Press and Policy

I’ve been doing a terrible job at keeping this blog current, and while I realize that probably no one actually reads this thing, I think it’s important to briefly note, just for the record, yesterday’s news: the lawsuit against UW-Milwaukee. On Tuesday, the UWM Post and I filed suit (with the assistance, of course, by excellent counsel at Godfrey & Kahn and the Student Press Law Center) against UWM seeking the release of records that were denied release, in part, by the university because of [its interpretation of] the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal student privacy law. Click here for a PDF of the complaint, here for Journal Sentinel coverage, here for the SPLC press release, and here for the Badger Herald article.

UWM would have you believe that FERPA was enacted by Congress to keep private the personally-identifiable information of students who sit on, and indeed lead, a powerful university governing body that allocates state resources and formulates/reviews university policy, where there is absolutely no direct or even indirect connection to the academic life of a student. But UWM is flatly wrong; the way it’s applying FERPA is not what Congress intended and in fact, it is impinging on the public’s ability to keep public institutions of higher education accountable — to students, taxpayers, and citizens. Just ask the original sponsor of FERPA, former U.S. Senator James L. Buckley, who said this to the Columbus Dispatch: “Things have gone wild,” Buckley said. “These are ridiculous extensions. One likes to think common sense would come into play. Clearly, these days, it isn’t true.”

So, before I head to class this morning, I leave you with a line I think is timely from the SPJ Code of Ethics: “Journalists should…recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection.”