Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic placed an unprecedented strain on schools. With students and teachers confined to their homes, school administrators were charged with the unenviable task of finding a way to restore some semblance of normalcy as quickly as possible. The solution was standing in plain sight: take an already existent technology and use it to connect educators to their students on a massive scale. The result: the virtual ubiquity of remote learning tools in schools and universities. But while remote learning software undoubtedly propped up the imperiled education sector, it did so at a cost. In requiring their students to embrace this technology, schools were effectively strongarming their pupils into forfeiting personal privacy in exchange for the privilege of staying in school. Leagues of students and pundits voiced their opposition to what they believed was an impermissibly coercive practice, but Aaron Ogletree, a student at Cleveland State University, went a step further. After his university required him to submit to a scan of his room before he could proceed with an exam, he sued the school in federal court for violating his Fourth Amendment rights. His claim was novel, but the court saw merit in it, agreeing that the university’s policy of conducting pre-exam room scans was an unreasonable search violative of the Fourth Amendment and ruling in Ogletree’s favor. Time will tell whether this shot across the bow to public universities that lean too heavily on remote proctoring technology is an aberration or the first of many judicial holdings of its kind. In the meantime, universities would be wise to learn from the mistakes of Cleveland State University, lest they, too, find themselves in the crosshairs of a disgruntled student with a preternatural awareness of his constitutional rights.
Recommended Citation
Evan Morehouse,
Ogletree v. Cleveland State University and the Future of Remote Learning,
57 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 833
(2024).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol57/iss3/6
