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Health & Fitness

The University of Iowa's Vow to Be More Transparent? Not Credible, Is It? UI Shares Student Info with Sheriff Pulkrabek (Blog)

It is unlawful for the University of Iowa to share private information about UI students with Sheriff Pulkrabek. Yet the sheriff requests such information and the UI has complied for years. Why?

Granted, when a student applies for a gun permit, the specter of University of Iowa graduate student Gang Lu's 1991 mass murder and suicide on the University of Iowa campus could leap to mind. I've always told my daughter that if there's a shooter on campus, she should run, not hide. I like the ALICE protocol even better because potential victims are taught to run away or, if trapped, to hurl as many things as possible at the shooter and bring him down if possible.

I was coming back to Iowa City from an out-of-town conference when an Iowa State Trooper, who had been traveling north on North Dubuque Street, got the call about a campus shooter and did a big U-turn in front of me and headed back south to campus. I didn't know why, but the radio news soon told me why.

When I went to pick up my young daughter at Kiddie Konnection preschool and daycare, the secretary of the Physics and Astronomy Department was also there picking up her child. She was in shock. Before any news of fatalities was on the radio, she said in a flat tone with a flat affect, "They're all dead."

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We talked for a while. I knew she needed to talk, so I just listened and tried to be supportive. We must have talked for half an hour. She was in bad shape. If she'd expressed more emotion, I might have been less worried about her. It was awful.

A graduate student friend of mine from Germany came by my duplex on Tracy Lane in SE Iowa City to say goodbye. She told me her husband, a UI professor, had been shot and died. She was going back to Germany, she said. She was so sad. I'll never forget her face or her goodbye. I hugged her and thanked her for stopping by. Of course, I never saw her again.

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So murders on campus are serious and more frequent than they used to be. I get that. But how much of our privacy are we willing to give up to be safe? And does the University of Iowa's violation of federal privacy laws make us safer? Sheriff Pulkrabek can't deny a weapons permit without cause in any case.

According to Des Moines Register investigative reporter Clark Kauffman, "the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the university's own staff-training materials state that a FERPA privacy waiver must specify the type of school information that's being shared, even if it's disclosed to parents."

Excuse me? Can a student's privacy as a legal adult be waived to provide information to parents? I don't think so. I wouldn't expect the University of Iowa to have the right to give me private information about my daughter, a UI senior.

The reasons for the UI's policy of evading the law and the sheriff's complicity in those illegal acts may be understandable, but they're not legal. It will surprise me very much if someone doesn't sue the UI for violating their privacy. Signing a waiver doesn't obviate the necessity to notify students as to what information the sheriff may ask for, and it certainly doesn't obviate the UI's legal obligation to be transparent and lawful in all of its transactions.

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