Protecting students, not just their privacy
School knew student was in deep distress before suicide but failed to notify parents, citing confidentiality laws
ICLINTON, N.Y. n the days after her son Graham hanged himself in his dormitory room at Hamilton College, Gina Burton went about settling his affairs in a blur of efficiency, her grief tinged with a nagging sense that something did not add up.
She fielded requests and sympathy notes from the college, promising the dean of students a copy of his obituary “so you can see how special Hamilton was to him.” This was why his suicide “makes no sense,” she added in a puzzled aside. The next day, Burton accepted condolences from the college president, and assured him “how right a choice Hamilton was” for her son.
But two weeks later, she read her son’s journal and everything changed. Graham Burton, a sophomore, wrote that he was flunking three of his four classes and called himself a “failure with no life prospects.” He had struggled to sleep, missed classes, turned in assignments late. The college had known of his difficulty, he wrote, but had been slow to offer help and understanding.
“Would you care to shed some light on this?” Gina Burton asked in an angry email sent at 2:53 a.m. to the academic dean, with copies to the president and the dean of students. “If this is what drove Graham, I don’t think I’ll be able to cope.” Her discovery set off a wave of pain and soul-searching but also a campaign to strip away some of the veils of confidentiality that colleges say protect the privacy and autonomy of students who are learning to be adults. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death, after accidents, for college-age adults in the United States. The number of college students seeking treatment for anxiety and depression has risen sharply over the past few years, and schools have in turn stepped up their efforts in mental health research and intervention. Even so, families have continued to put pressure on them to take greater responsibility for students’ well-being.
Massachusetts’ highest court ruled last week that MIT could not be held responsible for the 2009 suicide of a graduate student. But the court ruled that a university might be liable under limited circumstances, such as when a student expressly tells college staff members of plans to commit suicide.
“I think everybody should be on notice that schools can’t hide their head in the sand,” a mental health lawyer, Carolyn Reinach Wolf, said. “They can’t say: ‘Students are on loan to us.’ ”
Professors at Hamilton College, in upstate New York, had expressed concerns about Graham Burton for much of the fall term and knew he was in deep distress, according to a report on his death that was shown to the New York Times. More than a month before his death, his adviser, Maurice Isserman, wrote the academic dean the strongest of many warnings: “Obviously what’s happening here is a complete crash and burn. I don’t know what the procedures/ rules are for contacting parents but if this was my kid, I’d want to know.”
Isserman struck at the heart of what mattered to the Burtons: whether the college had a responsibility to tell them what it knew.
College officials say they are constrained by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, a federal law governing student privacy, in reaching out to parents. A Hamilton official cited it at a recent student assembly meeting, when students asked about the Burtons’ contention that they had not been told of their son’s troubles. The law views students as adults and bars parents from even the most basic student records, like a transcript, without their child’s consent.
There are exceptions: Colleges can release any student record to parents if the student signs a consent, if the college knows that a parent claims the child as a dependent on tax forms, or in a health or safety emergency. Even so, federal law allows colleges to use their discretion. They are allowed, but not required, to release the records or let a family member know if a student is suicidal.
Colleges use the law not only to protect students’ privacy but also to shield the college from conflict with parents and other forces in society, said Brett Sokolow, a risk management consultant to universities.
“There is an ethos of maintaining privacy and confidentiality — which sometimes is very beneficial,” Sokolow said. “But when somebody’s dead, do you wish you’d worked to maintain their privacy, or do you wish you’d worked to keep them alive?”