The pursuit of open disciplinary records at colleges and universities has become a constant and often embittered battle between student press and school administrators.
I experienced this conflict first-hand last year when I worked on a three-month project to create and analyze a database of Miami University's disciplinary records.
College disciplinary records are considered "academic" records and are protected under the Family Educational Rights to Privacy Act. The Miami Student, Miami University's student paper, argued in 1996 that the records are not academic and should not be covered by FERPA. The Student sued the school for access to them under the Ohio Public Records law.
The Ohio courts sided with the students, and although the university appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, full disciplinary records were to be released. But when the university began releasing records in 1998, the U.S. Department of Education asserted that Miami was in violation of FERPA, and sued the school in federal court to prevent the records' release.
The Department won its case last April, and the decision is being appealed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, one of the papers that initially requested Miami's records.
As editor of The Student last year, I became interested not only in the court cases, but also in the records themselves. There were close to 300 records in a box on my office floor — throughout the lawsuit, no one had even looked at the actual records.
Because The Students' request failed, the disciplinary records the paper received (from the university) were devoid of all personally identifiable information such as the students' names, ages and Social Security Numbers.
They consisted of two letters sent to the charged student: one initial citation informing the student of what he or she was being charged with, and one final letter explaining the case's outcome. A description of the incident, the violation with which the student was