What the Dept of Education Says it raelly meant (Rooker & theses)

[Gordon Cook <cook () path net>]

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)