I was happy last week to see an update on a FERPA case that’s been unfolding for several years:

The University of Maryland has finally released the names of students it has found guilty of sexual assault in the past 10 years. It was reluctant to do so, citing the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, but said it would do so after state Attorney General Doug Gansler rejected that argument last year.

Three years after journalism students first made their request, the public finally knows: Only four students have been found guilty. Four. In 10 years. According to the school’s Clery statistics for 2007-09 (the only three years I could easily find on the school’s website), 21, 17 and 10 forcible sex offenses were reported each year, respectively. With 48 reported sex offenses in three years, it’s hard to imagine that in 10 years only four students have been found guilty.

Of those four:

only one of the students found guilty was expelled, and the other three were suspended for a year and forced to meet certain requirements, such as staying away from the victim and writing reflective essays. (The Diamondback)

It’s easy of course to see why the university tried to hide behind FERPA, a law that was intended to to protect the privacy of student education records. The number of students found guilty of sexual assault seems unbelievably low compared with the number reported to the school. It calls into question how seriously the university investigates students accused of sexual assault, as well as how seriously it punishes those they find guilty.

University of Maryland students should be asking their administrators some very tough questions right now, and hopefully they will make it clear that the University has a responsibility to investigate sexual assaults on campus and punish those found guilty. Reports of on-campus sexual assaults should be as publicly available as those detailing similar crimes occurring off-campus.

As bleak as the numbers are, at least they are public now. That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that many, many campuses have disclosure policies similar to how Maryland’s was prior to Gansler’s directive. At UNC, my past requests for names of students found guilty by the Honor Court of sexual assault were denied because of FERPA (despite UNC’s FERPA training for professors that says this information will be released upon request). To this I echo the recent words of North Carolina state judge Howard Manning: ”FERPA does not provide a student with an invisible cloak so that the student can remain hidden from public view.”

Reports of sexual assaults on campus are not educational records, and we shouldn’t tolerate it when universities insist they are. If we truly want to address sexual assault on college campuses — a topic of much recent discussion given the Title IX complaint filed against Yale and Saturday’s Wall Street Journal column that argued in favor of shutting down all fraternities — we need to start with detailed reporting about how universities address reports of assault.

That kind of reporting is only possible if universities are forced to be open instead of allowed to hide behind FERPA. So, a plea: We only know about the situation at the University of Maryland because student journalists kept pressuring the University, fighting it all the way up to the state attorney general’s office. Journalists, and particularly campus publications, have a watchdog responsibility to fight back when universities refuse to release information on sexual assaults because of FERPA, and they should give ‘em hell until every college is open with how they deal with assaults.

Updated to add information about UNC-Chapel Hill’s stated policy on disclosing the names of individuals found guilty of sexual assault through the campus Honor Court. Thanks Kevin Schwartz and Erica Perel for pointing that out.

Great news for those of us who worry about the increasing tendency of college administrations to throw the excuse of FERPA at every public records request: The University of Maryland will now have to release the names of those who violate the school’s code for sexual assault after the state’s Attorney General ruled that releasing the names of convicted offenders doesn’t violate the educational privacy law.

This is great news for all journalists, but especially college newspapers. FERPA — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — was meant to protect student academic records. But college administrators have used the gray area of the law to deny access to a range of records that were never intended to be restricted.

The Daily Tar Heel has fought against the misuse of FERPA for years, notably by challenging a 1996 decision to restrict DTH reporters from attending the disciplinary proceedings against two students accused of stealing copies of a conservative on-campus magazine. More recently, we’ve been denied access to petitions collected by student body president candidates with the argument that providing the names of students signers would violate their FERPA rights (I’d link, but the paper’s archives from the 2008-09 school year aren’t online). We’ve also been denied access to e-mails between the parents of a student shot by police earlier this year and the chancellor, again in the name of FERPA.

While any misuse of FERPA is cause for alarm, the situation in the Diamondback article touches on one of the most important reason why significant FERPA reform is needed. Student honor and disciplinary courts wield an enormous amount of power, with the ability to suspend and expel students for actions that now are often shrouded in secrecy. There is a reason that criminal courts operate publicly: Anyone accused of a crime should be granted an opportunity to confront their accusers, something that can’t be ensured if courts are sealed from observers in the name of FERPA.

FERPA resources

• The Reporter’s Guide to FERPA, compiled by Sonny Albarado for the Society of Professional Journalists
• Have a FERPA horror story? E-mail DTH General Manager Kevin Schwartz, who is collecting tales of FERPA misuse to mount a campaign for reform.