Author: Drew Jaffe
Occidental faculty members and administration have created a committee to address privacy concerns prompted by the seizure of 42 administrative staff and eight faculty hard drives last July. College officials claim that the information was requested in response to an ongoing investigation by the Department of Education (ED) into the college’s handling of sexual assault allegations.
Occidental’s practices are being scrutinized after 37 students, faculty and alumni filed a Clery Act complaint and a Title IX complaint with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) on April 1.
According to an email from Chief Technology Officer James Uhrich to Faculty Council President Nalsey Tinberg, Occidental College has a legal obligation to preserve evidence relating to the OCR investigation as well as potential legal action from students involved in sexual assault cases at the school. This obligation includes evidence on school-owned devices. The school also copied hard drives of personal devices, but only at the consent of the owners, Uhrich noted in a later interview. The decision to confiscate electronic devices, however, did not come from the ED, according to a Huffington Post article.
Uhrich wrote in his email that all information collected would be carefully screened and protected by an off-campus third party, but response from faculty members was initially skeptical. Tinberg, on behalf of the faculty, cited the lack of an existing policy on document retrieval and the need to copy entire laptops and other devices as causes for concern.
According to Tinberg, there had been no agreed upon process for confiscating devices from groups on campus. To address this problem, faculty and administrators formed a committee at the start of the year to create a more standardized process for information preservation.
“Our hope is to come up with a humane policy that can respond to the requests of the administration when there is a need to preserve documents while addressing privacy concerns for all concerned as well as respecting the intellectual property of faculty,” Tinberg said via email.
The committee is composed of Geology Professor Scott Bogue, Director of Human Resources Richard Ledwin, Politics Professor Thalia Gonzalez and Tinberg. Uhrich chairs the committee.
By establishing a policy on information preservation, the committee will hopefully resolve problems created by the seizure, including – as Politics Professor Caroline Heldman said – concerns over the school’s ethical standards.
“It raises an interesting question about workplace privacy and what is appropriate for the college…This action creates a chilling environment for faculty who want to be advocates in sexual assault cases,” Heldman said.
Addressing the concerns of faculty and administrators, Director of Communications James Tranquada said that only the school’s attorneys have access to the information. According to Uhrich, the information is held by a third-party company that specializes and is certified in data preservation. If the school’s attorneys request it, the company can automatically scan documents for specific words and phrases. The law firm O’Melveny & Myers is currently acting as college counsel.
Uhrich states in an email to Tinberg that it was the college counsel that advised the school to preserve evidence related to the investigation and possible litigation by students. Such preservation complies with state and federal rules regarding civil procedure.
In an interview with Uhrich and Director of Network, Operations and Systems Wesley Tomatsu, Tomatsu added that failure to comply with these rules can potentially result in fines for the school. This could occur if the school were not able to provide evidence the court deems it should have been able to provide.
Uhrich also mentioned that all confiscation was done at the convenience of both parties involved.
“We worked very hard to make people comfortable in this process, understanding it’s not a very comfortable process to begin with. We spent a good deal of time talking with people…and making sure we were as responsive to the community as we could be under relatively difficult circumstances,” Uhrich said.
In response to questions over the ethical nature of the seizure, Tranquada emphasized the rarity with which the school requests personal information .
“As we have said before, Oxy does not monitor the electronic communications of faculty, staff,or students. We have no interest in invading anyone’s privacy. That is completely alien to our institutional values,” Tranquada said in an email to The Occidental Weekly.
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