A Connecticut commission has ruled that Yale University must provide access to campus police personnel records. The ruling is just one of several in the last few months that are requiring private universities to open up their records to the public. While Yale University officers are armed and make arrests, they work for a private university, institutions which have been reluctant to share their records with the media and the public.

It’s the latest in a series of rulings mandating greater openness at private universities. In Georgia in 2006 a law was passed that ordered records to be opened up at all police departments at private universities.

The Massachusetts legislature is considering a similar bill. For obvious reasons, private universities have fought opening their records, claiming they are trying to protect the privacy of their students and staff.

But there’s also a public relations element here. Universities with a lot of crime on campus or illegal behavior among faculty are not desirable places for people to send their kids.

The issue of opening up police records has become more urgent after the shootings at Virginia Tech University in April 2007 and the incident in February by a former student who shot and killed five students and himself in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

Since 1990, all colleges that take part in federal financial aid programs – which is most of them – have been required to release annual reports about crime on campus, make crime logs available to the public, and provide warnings about possible problems.

But the act doesn’t require colleges to release individual crime reports or police-department personnel files, and some private schools have refused to do so.