Sometimes lecturers have positive memories of students, and sometimes they don¡¯t. They usually don¡¯t share their memories publicly ¨C at least with names ¨C either way. Yet sometimes they¡¯re asked to weigh in on the intellect or character of a former student, or feel the need to do so ¨C particularly when those students become public figures.

Case in point: Guy V. Martin, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Alabama, wrote a deeply unflattering article for??earlier this year about the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Much of the piece was about teaching Moore ¨C or trying to, unsuccessfully.

¡°If Moore's analysis of a case was tantamount to thinking 1 + 1 = 3, and his classmates reasoned otherwise, there was no backing down by Moore,¡± Mr Martin wrote. ¡°The class was willing to fight to the death against illogic that no legal mind but one in America would espouse.¡± Moore never won a single argument, ¡°and the debates got ugly and personal. The result: gone was the fulfilment a teacher hopes for in the still peace of logic and learning.¡±

Mr Martin added: ¡°I had no choice but to abandon the Socratic method of class participation in favour of the lecture mode because of one student: Roy Moore.¡±

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The op-ed, published in September, didn¡¯t stop Mr Moore from winning his state¡¯s Republican primary. (Rather, it seems an entirely different kind of spectre from Moore¡¯s past ¨C his alleged predatory behaviour involving young teenage girls ¨C was his undoing in last week¡¯s general election.) Mr Martin¡¯s impact aside, can and should professors talk publicly about their past students?

In the US, institutions guard their students¡¯ privacy, and indeed, they¡¯re required to under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA, as it¡¯s known, prohibits the disclosure of personally identifiable information gleaned from education records. Records, according to the US Education Department, mean documents directly related to a student, maintained by an institution or agency.

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Information obtained through personal knowledge or observation are not records under FERPA, however. So, legally speaking, professors are clear to talk about their students ¨C past or present ¨C as long as they¡¯re not disclosing anything they¡¯ve learned from official documents, written or recorded. They might say a student is bright (or not), but not disclose that student¡¯s grade, for example.

Brett Sokolow, an attorney and president of the campus safety consulting firm NCHERM Group, said that FERPA-protected information remains so ¡°even many years after graduation¡±. But academics and even administrators can share what they know about someone based on talk or direct interaction. That includes what ¡°might leave a perception of someone¡¯s intelligence¡±, Mr Sokolow said.

Mr Martin is not the first professor to talk about a student. Robert George, McCormick chair in jurisprudence at Princeton University, talked to??earlier this year about his former advisee, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But he did so glowingly, in a joint interview with Mr Cruz. The late William T. Kelley, former professor at the University of Pennsylvania¡¯s Wharton School, also allegedly told a friend many times that a former student, one Donald Trump, was ¡°dumbest goddamn student I ever had¡±. Yet Frank DiPrima, the friend, shared those comments in a piece for??some six years after Kelley¡¯s passing, after Mr Trump became President Trump.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of law at Harvard University, once discussed former student Barack Obama in a National Public Radio?, but probably not in a way that Mr Obama would have minded. ¡°He wanted to make a difference,¡± Professor Tribe said of Mr Obama. ¡°He wanted to learn how the system worked.¡±

Mitt Romney also might have approved what Detlev Vagts, professor of business at Harvard, said about his time there in a parallel NPR?, in 2012: ¡°He had a very strong business school record, and a good but not outstanding law school record.¡±

Biographers and reporters love to delve into politicians¡¯ pasts, but they almost always quote fellow students from the time, not professors ¨C and probably not for a lack of trying. It was a fellow Baylor University swim team member who once told??that Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky got high on laughing gas, via a scuba mask and nitrous oxide tanks procured from a dentistry classmate, for example. In any case, it remains the exception that professors publicly discuss their past students. But that appears to be a matter of ethics, not law or policy.

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In an interview with?Inside Higher Ed, Mr Martin said he was within his rights in talking about Mr Moore and ethically clear, if not obligated, to do so ¨C in the public interest.

¡°He¡¯s a public figure,¡± Mr Martin said of Mr Moore. ¡°If he¡¯d stayed private, I would have strayed away from this. But several people asked me to speak out, and this is a matter of his fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution.¡± (Mr Moore, a Christian, has argued that ¡°God¡¯s law¡± supersedes state and federal law; he was removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice, first for refusing a federal court¡¯s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument he¡¯d installed in the Alabama Judicial Building, in 2003, and again in 2016 for telling state probate judges to ignore a US Supreme Court decision in favour of marriage equality.)

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But to what extent does someone¡¯s decades-old student performance inform their current abilities? In Mr Moore¡¯s case, very much so, Mr Martin said, asserting that his former student has demonstrated time and again ¨C including as former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court ¨C that he hasn¡¯t changed.

¡°He demonstrated the same inability to hear the other side, taking extreme positions and not listening to reason,¡± even when his court seat was at risk, Mr Martin said. ¡°Had he been a changed person, that would have been different.¡±

The American Association of University Professors takes a somewhat different view in its . The document says, in part, that professors ¡°respect the confidential nature of the relationship between professor and student.¡±

Greg Scholtz, director of academic freedom, tenure and governance for the association, said it ¡°seems obvious¡± that that obligation would ¡°discourage¡± teachers from disclosing information about the classroom performance of their students. Yet it¡¯s doubtful that such a responsibility applies 30 or 40 years after a student has graduated, he said. (Mr Moore is 70.)

Mr Sokolow, of NCHERM, said he thought that professors and administrators each have to decide for themselves whether it¡¯s appropriate to comment on a student who¡¯s achieved some level of ¡°notoriety¡±. Sometimes, he said, ¡°doing so is providing a public service, and sometimes it is just gossip. It¡¯s more ethical when it's a public service.¡±

This is an edited version of a story that?.

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