Six USC students dropped homemade bombs from a window at Columbia Hall in October, but we’re not allowed to find out who these students are. Three guesses as to why.
The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA for short, was originally designed to allow students to have control over and disclose their own educational records as they feel appropriate. However, throughout the years, FERPA has somehow morphed into an ambiguous blanket law that allows nondisclosure of many issues we feel necessary to bring out into the open, events that could have a large impact on the safety of a student body. Events, for example, involving homemade bombs.
We understand that privacy of our academic records is important to us as students, and there’s no question as to whether or not the law should exist. However, because the conditions of FERPA are so broad and don’t specify what an “educational record” entails, the law is easy to abuse and use to hide things that are not so relevant to academics.
When incidents happen on campus that involve crime, we have a right to know at least the very basic information about the people involved. While we do know two names of the students involved in the incident because both had criminal charges filed against them, we don’t know anything about the other four — who they are, what punishments USC gave them or even if they still attend the university.
We don’t blame USC for withholding the information. They’re only trying to follow the rules. But the rules need to be changed, and they need to be changed quickly, if for no other reason than to protect the safety of our students.