BY MATTHEW BOEDY

On April 8, our school had a gun incident that involved a student making threats against the campus. But this story isn’t about that scary situation. It’s about my school administration’s epic communications failure about the incident. 

Incidents like this show why principles of academic freedom and shared governance matter. It took faculty speaking out in various ways to force the university to say more, information it kept from the campus on purpose. 

The incident happened about 11 a.m. on that Tuesday. Staff, students, and faculty on the campus where the incident occurred received an email about an hour after it quickly ended. (That audience may also have gotten a text alert but I can’t verify that.) That email read that police had resolved an “isolated incident” at the library and there was no threat to campus safety.

I am sure this meets the basic requirements of the Clery Act, the federal law that requires among other things that colleges notify its communities about ongoing threats to campus. What it does not meet is the requirements of transparency. The school knew much more from the start. And it took many more communications from the school to be transparent about what it knew. 

The university didn’t inform all faculty, staff, and students until the afternoon of the next day through email. For a school that has five campuses scattered across northeast Georgia, some hours from others, this second email was the first many of us had heard about the incident. 

The email about 28 hours after the incident added the police had arrested and charged an individual with “making threats, weapons violation, and trespassing.” The school reiterated there was no “ongoing threat” and normal operations had resumed shortly thereafter. 

After many people began demanding more information, the school sent out a third email on Friday, April 11, just before 5 p.m. It acknowledged those demands and reiterated the short summary the school offered in previous emails. It then said: “What makes communication in situations like this challenging is that there are legal and privacy protections, including FERPA, that limit what we can share about individuals involved.”

The implication was that because of federal student privacy laws, the university could not identify the person arrested as a student. That is inaccurate. There is no privacy right in FERPA about criminal cases. By this time the student had been placed in the local county jail, faced a bond hearing, and was released on bond back into the community – all public information.  

If there was another legal limitation at play, the university has never said so. At a town hall this week, university administrators reiterated the vague legal “barriers” it had about communication. 

By Monday the 14th the local newspaper had questions. It had the police incident report which identified the person arrested as a student. It had his mug shot from the jail. But the school continued to refuse to identify the person arrested as a student. The newspaper reported the school “confirmed that an incident occurred” but it could not “identify the individual due to federal student privacy laws.” 

According to its own website, the school could have verified information about the student including his name, year, major, and hometown. 

The school also added that “any further information about the incident would need to come from” campus police. The police never communicated with the campus community, only the administration. And the police report – which I too requested and was given through an open records request – merely said that the person in question was “carrying a rifle case heading toward” a building on campus. It did not mention any other elements of the incident. 

The next day, April 15, the university in a statement to the newspaper (and not sent to the school community) revealed new information about the incident: the student had “made a threatening statement to library staff, had a concealed handgun in his waistband and an AR-15-style rifle in his car.” The school yet again refused to identify the person as a student. 

It was at this point I contacted the school’s general counsel to confirm indeed that FERPA allowed the disclosure of student directory information regardless of any criminal investigation. She confirmed it did. Like many of you I receive regular mandatory training on what student information can be released and to who. 

Finally in a fourth email to the school on the 17th, the university acknowledged the person was a student and confirmed his name, which many of us knew all along from reports in the newspaper. 

But this time the school claimed this new information could have only been shared at this time because the “investigation” was complete. 

The facts we know about the investigation seem to rebut a week-long investigation. Police arrested this person within minutes and the university knew his identity quickly thereafter. In fact, to name those charges as it did in the first email to the whole school, the administration clearly had all the information it would need to announce those charges. 

An arrest generally closes an investigation. In this case an arrest was immediate. In other words, there was no investigatory privacy needed that could have prohibited the university from admitting the person was a student. 

It is clear to me that the university administration deliberately did not acknowledge the person was a student for more than a week after the event, even though information about that identity was public. It also refused for more than a week to reveal the presence of two guns even though the student was initially charged with a weapons violation. 

We still don’t know what the specific threat to the library staff was. But faculty colleagues there reported to me police dogs searched all rooms in the library, implying the threat was more than gun-related. 

Why these choices were made I cannot speculate on. 

The university’s town hall doubled down on its lack of communication and thereby digging deeper on its communications and leadership failures. 

For higher education legal experts who read this blog, I am certainly open to being corrected about my claims here. But let me end by reiterating that the university has failed to share any evidence of its claims about student privacy.

Contributing editor Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP and works at the University of North Georgia. He can be reached through email or his Twitter account @matthewboedy.