The culmination of an education became that moment when a student quit being a student and entered the community with his own ideas. The last act of an education is the public statement of a thesis or dissertation. Anyone is welcome to attend a thesis defense at a university. It is a public event. Now the U.S. Department of Education has made a shocking ruling.
Theses are subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Scholars can no longer go to the library to read a thesis without the student's permission. And so the thesis is no longer a thesis. Maybe it's unfinished work to be kept on ice until it can, one day, be reworked into a respectable book or paper. In the '50s we expected students to propose their own thesis questions and create their own answers. That's changed as university research has grown dependent on outside support and on graduate-student help.