EXTRAORDINARY times call for extraordinary measures. In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans have been living in a heightened state of security and anxiety. Even on college campuses across the country, students are faced with changes made in the interest of safety and security. Some of these differences, such as the new entry procedures for football games, are obvious. Others are less visible.
Next week, the United States Senate will vote on a bill that already has passed through the House that allows federal officials unprecedented access to student records. This bill is designed to make student records available to anyone working for the Attorney General with his orders to seize documents, even in the absence of an emergency situation, as grounds for viewing the records.
Though such a bill may be criticized as constituting an invasion of privacy, students should not oppose it. It is designed to protect us, and we should be willing to subject our records to search by federal officials if it is an effective way to investigate leads on cases. Unfortunately, things have changed since Sept. 11. This is just one way in which our lives have changed.
Critics of this bill argue that it would lead to abuses of the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Because student records currently can be released only with the student's written permission, many civil liberty activists claim that the proposed bill will enable federal officials to abridge students' rights and possibly even generate racial profiling. This aspect of the criticism arises from the assumption that broad searches of records occur by looking at last names, which is a form of racial profiling.
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This is a tricky argument. Unlimited access to student records does open up the possibility that students' privacy rights could be abused. And we can presume that if federal officials are evil enough to unjustifiably sneak peeks at our records, they would make baseless assumptions about us just by looking at our last names, too.
Unfortunate as this may be, though, it is one of the necessary facts of life in this new era of fighting terrorism. Just as it was annoying and time-consuming to have my suitcase exhaustively searched in the middle of an airport as I traveled this fall break, such intrusions are not pleasant. However, it is part of the price we will continue to pay in the coming years. At the risk of sounding like a propaganda poster, personal sacrifices must be made for the greater good.
One may argue that suitcases and student records are far different things. Maybe they are. But maybe if an investigator were able to check into records before looking in suitcases became necessary, efforts to apprehend criminal agents before they committed a violent act would prove more fruitful. Just because the bill gives federal officials the ability to look into records without emergency reasoning doesn't mean that they will.
As for the racial profiling charge, again, it is another fact of life. Though it may be unfair or unfortunate, it happens every time we see someone's name. If I got a penny for all the times that people made jokes about my connection to the Mafia, I wouldn't be looking for a job right now. Similarly, I could have protested the airline representative when she informed me that the computer had "randomly selected" me for the intensive search, insisting that she was really just discriminating against Italian-Americans.
But instead, I followed the armed guard to the suitcase X-ray machine and patiently waited as he dissected my personal belongings. I didn't even protest when they confiscated my nail clippers.
The simple fact is that student records are just another part of our identity and rarely represent more than just a list of grades to an outside observer. There is no reason to deny access to them, even in the absence of an emergency situation, if retrieved by federal officials for the sole purpose of use in an investigation, as the House bill prescribes.
Passage of this bill will allow investigators to conduct more thorough and productive searches without compromising students' rights. Such a measure would be no more intrusive than other practices that are readily accepted. Although Americans, and especially college students, feel deeply about their civil liberties, this bill would not diminish the protection we already are afforded.
(Katherine Martini's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kmartini@cavalierdaily.com.)
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