Institutions Should Not Provide Student and Faculty Info To Enable Deportations

In response to news reports that the Office for Civil Rights in the US Department of Education has requested the names and nationalities of students and faculty who may have been involved in alleged Title VI violations, the AAUP has written to college and university general counsels to clarify that they are under no legal compulsion to comply with such a request, and to strongly urge them not to comply, given the serious risks and harms of doing so.

Title VI does not require higher education institutions to provide the personally identifiable information of individual students or faculty members so that the administration can carry out further deportations. This information is irrelevant to legitimate agency efforts to investigate compliance with Title VI. Moreover, sharing this information may violate the First Amendment rights of students and faculty for multiple reasons. In addition to the Title VI and constitutional concerns, both FERPA and analogous state law protections also affirmatively preclude such disclosure. And finally, but no less importantly, sharing this information is inconsistent with institutional commitments to freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Read the full letter here.