From College Monthly, September 1974
Not too long ago, Steven Schwartz, a student at Cortland College in Cortland, New York, regretfully informed his landlord that he could only pay half the forthcoming semester’s rent at a time. Doubting Schwartz’s poverty plea, his landlord promptly telephoned the Cortland financial aid office and asked for a rundown of Schwartz’s fiscal status. Among other things he was told that Schwartz was about to receive a substantial loan; moreover, he was told the exact amount of the loan, its source, and the name of the bank that was floating it. Armed with this confidential information, the landlord confronted his startled tenant with a renewed demand for a full semester’s rent.
The incident was extraordinary only because it was made public.
“People from outside the college community are constantly asking me for information about students,” says Alfred H. Cope, Registrar, and Manager of Student Data Systems of Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Every working day, Cope, like thousands of other student data personnel across the country, is swamped with dozens of inquiries from equal numbers of self-anointed private detectives. The snoopers include government and corporate recruiters, junk mail company representatives, philanthropic organization personnel, former teachers, and even friends, and relatives; each is anxious to probe some sensitive aspect of the subject student’s past, present, and/or future without the student’s awareness or approval.
Sometimes the requests for information are downright amusing. There was a time when a man asked the Office of Student Affairs at Stanford University for a copy of the psychological test scores of a student whom he was considering marrying. It seems that the fellow wanted to assure himself that his betrothed was of equivalent (or inferior?) intellectual aptitude before it was too late to do anything about it.
But often the queries are anything but amusing. Last summer, for instance, the Northrup Insitute of Technology was visited by a scandal-mongering television crew from Los Angeles that wanted the institute to release the files necessary for an exposé of a Northrup student alleged to be a political protege of actress/activist Jane Fonda.
Fortunately, the institute refused to honor the prying request. If placed in a similar situation, would your college have been as tight-lipped? Would it have insisted that the information it has don you was for your eyes only?
Don’t count on it.
Several years ago the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) conducted a sweeping survey of record disclosure policies at 100 of its member institutions. The survey showed, amazingly, that most of the sampled institutions did not even have student record disclosure policies. Disclosure of the information requested by an inquiring party was immediately allowed by the data personnel at these institutions if, in their enlightened opinion, such disclosure “served the best interest of the student, the University, or the community”. In other words, if they felt like it.
The results of the AACRAO survey were buried in an appendix of its house organ, College and University. No wonder.
“Do you allow the release of grades and transcripts to students’ former high schools?” the 100 randomly chosen schools were asked, for instance. Ninety-seven percent said yes, they did. Do you immediately release information to philanthropic organizations tendering financial support to students without the students’ express consent? Seventy-six percent said yes, they did. Were academic transcripts made available in like fashion to prospective employers? Twenty-seven percent answered affirmatively.
Perhaps the most startling response came in answer to the following question: “Do you make available to local, state, or federal agencies, such as the FBI, Police, Civil Service, or Military Intelligence, the academic and personal information deemed pertinent to the query without the student’s permission?”
More than 90 percent said yes.
Admittedly, the situation has improved somewhat since that survey. In 1970 AACRAO distributed a brochure to its 900 member institutions in which the college or university data officer (usually a registrar or dean of students) was urged to adopt a carefully considered data banf disclosure policy, and strict guidelines for drawing up such a policy were included therein. As a result, many schools did indeed take prompt action in a concerted effort to “shut the vaults” of their student data banks.
One such school was California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, whose revised record disclosure policy was elaborated in a recent memorandum by CAL’s registrar, William Schaefer. “My personal philosophy and that of the Institute concerning student records and data is simple: a student’s record is essentially his personal property. I have custody of it, but what I do with it is in very large measure determined by what a student wants me to do.” Without the express, prior consent of the subject student, Schaefer, and his staff will allow the disclosure of no more than the academic equivalent of name, rank, and serial number. “All persons, after proper identification, requesting information about students,” Schaefer’s mimeographed fiat reads, “will only be given the following information: 1.Verification of date and place of birth, 2. School or division of enrollment and class dates, 3. Degrees earned, if any, date, major or field of concentration and honors received, 4. Verification of signature.” All rather innocuous stuff. Obviously, if all college and university data personnel subscribed to Schaefer’s “philosophy” there would be no need for students to worry – no need to raise the hue and cry.
But, alas, such is not the case. Today, holes in the academic data dikes continue to spring everywhere, causing irretrievable damage to the student community’s sense of privacy as well as its present and future financial, academic, and political security. Witness the landlord’s sneaky tactics at Cortland.
Students are protected even at schools that purport the AARCAO guidelines. Lex Barnett, registrar at Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida, recently informed this writer that he “subscribes to and generally follows the AARCAO guidelines,” making available to inquirers “only the barest academic data about students.” Nevertheless, Barnett was quick to remind us, that he and his staff “do make individual decisions occasionally and are quite lenient (my emphasis) with those agencies which deal with national securities [sic] and national welfare.” One wonders how Jacksonville’s 1500 students would react if they realized how flimsy the barrier protecting them from Gordon Liddyish government dossier compilers is.
Paul Dresser, vice provost of Michigan State University and an authority on the abuse of student records: “The search by various organizations, congressional committees, and the like for information about students has brought to administrators an awareness that they have not fully realized the extent of the records kept on students, that their policies on maintenance have not been clear, and that their records really have not constituted a system, but rather a series of unrelated and often closely guarded preserves controlled by individuals who have determined both what went into them and how they were used.”
Perhaps the greatest demonstration of the growing concern over the ethical questions involved in student record-keeping came at a conference recently in Tuxedo, New York under the auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation. Numerous experts on student rights participated in the week-long think tank. Led by such student advocates as Michael Liethen, editor of the College Law Bulletin, and Drew Olim, director of the United States National Student Association’s legal rights program, the experts agreed on a set of guidelines and recommendations, which, if adopted by the nation’s institutions of higher learning, should go far towards buttressing the average college student’s right to privacy and his/her unimpeded pursuit of happiness. The guidelines were much tougher than those which AARCAO had endorsed. The think tankers strongly recommended that student data personnel not release any identifiable information from a student’s record “without the written consent of the student based on full knowledge of the intended uses of such information.” Moreover, in order that students may learn something of the parties seeking information about them, data personnel were strongly advised to keep a record of all requests for information in a student’s files, including the name of the investigative individuals or agency, data, alleged purpose of the request and disposition of the request.
In order that students not be blemished by false, erroneous, or malicious information in their files, the conferees urged that “students…be given the opportunity to challenge the accuracy of the information contained therein, to petition for the removal of specific items in the files, and to add written comments or explanations to the file.” It was even suggested that in order to minimize “distrust between the student and faculty” and to allow students to acquire a better knowledge of their academic strengths and weaknesses that institutions “experiment with practices designed to remove the cloak of confidentiality” from faculty recommendations and character evaluations. In the past, as is well known, few institutions have let students see more than the ink of the dossier.
The Sage Foundation’s think tank took a particularly noteworthy stance on the question of responding to subpoenas, recommending that a student be notified immediately when his or her records were served with a subpoena. In the past, few institutions bothered to do this.
It also urged that where a subpoena seeks information likely to chill freedom of expression or organization, a university “has an obligation to quash the subpoena in court.” Still, an academic question is how many universities would actually adopt such a politically “radical” role in defense of their students.
The record is certainly not very encouraging in this respect. In August 1966 the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed from the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University copies of known membership lists filed with the universities by campus political organizations to be critical of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently wrote the universities involved, calling this perhaps the most serious breach of academic freedom in years, and urged them to resist in every legal way. Yet none even tried.
In fact, things got worse. In reaction to the disturbances that had become de riguer on campuses four years later, the Pennsylvania State Legislature amended its scholarship and loan acts, authorizing the state’s Higher Education Assistance Agency to “deny all forms of financial assistance” to any Pennsylvania student who had committed “certain behavioral acts and offenses.”
The following March, several thousand institutions across the country were asked to sign a statement obligating them to report the names of any students residing in Pennsylvania who had been expelled, dismissed, or denied enrollment because of disruptive activities or had, to the best of the institution’s knowledge, been convicted of any court of record for felonies or acts of “moral turpitude.” If any institution refused to sign the agreement, it would immediately be denied “approved status” and Pennsylvania students at that school would be denied the state’s financial aid.
The score was a little better this time: about 18 schools balked at signing the agreement, including tiny Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., whose president, John R. Colemen, explained: “We can understand the state asking a would-be recipient directly if he has been dismissed from a college for disruptive activities. What we cannot accept is the idea that the college itself is put in the position of being the reporting agency…[It] would threaten academic freedom and, equally important, academic responsibility.”
That was the good news…Some 1200 institutions did sign. Numerous Pennsylvania students subsequently lost scholarships. (Those institutions that refused to cooperate with the state legislature’s witch hunt offered to replace severed scholarships and loans with their own funds).
Some will argue, of course, that since the members of the campus revolt of the sixties have, by now, been vindicated not once, but several times over, there is no longer need to fear the government intrusions such as those just cited, hence no need to feel apprehensive about how universities would react to them. A cautious few disagree, including Dr. John D. Black, Director of Research and Staff and officer of the Administrative Panel on the Privacy of Information at Stanford. “I have the impression that there is less sensitivity to the problem of privacy in the campus community since the end of the Vietnam War and the era of activism which accompanied it,” he recently told me, “but I think that the danger of privacy invasion remains a serious one which requires vigilance. Despite President Nixon’s recent statement on the subject of privacy, the Federal government has not inspired widespread confidence that it can be trusted to use information it gathers for benign purposes only.”
Will college and university administrators adopt the recommendations of the Tuxedo conference and act in forceful and decisive fashion to protect the privacy and security of their students’ records? Can they bring themselves to part with student records after they have outlived their usefulness rather than them to their cherished university archives? To work up the nerve to refuse government investigators when they ask to see students’ criminal and disciplinary records? Will they become convinced of the necessity of spending the millions of dollars necessary to prevent illegitimate access to their data-crammed computers?
Only your registrar knows, and he’s probably not telling.