The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is often abused as a shield against public scrutiny, but the law has an essential role in protecting student privacy. Unfortunately, that usefulness does not adequately extend to protecting counselor-patient confidentiality.
A student at the University of Oregon filed a Title IX suit against the university for its handling of her sexual assault case.
In the course of the case, the university abused a loophole in FERPA by handing over the student’s records from the counseling center to the university’s general counsel without consent.
According to analysis by Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education and a former UNC law professor, what Oregon did was legal under FERPA, though it constituted a clear violation of the spirit of the law.
Pryal recommends that students cease any use of university-supplied counseling.
The seriousness of mental health issues makes this option unacceptable. Students often cannot afford other services and cannot put their mental health problems on hold until the federal bureaucracy closes the loophole.
UNC’s Office of University Counsel must adopt policy to assure students their right to confidential counseling will go uninfringed while the federal law remains imperfect.
Students must have access to counseling services they can trust totally — if they cannot, the integrity of UNC’s counseling services will be fundamentally undermined.
