The stories we cover about The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) mainly involve free speech rights.

However, in a new column, FIRE’s Nico Perrino discusses student privacy rights:

It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called “the most authoritarian institution in America”.

The National Security Agency? Nope. It’s your average college or university.

Earlier this year, when Harvard University violated school policy by secretly searching deans’ email accounts, the world glimpsed the intrusive measures one school took to monitor online activity of its staff. “We needed to act to protect our students,” said then-dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the search in response to leaked information about a high-profile cheating scandal at the Ivy League institution.

…In 2007, Valdosta State University student Hayden Barnes was expelled without due process (pdf) for protesting University President Ronald Zaccari’s plan to spend $30m of student fee money on building campus parking garages. Zaccari went to extreme lengths to mute Barnes’ criticism: he monitored Barnes’ Facebook page, ordered university staff to look into his health, and ultimately had an expulsion note slipped under his dorm room door that identified him as a “clear and present danger” to campus. (In 2012, the Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals held Zaccari personally liable for violating Barnes’ legal rights.)

In another brazen exercise of snooping and censorship, St Augustine’s College (SAC) in North Carolina punished student Roman Caple in 2011 for a Facebook post on the college’s official page that, according to the school’s vice president of student affairs, “jeopardized the integrity of the college”. The offending post simply called for fellow students to “come correct, be prepared, and have supporting documents” at a public meeting where campus leaders were scheduled to discuss the school’s response to a recent tornado that cut off power to many SAC students.

Lately, tracking student social media has gotten so out of control that Delaware and California have passed legislation limiting schools’ ability to do such monitoring.

But as we know from the Harvard imbroglio, the monitoring of online activity isn’t limited to students. Last month, a professor at Johns Hopkins University wrote a blog post critical of the NSA and was asked to take it down and stop using the NSA logo by one of the school’s deans. (The school later apologized.) And at Occidental College, administrators recently confiscated the computers and cell phones of at least eight faculty members and dozens of staff members allegedly as part of an ongoing investigation by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) into campus sexual assault procedures. But in an interview with The Huffington Post, an OCR official said that “OCR did not require Occidental to confiscate faculty members’ laptops and cells”.