Spare Change?

Beneath a tangled web of misinformation involving words like "matriculation," the University is compromising student privacy.

Over at the admissions office, your application is receiving one final look-over, now that you've been admitted and have sent in your deposit. Meticulously, the emergency contact addresses you supplied are being recorded. The one that you labeled as "parent" is entered in a database along with thousands of other parent addresses and phone numbers. Eventually, your emergency contact information will be passed to the Registrar's office to gather dust in your official record, unless you decide to take a drunken bellyflop off the top of PLC one fine spring evening.

Or so you thought.

Every year, the admissions office sends a copy of that parent address database to the development office which, in turn, calls your parents to hit them up for a couple hundred bucks between September and November. You see, somewhere along the line somebody made the decision that fund raising qualifies as an emergency too.

"We've been doing this for about four years," said the development office's John Manotti, Annual Giving Program Director. "Through the Parent Program, we raise about $180,000."

Normally, emergency contact addresses are closely guarded under the University's student record policy, but the loophole that allows them to be used for fund-raising purposes is an absolute beauty. "Matriculation" is the magic word. Students who have been admitted, but have not actually enrolled in courses are considered "non-matriculated"--not actual students. As non-students, the record policy doesn't apply to them and many kinds of information furnished to the University can be shared between campus departments for purposes that are beyond "legitimate educational interests," a key requirement in the student record policy.

According to admissions director Martha Pitts, many campus groups and departments request information, primarily mailing addresses, from student applications. If the department submits a written request and a copy of the publication they intend to send, the admissions office may, and usually does, provide them with pre-printed address labels for their use. The development office submits a written request as well, said Pitts, but receives a printed database of parent names and phone numbers in lieu of address labels.

The development office uses paid student workers to contact the parents, Manotti said. "They called at least three times," said the mother of a UO student, who declined to be named while her child was still a student at the University. "I finally gave them 20 bucks, but they wanted a lot more," she said. Manotti denied that parents are contacted more than once.

Since the development office receives the parent phone numbers before the students have matriculated, but uses them after the school year has started, sometimes the list is less than accurate. "It's not a perfect system. Occasionally we do call parents whose students have not actually matriculated," Manotti said.

Pitts said that she has received complaints from parents and students of parents who have been called at home, but said that such concerns were "very infrequent."

"I refer them to the Annual Giving Program office," she said. "We find that even in calling prospective students to give them information and answer questions about the University, people are more conscious about being called at home."

When asked if he had ever received complaints about the use of emergency addresses for fundraising, Manotti replied, "None. Not one."

When Pitts first spoke with the Commentator, she was not even aware of the transfer of parent information from the admissions office to the development office, and appeared quite surprised. After inquiring among her own staff and conferring with the University's legal counsel, though, she is content with her office's procedure, in part because the information is being shared with an actual UO department rather than the UO Foundation, an independent corporation which is legally separate from the University.

However, there may be a slim hope that the wording on the application for admission may be changed to reflect the fact that emergency addresses are used for more than just true emergencies. "Every year, we look at things that have come up over the last year," said Pitts. "We haven't considered that particular field in a long time, but this is something that I will bring up to my staff and we will look at."

While record privacy is obviously a little vulnerable in the gray area prior to matriculation, the situation reverses dramatically after a student has actually enrolled in courses, completing the matriculation process. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), passed by Congress in 1974, sets down stringent requirements regarding the dissemination of student information and threatens colleges who don't comply with a sudden shutoff of federal funding. UO complies with FERPA by creating a student record policy, which clearly distinguishes what kind of information can be given out and under what exact circumstances.

"Legitimate educational interest" must be shown in order for student information to be shared between UO offices. Even after matriculation, though, one kind of information remains completely public, accessible even to people not affiliated with UO in any way. This means that any drug-crazed lunatic off the street can walk into the Registrarís office and obtain any records contained under the heading of "Directory Information."

These records involve more than just your mailing address. Cumulative earned credits, class level, major, minor, and dates of attendance at UO are available to anyone who inquires.

Students do have the option of putting a directory restriction on their records. While this prevents directory information from being given out, it also has some undesirable side effects. Effectively, it makes you a non-person. The privacy is so complete that when you graduate, your name will not be listed in the commencement program. Even years after you have left, the University will not be able to confirm or deny that you ever attended or received a degree here.

On the one hand, standard procedure goes too far in giving out your personal information, especially before matriculation. On the other hand, you are given the option of curbing this unmitigated flow of "private" information--but with seriously problematic side effects. It is long past time for the University to produce an acceptable compromise, one which comes closer to protecting our interests on all fronts.

Leanne Nelms, a senior majoring in English, is a copy editor for the Oregon Commentator