A reflective opinion piece in the Columbia Spectator, published yesterday by student Derek Turner, examines the state of student rights at Columbia University and asks important questions about the range of rights and decision-making authority students should reasonably expect at Columbia. It is always a worthwhile exercise to assess whether one's university is delivering on the promises it has made to students and faculty to lure them to campus, or whether the school's administration is instead failing to meet the legitimate expectations it has created. Moreover, the article is timely in that Columbia students have recently sought to make their voices heard on campus issues such as gender-neutral housing, the university calendar, and smoking bans on campus, as the article discusses.
The Society for Professional Journalists has published a usefully thorough examination of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the 1974 federal law governing access to student educational and disciplinary records. Working in conjunction with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation (GFAF), SPJ's report details both how FERPA works—that is, what materials it does and does not cover and to whom its protections apply—and how it fails. Specifically, SPJ argues that FERPA "has been twisted beyond recognition, keeping school lunch menus, graduation honors and athletic travel records secret," and implores both student journalists and their professional counterparts to push back against the increasing misuse of FERPA as a one-size-fits-all justification for hiding public records. SPJ's report is designed to "help journalists and citizens understand their rights to education records and not allow school officials to hide important public information while still protecting legitimate student privacy."
In a week when a college football coach praised the mass theft of a campus newspaper as a productive "team-building exercise," and a blanket funding freeze of student fee-funded media continues at UC San Diego over the protests of just about everyone who's not Associated Students of UCSD President Utsav Gupta, the announcement of FIRE President Greg Lukianoff's new book project is aptly timed, to say the least.
FIRE announces its Speech Code of the Month for March 2010: Murray State University in Kentucky. According to Murray State's Student Life Policies, conduct violations in the university's residence halls may be punished by "creative educational sanctions," such as "writ[ing] a letter of apology" and "mak[ing] signs or bulletin boards." These sanctions amount to compelled speech that violates Murray State's legal and moral obligations as a public institution to uphold its students' First Amendment right to freedom of conscience.
