SAFE ON CAMPUS

North Carolina’s public colleges and universities operate within overlapping legal and institutional requirements governing student privacy, misconduct reporting, public records, campus safety, and institutional accountability.

For survivors of sexual violence, harassment, and related misconduct, these requirements can create tension between protecting personal information and ensuring meaningful transparency regarding institutional response.

Safe on Campus examines whether existing policies and practices provide sufficient clarity, consistency, and protection for survivors while preserving appropriate mechanisms for public accountability.

Institutional responses to sexual violence and harassment can shape whether survivors are able to remain enrolled, access support, protect their privacy, and participate fully in campus life.

When institutional policies are unclear, inconsistently applied, or insufficiently transparent, survivors may bear the consequences of systems that fail to protect their rights or provide meaningful accountability.

Strong policy must protect survivor privacy while also ensuring that public institutions can be evaluated on how they prevent harm, respond to reports, and fulfill their obligations to students.

North Carolina needs a coherent statewide framework that reconciles survivor privacy with institutional accountability across its public colleges and universities.

Such a framework establishes uniform standards for the protection of personally identifying information, the communication of procedural rights, the provision of supportive measures and remedies, and the institutional response to reports of sexual violence, harassment, and related misconduct. It also requires the systematic collection and public reporting of de-identified data sufficient to evaluate institutional performance, identify patterns of delay or noncompliance, and determine whether disparities in response persist across campuses or populations.

Institutional accountability depends on more than procedural compliance. It requires transparency sufficient to permit meaningful external scrutiny, oversight mechanisms capable of identifying systemic deficiencies, and corrective processes that address institutional failures when they occur.

Survivor privacy and public accountability are not competing policy objectives. A sound regulatory framework protects individual confidentiality while preserving the information necessary to evaluate whether public institutions are fulfilling their legal, educational, and ethical obligations.

Safe on Campus is informed by the federal and state legal frameworks governing institutional responses to sexual violence, harassment, student privacy, campus safety, and public accountability.

At the federal level, Title IX establishes protections against sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and governs institutional responsibilities related to sexual harassment and related misconduct. Following the nationwide vacatur of the 2024 Title IX regulations, the U.S. Department of Education returned to enforcement of the 2020 Title IX regulations; in September 2026, the Department formally restored that regulatory text.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act governs access to and disclosure of personally identifiable information contained in student education records. FERPA generally restricts disclosure without consent while permitting disclosure under specified circumstances, creating an important legal framework for evaluating how institutions protect survivor information and communicate about institutional processes.

The Clery Act establishes separate campus-safety and transparency obligations for institutions participating in federal student-aid programs, including requirements related to campus crime data, safety policies, and public reporting. Institutions must report specified crimes, including sexual offenses, while federal reporting structures rely on aggregated rather than personally identifying information.

North Carolina public institutions also operate within state laws governing public records, confidentiality, higher education, and access to institutional information. These requirements intersect with federal privacy and campus-safety obligations and contribute to the broader policy environment in which institutions determine what information must be protected, what information may be disclosed, and what information should be available for public oversight.

NCCWJ examines these intersecting requirements alongside institutional policies, administrative practices, available campus data, regulatory guidance, and stakeholder perspectives to identify gaps in privacy protection, procedural consistency, transparency, and institutional accountability.

The initiative uses this research to develop policy recommendations that protect personally identifying information while preserving sufficient public information to evaluate how North Carolina’s public colleges and universities prevent harm, respond to reports, provide supportive measures, resolve complaints, and fulfill their obligations to students.

NCCWJ will maintain research, policy materials, legal and regulatory information, and public education resources related to survivor privacy, institutional accountability, and campus response to sexual violence, harassment, and related misconduct.

Resources may include policy briefs, fact sheets, legislative and regulatory summaries, institutional policy analyses, data reports, public comments, testimony, model policy recommendations, and other materials developed or curated by NCCWJ.

Materials will be used to support public understanding, inform policy development, identify emerging issues, and strengthen accountability across North Carolina’s public institutions of higher education.