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Buried in North Carolina’s late state budget — now law under the governor’s signature — are two provisions that alter how students are disciplined at public colleges and universities.
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One prevents students convicted of assaulting an officer from receiving financial benefits from the state. The other shields disciplinary records that include personal student information from public view.
A state budget is primarily a spending plan. But in North Carolina, it’s also a vehicle for policy. This “legislative sleight of hand” is a technique that goes back decades and is used by both parties, according to media lawyer Hugh Stevens. In this case, the state legislature is controlled by Republicans.
Stevens is interested in these college discipline policy provisions in the budget because one directly undoes a high-profile lawsuit he won against UNC-Chapel Hill back in 2020.
Under the Protect Campus Survivors Act, disciplinary records that reveal personally identifying information about students in the UNC System are no longer public record. That holds even if releasing the record would be permitted under the federal education privacy law known as FERPA. It does allow, however, for the release of aggregated data, guidelines or summaries of such records.
The law, which Senate Republicans unsuccessfully introduced as a standalone bill last year before inserting in this year’s budget, “strengthens privacy protections for students at our public colleges and universities,” Sen. Michael Lee, a Republican from New Hanover County, posted on Instagram. “The law would ensure that personally identifiable student disciplinary records remain confidential, protecting the privacy of survivors and students involved in campus investigations. This legislation puts safety and respect first while maintaining transparency where appropriate.”
The North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault celebrated the provision on social media, calling it a “priority that has been worked on for five years.” Skye David, a lobbyist who advocated for the provision, said she believes it “will have the intended outcome of providing students, family, and campuses the aggregated data for reporting on Title IX cases without inadvertently outing survivors.”
What worried David is that, under the previous rules, a victim’s name could be made public record without their approval.
“If and when [survivors] want to share what happened, that choice is theirs alone,” David told The News & Observer. “After someone has experienced a sexual assault and their autonomy is taken from them, it is imperative as an advocate to allow the survivor to consent to each stage of the process afterwards, including sharing their experience.”
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The provision, however, undercuts a state Supreme Court decision Stevens won on behalf of the Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, and three other news organizations. Reporters were trying to uncover disciplinary records of students who committed sexual assault. The court decided in 2020 that the records they were after were indeed public, and therefore “subject to mandatory disclosure.”
Now, though, that decision is void. The budget provision shields records about both victims and perpetrators of campus offenses, and is not relegated to instances of sexual misconduct.
For Stevens, the new provision allows for unproductive opacity on the part of public universities.
“What [the news media] is interested in is: ‘How does the university handle cases of serious misconduct like this?’” Stevens said. “They aren’t typically interested in the names of the accusers. … Over several years, The Daily Tar Heel has assiduously sought to find information that it can provide to students to let them know that these cases happen, and they can have serious consequences. I would want to know that they are handled in a way that results in fairness for everybody.”
That kind of reporting might be harder than ever to conduct under the new rules, he said.
Another provision in the budget addresses students who are convicted of assaulting officers, or other employees of the state, during their time as students. Students were charged with this crime on UNC-Chapel Hill campus during student protests over Silent Sam in 2018 and more recently, Israel and Hamas’ war in Gaza.
Students whose charges result in conviction will no longer qualify for in-state tuition rates. It also strips them of any state-funded scholarship or grant money they may receive. Each of these penalties would begin the next semester following the conviction. This is a “new substantive requirement” for the UNC System’s disciplinary process, system spokesperson Andy Wallace told The N&O.
It applies to UNC System students and those in the community college system, and takes effect Dec. 1.
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