toledoblade.com --

COLLEGE athletics is a $5 billion industry that wields enormous, some say excessive, influence on many campuses, often acting as a law unto itself. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in a survey by the Columbus Dispatch that revealed how many colleges and universities use federal law to protect athletic secrets.

What the Dispatch found was that the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, enacted in 1974 to protect "education records," is subject to wildly different interpretations depending on what school is doing the interpreting.

While former U.S. Sen. James L. Buckley says Congress passed the law to protect student transcripts and grades, colleges today use it to hide the identity of athletes, coaches, boosters, and others who break NCAA rules.

Of the 69 colleges and universities that responded to the Dispatch's information requests, only three, including Eastern Michigan, didn't censor at least some of the information. Eight refused to release any information at all and one, Michigan State, ignored the newspaper's request entirely. Twenty-three schools, including Ohio State University, redacted all the names of athletes and other details, even from the most innocuous documents. In almost every case, FERPA protection was given as the reason.

Ironically, college athletes sign an NCAA waiver that permits the disclosure of their education records, including the student grades that were the original focus of the legislation, and university officials are quick to trumpet the GPAs of high-achieving scholar-athletes. But the rules apparently change when the publicity is less favorable. While the same waiver states that information regarding infractions "may be published or distributed to third parties," NCAA officials argue that this doesn't include naming rule-breakers.

Far from protecting student athletes, sometimes FERPA is used against them, as in the case of an Oklahoma State baseball player from Vermilion, Ohio, who was suspended from the team, then blocked from gaining access to his own investigative report based on the school's interpretation of FERPA.

Successful sports teams bring prestige, national recognition, and tens - sometimes hundreds -of millions of dollars to universities. The bigger the stakes, the bigger the temptation to skirt the rules, and, therefore, the greater the need for openness.

FERPA was intended to protect the privacy of academic records, not the identity of cheaters. If that's not plain already, Congress should clarify the issue so athletic departments will stop doing an end-around the law.

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