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What the Dept of Education Says it raelly meant (Rooker & theses)
From: Gordon Cook <cook () path net>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 23:19:03 GMT
I started a discussion of this on the Metanetwork in washington dc. Lisa Kimball is a very trustworthy correspondent whom I have known for 8 years. Here is what she found out. 61:30) Lisa Kimball 27-AUG-93 12:14 Being a washingtonian i couldn't resist calling over to the department of education general counsel's office to ask what their view of this story was ... they sent me a copy of Rooker's letter and a memo they prepared in response to requests for info (they also put me on their email list for future stuff) . To quote the memo "The Department did not before and does not now see a problem with the way schools normally treat theses that are written for publication and does not generally see the need for schools to change the way they are doing business." The Rooker letter is in response to a specific request for response from the Univeristy of PA's archivist asking about distinctions between undergraduate and graduate students records. Mr. Rooker says "This Office recognizes that undergraduate honors theses and graduate theses differ in nature from typical student research papers and other education records in that theses often become research sources themselves and are on occasion published." He makes this statement as justification for saying that the requirements for safeguards are reasonably LESS than those which relate to student grades and other things where privacyu is of grave concern. Therefore, he implies that ANY statement made by the student that they intended the work to become publically available (e.g. the transmittal memo usually accompanying the theses the student "turns in") is acceptable as an indicator that permits publication. The bottom line is that the gist of Rooker's "ruling is more or less exactly the opposite of the way it was portrayed in the news story. Lesson #1 of Journalism Learned from My Father: Go to the original source before going off the deep end. 61:36) Lisa Kimball 27-AUG-93 16:57 And ... i just got a call back from Leroy Rooker himself who confirmed what i had suspected. The Dept. of Education got a request from U PA for a written ruling - something they are *required* to respond to with the kind of letter Rooker wrote. Rooker's concern was that it was important that such a letter NOT make a problem for all the libraries et al making theses available even tho the law is such that he had to say that such papers WERE covered by the statute. Which is why he put the clause in his letter giving universities an explicit way they could cover themselves when doing exactly what they've been doing all along ... and what the Dept. of Educ. was trying to *support* them continuing to be able to do. He also provided all this explanatory stuff to the consortium of library associations who expressed concern after the story ran to let them know that the reporter had either misunderstood (teh charitable explanation) or miscontrued what had happened. So - i believe this is another case where the conspiracy theory of incompetent bureaucrats misses its mark ... (not to mention an impressive response on the part of the Education Department which netted 3 informative call-backs to me in the space of the afternoon on the basis of my being an interested citizen wanting some information)
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- What the Dept of Education Says it raelly meant (Rooker & theses) Gordon Cook (Aug 27)