Professor Michele Dauber weighs in on laws governing the disclosure of sexual harassment accusations for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

When Treon Harris, the starting quarterback for the University of Florida’s football team, was accused of sexual assault this month, the university did something unusual: It announced the accusation publicly the very next day.

Colleges are not known for being open to sharing information about sexual assaults or anything else involving the bad behavior of students. Such matters, they often say, are cloaked by a federal law—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits educational institutions from releasing "education records" that reveal the identity of an individual student.

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Forcing colleges to be more open in how they deal with sexual violence would require policy changes outside of Ferpa, says Michele Landis Dauber, a professor of law at Stanford University, because most incidents of sexual assault on campuses are never reported to the police and don’t involve prominent athletes.

While colleges are required to report the number of rapes that occur on the campus, they should also be required to report the outcome of disciplinary actions concerning those incidents, she says.

But the recent examples at the Universities of Florida and of Kentucky are likely to remain exceptions, says Ms. Dauber, who led Stanford’s two-year effort to revise its sexual-assault policies beginning in 2011.

"I’m skeptical," she says, "how much of this is about protecting women versus protecting the money stream from big-time athletics."