Sada Reed, a doctoral student at the University of
North Carolina, examined legal cases and law review articles regarding the privacy
of collegiate student-athletes. This past weekend Reed told a gathering of scholars
at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Southeast
Colloquium that a paucity of cases and articles exist on this issue.
Why is this a cause for concern? While state and
federal governments are creating laws to protect the privacy of students, some
schools might attempt to use the laws to deny information requests.
One of these tricky laws is the Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which restricts the information colleges can
share about students. If a school is found to run afoul of the act, it can lose
its federal funding.
Interpretations of the act have led to legal
challenges. For example, a University of Maryland basketball player violated
NCAA rules regarding the payment of parking tickets in the 1990s. The
university’s student newspaper, The
Diamondback, requested access to the parking tickets; the university denied
the request citing FERPA. After a court battle, The Diamondback won the case because parking tickets were not
considered part of students’ educational records.
Reed, who worked as a sports editor and reporter
before beginning her doctoral studies, also discussed the rights of
student-athletes, especially when it comes to surveillance of their activities.
She told the audience that courts have ruled “student-athletes have a
diminished expectation of privacy.” This is likely because of their quasi-celebrity
nature of student-athletes.
The diminished expectation decision has big
implications for things such as drug testing and potentially down the line
allowing states to make compelling cases for “preventing specific online
activities” for student-athletes.
-- Steve Bien-Aimé
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