A federal law called FERPA prevents administrators, faculty and other "officials" at the University from disclosing information about a student, present or past. In this post, I want to explore what role, if any, FERPA played in Notre Dame's ongoing response to the Manti Te'o hoax. As I hope to show, Notre Dame decided upon a deliberate course of action to make as comprehensive a statement as it could under the circumstances and then fade into the background, allowing FERPA and privacy concerns ...