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    Professors’ non-existent privacy rights

    FIDLAR song NSFW, so whole post is after the jump.

    About eight years ago I was in France for a conference and ended up spending some time in Strasbourg on the day when French high schools got out. On my way to dinner I walked by a school just as the test scores for the year were revealed. All these kids and some of there parents were there trying to find how high their name was on the list. Some kids were really happy, taking pictures of the list with their cell phones, and some were pretty upset. The weirdest thing is that their names and relative rankings were posted publicly outside of the school (by a tram station) where everyone could see.

    Any faculty member who has sat through dozens of semesterly admonitions from various administrators about how to follow FERPA knows that this kind of thing is illegal in the United States. Students (qua students, not qua consumers) have pretty robust privacy rights in the United States.

    I wish it were the same for professors. Consider:

    1. While I am legally prohibited from disclosing any aspect of a student's performance in a class, students can say whatever they want about me on ratemyprofessors. LSU Student Senate actually set up an internal ratemyprofessors that students can fill out when they get their final grades and that all LSU students can see.
    2. At the beginning of each semester each department member at LSU receives the grade breakdowns of everyone in the department. As far as I can tell, this is an attempt to publicly shame grade inflators.
    3. Starting last semester, LSU suits began doing the same thing with respect to whether faculty member's have gotten their book orders into the campus Barnes and Noble. They send out a list to the whole department of everyone in the department who hasn't sent the list in to B&N with a legal warning that LSU complies with federal law concerning making our bookstore orders public by forcing faculty to use Barnes and Noble.*
    4. The LSU student newspaper keeps a public list on-line of all LSU professor's salaries (I refuse to link to it). They don't include contributions to salaries by the Tiger Athletic Foundation, so it looks like administrators and people involved with the sports program are making far less than they actually do. But it gets it right for everyone else.**
    5. The LSU  student newspaper keeps a public list on-line of all LSU professor's political affiliations (I refuse to link to it), and
    6. As part of the political affiliation list, they provide GPS co-ordinates of every LSU professor's house (I refuse to link to this) in a manner that makes it trivial for any of the hundreds of thousands of LSU students/alumni to find out where any professor lives.

    The last one enrages me. When you are talking about a school with this many students, some of them just are going to be very bad people. One of my colleagues had his throat cut by an violent student at his house a few years ago (story here). It was horrible.

    Some faculty have been looking into getting them to take our addresses down, but we really just don't have anything like the legal protections that our own students do. Given the ruling party's animus against edumucation and teachers, I don't expect a faculty version of FERPA to pass any time soon.

    [*This isn't a big deal. But it is absolutely indicative of our age's dysfunction that they are complying with a law which is supposed to make these things public so students can get the best deal by putting the list in the hands of a private company.

    **In the comment section one student wrote "it's nice to see Cogburn pulling in 60 gs for just playing youtube videos in class." I thought of all sorts of obnoxious responses, but didn't post any of them. The worst involved trying to explain to this anonymous blockhead what I do in any given day. The best were probably of the bear-baiting "Dude, don't feel bad for me, my parents help me out" type.]

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    5 responses to “Professors’ non-existent privacy rights”

    1. Charles R Avatar
      Charles R

      The GPS coordinates/home addresses are available! Have you heard of stalking incidents not yet rising to throat-cutting? Are the administrators and staff home addresses available on that list, too, or just professors? How did the addresses become available in the first place to be scraped by the newspaper?
      How does the newspaper get the political affiliations?
      I have had one stalker in my life. It lasted a few months, but I know others who have worse experiences, and you have your colleague’s own situation. What good is even ostensibly the point of publishing those addresses?
      And since the newspaper caters to students, shouldn’t they be more concerned with the addresses of the campus law enforcement officers? If they really want to exert their minor tyranny through managing the fear of those with some power over them, then someone needs to persuade them to do this with the cops all around them. If the newspaper wants to be tough, then they need to show they can stand up to people with actual power to destroy lives, since one well-timed citation is more damaging than a C. Whether they print those addresses or not will tell us something about their own motivations either way; whether the addresses continue to be printed or not will tell us something further about who allows the newspaper to continue doing something so clearly intended on chilling professors.

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    2. r Avatar
      r

      5 and 6 strike me as insane and pernicious. 2 and 3 seem like bureaucratic pains, but at least have discernible rationales. 1 and 4, however, I am sympathetic to on the merits. 1 because it really can be helpful to students, and 4 because government transparency is, I think, is a timely issue of incredible importance to the health of our democratic society, and so the open records laws which (among many things) make professorial compensation public are really important–although it does suck, in the society we live in, with the social norms we have, to be the one who has to take the hit in order to try to secure that value.
      Still, though, I’d emphasize that all that being said I find 5 and 6 insane and pernicious.

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    3. Gordon Hull Avatar
      Gordon Hull

      For the addresses, I’m betting it matters whether you own your house. If you do, then your ownership of the property is public record, and probably accessible through some sort of city or county website. Of course, it would therefore be easy enough to link to the addresses of admins and whoever else owns their house. If, on the other hand, you’re renting and they publish that, it seems to me that they’ve got some information that they shouldn’t.
      The one about political affiliations (party memberships? what exactly are they putting up there?) strikes me as really frightening. I seem to remember conservatives lost their marbles entirely when, after the Newtown shooting, some newspapers posted the addresses of registered gun owners online. They even got laws passed banning the practice, if I remember right, despite the registrations being theoretically public records.
      These sorts of problems – where the Internet suddenly means that you can access public records from your basement rather than having to go to the local courthouse – were what motivated Helen Nissenbaum’s argument that we need a new theory of privacy to cover such cases of “privacy in public.” And she’s right.

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    4. Anonymous Grad Student Avatar
      Anonymous Grad Student

      I looked up that list of political affiliations and addresses. It’s definitely weird, but I don’t think its as bad as you say (at least given what I glanced at). First, the political affiliations are not associated with professors by name. It’s all percentages, and the most specific categories it offers breakdowns for are very large sub-groups (like “Percentage of Democrats in Humanities & Social Sciences” or “Percentage of Independents in Athletics”), with NO option (as far as I could tell) for further narrowing by department or anything else. I could be wrong and I could have missed it, but that doesn’t sound as heinous as what I imagined.
      The gps map is certainly weird, but it doesn’t give addresses directly and it doesn’t seem to allow for any sort of narrowing by position in the university (though it is color coded by political party). That doesn’t mean it’s not scary to know that its publicly available to students that someone who works for the university in some capacity (whether a professor, or administrator) is a democrat and lives at such-and-such intersection. I’m just saying it sounded decidedly more shocking in your description.

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    5. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      You are right that the above is misstated, but what you have isn’t quite right either. You can narrow it by college, get the latitude and longitudes of the faculty members’ homes, and then find the homeowner’s information from that on public websites. So it still invites getting a list of the democrats, republicans, independents, and greens in your department as well as their addresses.
      In the OP I should have noted that one of my colleagues received mail threatening his children in 2004 because he had a “Bush must go!” sign in his front yard.

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