Associates of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., are trying to use scholarship recipients as tools in Cuomo’s next campaign advertisement, and used their political connections to obtain names of state-funded college scholarship recipients in an effort to drum up support for the re-election campaign.
According to a report from the New York Post, members of Cuomo’s campaign took the liberty of figuring out which students had benefited from a newly created Excelsior Scholarship, a state-funded program that grants free public college tuition to students from families making under $125,000 per year. These students were then asked to appear in a campaign commercial highlighting the scholarship.
Despite some students being happy about receiving scholarships for public college, a number of them were not thrilled about being recruited as political pawns for the Cuomo’s re-election campaign. One student said he was surprised at how they managed to get his phone number, and how he certainly didn’t want to be associated with the campaign.
“I’m a little intrigued about how they got my phone number,” said Nikita Losi, a 19-year-old Excelsior Scholarship recipient. “[Cuomo’s representative] wanted me to appear in some sort of advertisement for Governor Cuomo, to talk about the Excelsior Scholarship and what it means to me and how it impacted my life.”
“I didn’t want my name associated with that,” said Losi, who had already made up his mind that he would be supporting Cuomo’s Republican challenger, Marc Molinaro, instead of the current governor.
Normally an individual’s contact information, held by an educational institution, is protected and confidential under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which prohibits any release of information that could identify a student.
When asked about the potential FERPA violation, Cuomo’s campaign quickly responded that they were able to obtain the information from the list of attendees at the Governor’s 2018 State of the State Address, of which many Excelsior Scholarship recipients attended.
“We requested any publicly available list of State of the State invitees,” explained Abbey Fashouer, a spokeswoman for Cuomo’s re-election campaign.
