UNC redacts Saunders comments

The Board of Trustees received 212 comments from students about renaming Saunders Hall, but the University will not release their names.

The Board of Trustees requested comments on Saunders Hall from March to April leading up to their Thursday meeting, where they will vote on a package of proposals related to the renaming of Saunders Hall.

Out of 212 student responses, 183 requested the Board of Trustees rename Saunders Hall. There were 25 responses to keep the name and four responses that gave no suggestion. Of the students who wanted to rename Saunders Hall, about 34 percent requested the building be named after Zora Neale Hurston.

The names and email addresses of students who wrote in were redacted from the public record obtained by The Daily Tar Heel. Without a complete record, it is impossible to know if some students submitted multiple comments.

“I have to ask who is being protected,” said Nikhil Umesh, an activist with The Real Silent Sam Coalition and former columnist for The Daily Tar Heel.

Many students signed their name at the end of their comment or wrote that they would like to be contacted for further comment. Those names were redacted as well.

Board of Trustees chairman Lowry Caudill and assistant secretary Dwayne Pinkney said the board did not request the names be redacted.

Regina Stabile, director for institutional records and reporting compliance at UNC, said the comments included “education records” as defined by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Educational records include grades, transcripts, class lists, student course schedules, health records, financial information and student discipline files.

By considering student comments an educational record, the public records office is making a distinction between student comments and comments made by other people. It is unclear if the Board of Trustees or UNC will use the 212 comments made by students any differently than other comments.

Jonathan Jones, director of the N.C. Open Government Coalition, said FERPA does not cover student comments made to the Board of Trustees.

“This is another example of the continued abuse of FERPA by universities in general and by UNC in particular,” Jones said.

Jones said the names and email addresses of students are considered “directory information,” which is not protected under FERPA.

“There is simply no way this is an educational record,” he said. “It’s not at all a part of this student’s academic or disciplinary history. You can understand why they may want to claim something is not a public record when there’s embarrassing information in it, but there’s nothing embarrassing about this, and it doesn’t warrant special privacy rights under the law.”

Frank LoMonte, executive director for the Student Press Law Center, said comments to the Board of Trustees cannot be FERPA education records unless they are specifically appealing academic decisions.

“When you are acting in your citizen capacity and not your student capacity, records that you create are not FERPA education records,” LoMonte said.

“The way we know this for sure is if a student showed up at the registrar’s office and asked to inspect her FERPA records, nobody would say, ‘Hang on while we contact the Board of Trustees to see if you’ve sent them any emails.’ If the records would not be produced to a student who makes a request to inspect her FERPA records, then they cannot be classified as FERPA records for purposes of concealment.”

university@dailytarheel.com