Don't worry, Jumbos, the Big Brother you probably didn't even know was watching won't be peering over your shoulder for much longer - at least, not as closely as he used to peer.
As of right now, every member of the Tufts faculty - that is, all instructors, advisors, department chairs, department administrators and academic deans - have unfettered access to your Student Information System (SIS) records. That's right: Your personal information and academic records are available to all of those people, whether you knew it or not.
If that strikes you as odd, you're not alone. Your ever-vigilant Tufts Community Union Senate's Educational Policy Committee (EPC) noticed this disturbing breach of privacy last fall and enacted legislation to tighten access to students' personal and academic records. The last stage of that process was completed yesterday when the Arts, Sciences & Engineering (AS&E) faculty voted to pass a resolution limiting the number of people who can access student records.
We applaud the Senate's EPC for its vigilance. That being said, the university should not protect students' privacy only when it is pressured to do so by members of the student government. It is horrifying and disappointing that the university so casually disregarded students' rights during the many years since student records were put online.
This carelessness is upsetting for many reasons, not the least of which is the message it sends about the university's commitment to protecting its students. However, two points in particular make the situation especially aggravating for students whose rights may have been violated by this negligent policy.
For one, this policy grossly violates the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law that forbids schools from sharing student records with a third party without student consent. There are nine exceptions to FERPA, but none of them even comes close to justifying the fact that a professor you've never met could, in theory, look up your GPA or peruse your study abroad transcript with a few simple keystrokes.
Moreover, allowing instructors who are not in any way responsible for managing an undergrad's academic career to see the student's records creates conflicts of interest that could be seriously damaging for the student in question. Several cases have arisen in the past in which students have been unfairly accused of academic dishonesty when professors felt students' success did not match up with their prior performance.
Although the EPC's legislation takes important steps toward securing students' privacy, the new measures approved by the AS&E faculty yesterday are not nearly stringent enough, especially in the wake of Tufts' illegal and reckless actions. According to the new policy - which will not be enacted for several weeks - only certain faculty members will be able to access a student's SIS records: the student's advisor, his academic dean and the administrator and chair of the department in which he is majoring.
However, in addition to these four people, all other department chairs in the university and all other academic deans will still have equal rights to that student's SIS Online profile. As those officials have likely never had any contact at all with the student in question and, therefore, no cause to investigate the student's personal and academic records, the Daily can see no reason why these people shouldn't also be stripped of access to the files of students who do not fall directly under their jurisdictions.
It's the least Tufts could do to restore the privacy - and the trust - of the students it violated.
