Campuses face mounting litigation which will force them to provide information they now protect as private, said Peter F. Lake, a law professor and co-director of the Center for Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University, before a group of university risk managers.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, litigation will involve:

whether campuses have done enough to protect students from committing suicide, to curb the abuse of prescription drugs, and to monitor such popular tell-all Web sites as MySpace and Facebook. He also predicted that colleges may face lawsuits accusing them of educational malpractice.
“Students are coming out of college with huge debt, but with some of the lowest competencies I have ever seen,” said Mr. Lake…”Some can barely read; some can barely write.”
…if default rates on student loans increase, financial institutions may look to blame colleges and universities for not properly preparing the students to enter the work force and make a salary great enough to pay off the debts. Lake said he has seen a precursor in several successful lawsuits in lower courts in which students sued technical institutes for not adequately preparing them for various professions.
…Mr. Lake also said that colleges will be compelled in the near future to turn over information on students that is now deemed to be protected by privacy laws.
“You have people on your campus who committed violent crimes, who wrote suicide notes as their college application essays,” he said. “The admissions office is seen as an enclave; everything is private. How long will the courts allow us to bring anyone to campus, knowing what they have done, and not be compelled to give out that information?”
…Mr. Lake said institutions may want to monitor student postings on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. “You can take two approaches: Ignore it, or look over it like Big Brother. I am not sure what the correct approach is, but the law is not going to be forgiving of us if our argument is that we are not aware of what our students are doing.” (Martin Van Der Werf, “Increase in Litigation May Compel Colleges to Disclose More Information, Conference Speaker Says,” September 12, 2006)

Higher education trustees need to pay more attention to whether litigation at the institutions they serve is up or down and in what areas campuses find themselves a defendant. The threat of educational malpractice should drive our colleges to raise standards and provide evidence to the public of student learning. And the presence on campuses of individuals who have committed violent crime, especially in this age of terror, must lead to institutionalizing procedures for learning who they are and what crimes they have committed.