Ohio University claims that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prevents it from complying with a records request from a defendant’s lawyer in the student senate’s infamous arrest of pro-Israel “blood bucket challenge” protesters.
That’s “beyond baseless,” according to the Student Press Law Center’s FERPA Fact, which chronicles school officials’ incorrect use of FERPA to hide relevant public records.
Adam Goldstein, an “attorney advocate” for SPLC, says the “irrational mess” of FERPA is “selectively cited by institutions with the same whimsical flair that usually accompanies mentions of Lovecraft’s mythological destroyer of worlds, Cthulhu: a thing we’re supposed to fear, but, y’know, not really”:
Ordinarily, you’d have to know a little bit about what records were being requested to know if FERPA protected those records or not. But in this case, the records were part of a subpoena. And one of the exceptions to FERPA’s protection of education records is records that are responsive to lawfully-issued judicial subpoenas. See 34 C.F.R. Sec. 99.31(a)(9).
Which means the university’s entire position here is beyond baseless. The fact that the record exists and is responsive to a subpoena means FERPA won’t protect it from this disclosure, regardless of its contents.
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IMAGE: BenduKiwi modified by SPLC/Wikipedia
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