Brown and White Vol. 132 no. 6

              The Brown and White Vol. 132 No. 6
Tuesday, February 21, 2017 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Senate hosts On air with John Simon
third annual
Gatsby Gala
By MICHAEL GIES
B&W Staff
Nearly 300 students filled the
University Center on Friday night
for the third annual Gatsby Gala.
They wore 1920s-inspired outfits,
danced and snapped photos with
their friends.
But the room was significant-ly
emptier than last year. Over
700 students were in attendance
at the school-sponsored dance in
2016.
The Gatsby Gala was created
by Student Senate in an effort
to bridge the divide between dif-ferent
groups on campus. One of
the most frequent requests from
students was to host an event that
combined Greek and non-Greek
students.
Student Senate, the Residence
Hall Association, Student
Activities and the Lehigh
University Police Department
sponsored the event.
In order to make the Gatsby
Gala more appealing, Student
Senate said it worked with the
Learning the ‘why’ behind the ‘yes’ with FERPA
By AUSTIN KATZ
Assistant News Editor
On his radio show “Prof. Talks”
on WLVR, Austin Katz sat down
with President John D. Simon to
discuss his first year on campus,
the new health college and the
importance of data lit-eracy.
Q: You’re
kind of
embed d ed
with my
class, the
class of
2019. We started at the same
time, so how did your first
year at Lehigh go? Was it what
you expected?
John Simon: I had a great time
my first year. I really enjoyed
getting to know students, fac-ulty,
staff, alumni (and) tradi-tions
at the university. I’ve had a
very enjoyable first year. In some
ways, I wondered what it was
going to be like to really live on
campus and to really not have
a whole lot of privacy, but I’ve
really enjoyed living on cam-pus
since it allows me to go to
a lot of student events. In oth-ers,
I was surprised — there’s
an awful lot of travel. You spend
a lot of time on the road, meet a
lot of alumni, state and federal
government people who work in
industries, so there’s just a huge
component of travel that I sort
of knew about but didn’t realize
what it’d be like to live.
Q: You looked at student
feedback in the CORE
report, which is a data col-lection
of students and
faculty (responses) about
how the university could
be improved. How are you
implementing the results from
the CORE report?
JS: There were a lot of sugges-tions
around making the insti-tution
more welcoming for inter-national
students that are cur-rently
being implemented. Issues
around graduate student housing
and the lack of availability for
students near campus have sev-eral
projects being discussed with
developers in the South Side that
will be addressed in the next
couple years. The undergradu-ate
recommendations — largely
some of them make sense and
some of them don’t. We’ve tried
to integrate the thinking and how
we’re approaching growth at the
university and what type of resi-dential
communities we’d want to
build to support that growth.
Q: There’s the recent
announcement to expand into
the College of Health. Can you
elaborate on that?
JS: I think the faculty at Lehigh
needs to grow, so we think about
100 new faculty would have a
dramatic impact on the offerings
we could give students and the
Lehigh’s president talks expansion and data literacy
By SAM BENCHEGHIB
B&W Staff
When high school seniors receive
their admission envelopes or
check their decision online, the
answer rarely goes into detail. The
response might be a yes or no, or
offer the student a spot on the
waitlist. What’s missing from the
decision is the why.
Under the Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act of 1974,
otherwise known as the Buckley
Amendment, students are able
to view any educational records
Lehigh may hold by submitting a
request to the Admissions Office.
The law states universities are
obligated to respond to the stu-dent’s
request within 45 days.
Among the documents that
should be available to students
are their admission records. With
it, students can view the forms
they submitted when applying to
the university. Students can also
request copies of their education
records, which include both direc-tory
and non-directory informa-tion.
Directory information is more
general and usually not harming
to the student if shared publicly,
such as the student’s name, date
and place of birth and home and
university address.
Non-directory information is
more private and cannot be shared
with anyone, including the stu-dent’s
family, without written con-sent
from the student. If students
wish to grant their parents access
to FERPA-protected documents,
they may do so by contacting the
Registrar’s Office or the Associate
Dean of Students for Academic
Photo illustration by Roshan Giyanani/B&W Staff
FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) was passed as part of an initiative to protect the privacy of all student education records. Under
the act, Lehigh students can request access to any of their educational records through the Office of Admissions.
Under FERPA, stu-dents
can gain access
to admissions docu-ments
if requested
See TEST Page 4
See GATSBY Page 3 See Q&A Page 3 Chris Barry/B&W Staff