Tuesday, 18 April 2006

Moneta to world: read between the lines

Without federal regulations, what would we do? I hand over the mike to Duke’s own Larry Moneta:

Two Duke University students have been indicted by a grand jury investigating allegations of sexual assault against a Durham woman.

The university is prohibited under federal privacy regulations from releasing information regarding student disciplinary matters. (For more information about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act—FERPA—see http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html.)

Historically, it has been the university’s practice to issue an interim suspension when a student is charged with a felony or when the student’s presence on the campus may create an unsafe situation.

Translation from Moneta-ese: Finnerty and Seligmann are suspended. But I didn’t tell you that, because if I had, I’d have violated FERPA, so I didn’t. Hopefully your head now hurts enough that you won’t sue me. Thank you; I now have to go back to my sole reason for living: honking off the residents of Trinity Park.

4 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. azbballfan wrote @ Tue, 18 Apr 2006, 9:54 pm CDT:

An in tonight’s other news: The winner of the Duke adminstration’s “Oh we f**ked this one up” lottery this week: Ryan McFadden!!!

Uh, Mr. and Mrs. McFadden – how much did you want that check to be for again?

 

Well, theoretically the admin had a justification for suspending McFadyen, since his dopey email doubtless violated dozens of campus policies on everything from appropriate use of email to hate speech. In practice, had this investigation not been going on, nobody would have cared, but I don’t think you can sue for that.

And, we still don’t know for certain that McFadyen isn’t lucky alleged rapist #3. I tend to think #3 is likely to turn out be Sam Shepard (or Richard Kimble) at this point…

 
[Permalink] 3. azbballfan wrote @ Tue, 18 Apr 2006, 11:24 pm CDT:

Chris,

Excellent point, in my haste to make a joke I guess I guaranteed that I was the only one to get it.

When you graciously posted Moneta’s statement, I wondered why the University needed to hide student disciplinary matters about the accused when they announced McFadden’s suspension. Then, I figured it out – they were taught a legal lesson by an attorney who has sued them! Unfortunately, while the statement released by Moneta might help protect them from future charges by the accused, it wouldn’t help them in a case brought against them by McFadden.

Okay – now after the appropriate setup, let me try it again.

An in tonight’s other news: The winner of the Duke adminstration’s “Oh we f**ked this one up” lottery this week: Ryan McFadden!!!

Uh, Mr. and Mrs. McFadden – how much did you want that check to be for again?

And I wonder why I’m the only one who laughs at my jokes.

 

Oh, no, it was pretty amusing.

Actually, they did the same thing in McFadyen’s case, if you go back and check Brodhead’s statement from a couple of weeks ago—McFadyen’s attorney confirmed he was suspended sometime the next day. So McFadyen won’t be able to sue for a FERPA violation…

 
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