The Office of the Registrar is creating a task force to look at whether to change students’ personal information currently available on the University’s online directory after members of student government wrote a letter asking it to pull information from the database and allow students to put it back on if they want.
By default, every University student’s name, e-mail, mailing address, phone number, year in school and major is published on the online directory. Responding to students’ desires to have more control over which information to put on the directory, the registrar’s office last fall gave students the option of removing some of that information by logging onto DuckWeb. Before that, students could either choose to have all of their information or none of it available.
“We’ve always had two options of full information disclosure or none,” said Susan Eveland, associate registrar. “But the third option is the middle ground where students can control what’s on online directory through DuckWeb.”
Student government leaders wrote a letter to the registrar’s office at the end of winter term asking that the default be changed again.
“Whereas now students can opt out of publishing their address and phone number by checking a box in their DuckWeb accounts, we ask you to reverse that so that students can opt in to publish that information should they so desire,” according to the letter from ASUO President Adam Walsh, Student Senate President Stephanie Erickson and ASUO Women’s Center Director Brandy Ota.
“The potentially harmful information that the DuckWeb Directory published online includes the home phone number and mailing address for all students who do not deselect the default setting,” according to the letter, delivered on March 21.
The letter was drafted by Student Senators Wally Hicks and Toby Piering, who both said their main concern was for students who don’t know their information is published online, allowing anyone to easily find students’ addresses and phone numbers.
“We want the University to take the stance to protect students first and put public information out there if (students) so choose,” Piering said. “We want the default to go to protecting students so that we start with … the tightest restrictions and students choose to open it up.”
The registrar’s office has not officially responded yet, but it plans to form a task force of students appointed by student government to gather student input on the issue, Eveland said.
The task force will be created during spring term with the goal of making an official recommendation by the end of the term, she said. If the task force recommends changing the default policy again, the earliest it could happen would be fall 2006, Eveland said. But that will depend upon the workload of the Computing Center, which is the University department in charge of Web services, software programming and database administration on campus.
The online directory provides an easy source for many faculty, staff and students to contact other University members, Eveland said.
“How does the inconvenience of keeping the information off weigh against the risk some students may feel having it out there?” Eveland asked.

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