Valuing student privacy
In matters of privacy and safety, a proper balance is often difficult to strike. The Brown-Webb Amendment is no different.
An attachment to a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill passed last month, the amendment calls on the federal Department of Education to develop more explicit guidelines as to what information universities can and cannot share about their students.
Administrators say current law - namely the 1974 Family Education Rights and Privacy Act - is unclear and that such ambiguity is dangerous in the wake the Virginia Tech tragedy.
The premise, first of all, that ambiguity is necessarily dangerous is not altogether sound. Anyone looking for a surefire way to prevent acts of violence like the one at Virginia Tech is bound to be disappointed. That danger will, at some level, always exist, and we cannot let it frighten us into forfeiting our most fundamental rights.
Statements made by Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jim Webb, the co-sponsors of the bill, as well as Hopkins officials, seem to suggest that this effort is not merely an attempt to clarify the law but amend it. After all, for more than 30 years the law has seemed clear enough.
Instead this amendment seems rather more like a reactionary measure, one that is all too willing to forfeit educational privacy - enshrined by FERPA since 1974 - for a token amount of security.
Rather than designing guidelines on how to share students' private educational information, we should instead be focusing on ways to improve campus security, University-wide communication and emergency preparedness in the event that a rare act of violence does occur.
After all, one of the most tragic findings in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy was that the University failed to immediately notify students of the attack, and it took a second wave of shootings to get the attention of the authorities and on-campus security.
We should also focus our collective energies on making counseling services more accessible to students and responsive to their needs. This might require better funding as well as a more organized campaign to reach out to students who might feel as though appealing to the Counseling Center is a sign of weakness or some sort of personal failure.
It is not, and the good work that the Counseling Center does is one of our best lines of defense against breakdowns like the one that spurred violence at Virginia Tech.
Sharing information about students encourages selective profiling, a practice we find both unethical and counterproductive. We urge the University to take student privacy rights seriously and spend its efforts on more effective ways of making our campus safer.
An attachment to a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill passed last month, the amendment calls on the federal Department of Education to develop more explicit guidelines as to what information universities can and cannot share about their students.
Administrators say current law - namely the 1974 Family Education Rights and Privacy Act - is unclear and that such ambiguity is dangerous in the wake the Virginia Tech tragedy.
The premise, first of all, that ambiguity is necessarily dangerous is not altogether sound. Anyone looking for a surefire way to prevent acts of violence like the one at Virginia Tech is bound to be disappointed. That danger will, at some level, always exist, and we cannot let it frighten us into forfeiting our most fundamental rights.
Statements made by Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jim Webb, the co-sponsors of the bill, as well as Hopkins officials, seem to suggest that this effort is not merely an attempt to clarify the law but amend it. After all, for more than 30 years the law has seemed clear enough.
Instead this amendment seems rather more like a reactionary measure, one that is all too willing to forfeit educational privacy - enshrined by FERPA since 1974 - for a token amount of security.
Rather than designing guidelines on how to share students' private educational information, we should instead be focusing on ways to improve campus security, University-wide communication and emergency preparedness in the event that a rare act of violence does occur.
After all, one of the most tragic findings in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy was that the University failed to immediately notify students of the attack, and it took a second wave of shootings to get the attention of the authorities and on-campus security.
We should also focus our collective energies on making counseling services more accessible to students and responsive to their needs. This might require better funding as well as a more organized campaign to reach out to students who might feel as though appealing to the Counseling Center is a sign of weakness or some sort of personal failure.
It is not, and the good work that the Counseling Center does is one of our best lines of defense against breakdowns like the one that spurred violence at Virginia Tech.
Sharing information about students encourages selective profiling, a practice we find both unethical and counterproductive. We urge the University to take student privacy rights seriously and spend its efforts on more effective ways of making our campus safer.
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