Hiding behind FERPA’s confidentiality rules allows college administrators to create a false image that their colleges are free from the kinds of problems one would expect when five thousand to twenty thousand adolescents, many of them consistently intoxicated, converge on a few acres of ground. For years, colleges, citing FERPA, refused to release any statistics or police reports of serious crimes. Although they said this was to protect confidentiality, it’s no secret that the real reason was to protect themselves from the bad publicity generated by high profile crimes like rape, arson, and assault. Party schools’ broad interpretation of the FERPA law allows them to conduct their own secret criminal justice system out of sight of the public, parents, and the press. These campus judicial boards have a long history on college campuses, but the FERPA law allows them to continue in secrecy when nearly every other kind of official hearing board has been opened up by federal and state freedom of information laws.
