit the most destructively broad interpretations of FERPA, but the country has a long way to go. In order for real progress to be made, the Department of Education must reform the law to protect only what it needs to and no more.
FERPA needs a specific definition of what is an academic record — and therefore is restricted from public access — and what falls under the Open Records requirement of OU as a public, taxpayer-funded institution. Transcripts and gender, race, identity and financial information should be private. Any other records, especially those that just so happen to involve students, should be available for public scrutiny.
Until that happens, OU should lead the way in this important struggle to protect freedom of information by following the spirit of the law. The rest of the country can hide behind FERPA to deny clearly reasonable and important requests, but OU should be braver.
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braceyourself 6 months, 1 week ago
I don't find that to be a demanding request at all. He gets over $300,000 per month, which is a massive amount. If he wants more private conversations, he can buy himself ten personal phones.
TheJeff 6 months, 1 week ago
When you make a stupid request such as demanding his phone records (and it is stupid), you're abusing the spirit of open records and all you'll accomplish is to motivate someone to find a way to legally limit those "rights" further.
Why not demand that the university remove all doors from offices? What are those public officials doing behind closed doors anyways?