Party Schools Exposed

Author of college secrecy law says colleges abuse it

A six-month investigation published last Sunday by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch found vast differences in the way colleges interpret the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA.) While some colleges are very open and transparent about what they do, others slam the door shut against any kind of release of information.

Invariably, the colleges  reason this way: "We can't release educational records," they say. "It's against the law. We could lose our federal funding!" And what is an educational record you might ask?"Well, everything we do deals with education, so EVERYTHING is an educational record."

This "interpretation" of FERPA has led colleges to withhold from parents all kinds of important information that parents deserve to know, everything from suicide attempts to drug overdoses, to repetitive alcohol abuses to not showing up for class for weeks on end. Colleges make every effort to keep the three P's (parents the press and the public) out of the loop so they are free to do whatever they want with no oversight whatsoever.

Congress never intended to prohibit access to this kind of information and in the early 1990s it passed an amendment to FERPA that said, basically this: DISCIPLINARY RECORDS ARE NOT COVERED BY FERPA." What could be clearer than that? But, as the report shows, colleges are still "interpreting" the law as saying that they are.

The report shows that colleges use FERPA to cover up all kinds of crimes, from sexual harassment to bribery to illegal payoffs and violation of NCAA regulations. But perhaps the most interesting parts of the report are the comments by James Buckley, the former senator who authored the law. When he was told how colleges were using it, he said they had it exactly wrong and that it was never intended as a smokescreen to cover up wrongdoing. In fact, he said, Congress should act immediately to prohibit the law's being used in that way.

Colleges pretend to be terrified of violating the law and losing their federal funds, but this is also a part of the facade. In the 35 years since the law was passed in 1974, the federal government has never invoked it. Not once! Nor threatened to invoke it. The entire thing is an abuse to justify college's obsession with secrecy.

Colleges under fire from the right...and the left as well

It's no secret that American higher education has been under attack from the right for at least two decades. The American Enterprise Institute, for example, has made it a favorite whipping boy with AEI stalwarts like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder on their front lines.

Some of the criticisms, such as the complaint that colleges have dumbed-down  programs and lowered standards to advance the "everyone should go to college" agenda, are undeniable. Other criticisms, that colleges are refuges for a worldwide leftist conspiracy, for example, are less valid.

What is new in 2009 is that colleges are increasingly coming under fire from the left as well.

Ralph Nader, for example, has come out strongly against the debt-for-diploma scam that college administrators and predatory lending companies put together to systematically fleece college students and leave them in debt for decades.

"The corporate lawyers who conceived this self-enriching system ought to get the nation's top prize for shameless perversity," he said. Andrew Cuomo and Hillary Clinton have also come out strongly against the scam.

Just this week, however, the stalwart progressives at the Nation published an article called Higher Education Takes a Hit, in which colleges have come under fire for the shameless treatment of adjunct professors, who do exactly the same work as tenured professors but are paid a third as much with no benefits.  The percentage of these "contingent faculty" have increased from 43 percent to 70 percent in 30 years.

The article also exposes the great lie that tuition has been increasing at two to three times the inflation rate because of the rising cost of instruction. The truth, as the article points out, is that instruction costs have remained relatively stable. What that additional money is used for is "ballooning administrative costs, positions and salaries, venture partnerships with corporations and the construction of costly, extravagant facilities that critics say have more show value than instructional utility." Amen!

The article also quotes long-time lefty advocate Cary Nelson, president of the National Council of the American Association of University Professors.

"Higher education has become a corrupt institution facing financial crisis," he said. "There is a race to market campuses to yuppies with expansive building projects, to increase the leisure value of a campus." Wow! Could not have said it better!

So, it seems, the higher education reform movement has some very strange bedfellows indeed with Charles Murray and Cary Nelson on the same side! Exactly how these reforms will come about is not yet clear, but the defenders of the existing higher education system seem more and more to be crying in the wilderness.