Yet another "stir" in academia...

WSJ.com - Colleges Balk at FBI Request For Data on Foreign Students

From today's Journal:

FBI agents have asked some colleges and universities for help in amassing extensive electronic dossiers about their foreign faculty and students, including information that many educators contend schools can't release without a court order...

The FBI requests are raising delicate questions for schools about how much to divulge voluntarily. The dilemma pits the FBI's goal of acting fast to prevent attacks against public concern about too quickly signing away privacy rights. Some schools point out the FBI already has been given new powers under the USA Patriot Act and can get vast amounts of information on students with a court order. Yet the FBI isn't always using those formal legal channels...
But the requests are causing a stir in academia. The Department of Education has issued guidance on educational privacy laws that says releasing information voluntarily about students in a way that singles them out based on their citizenship, gender or race, for example, would be considered "harmful or an invasion of privacy."

You get the point.

Here's a little context for you. In the early 1980s I was a graduate student at Oxford, courtesy of a scholarship from Her Majesty's government. After having lived in England for two years, I was surprised (and a little alarmed) to find a telephone message from the Thames Valley Police tucked in my pigeon hole. (At least back in those ancient times, Oxford was not very big on things like telephones and computers. People communicated mainly by a free inter-college postal system using pen and ink. Think Harry Potter without the quills and owls.) Anyway, the note said to call them as soon as possible.

Putting aside my fears about what I was about to be nicked for, I called and was relieved to hear that they only wanted me to come in to the local police station, bring my passport, and update my registration as a foreign student. Evidently, and unbeknownst to me, all foreign students were automatically registered with Old Bill upon matriculation, and every two years the coppers followed up to make sure you were still where you were supposed to be and actually doing some studenting.

Jack booted fascism, eh?

BTW, does anyone else remember those weird TV PSA's from the early 1960s reminding everyone that "alien registration day" required all non-citizens to fill out some forms at their local post office? As a 5 or 6 year old, I remember finding this very funny with visions of Martians and Venusians lining up at the post office windows to register. I wonder when we stopped doing all that stuff...