Hodges Bill Would Require Universities to Archive Board Video
Delegate Keith Hodges, R-Urbanna, has submitted a bill that would promote transparency in higher-ed governance. HB2452 would require public four-year institutions to record, archive, and make Boards of Visitors meetings available to the public for five years.
Boards already live-stream their open-session meetings, as required by state law. But no requirement exists to make video accessible after the fact. I can’t speak for what other universities do, but the University of Virginia does not archive its meetings.
An employee of the board’s secretary told me that UVA did not archive video of its meetings for reasons of economy. The law requires such recordings to be ADA accessible, meaning that they must have closed captioning… which would be prohibitively expensive to add.
That might have been true at one time, but it no longer is. AI-powered closed captioning software has made the cost insignificant. Otter.ai, to pick one vendor, costs business clients $240 per year. UVA is a $5 billion-a-year organization. The university spends more money on doughnuts for board members than it would on closed captioning.
The Jefferson Council finds the recordings so valuable that we capture the livestream and post it to our own YouTube account. As a journalist covering board meetings, I find it helpful to consult the recordings to get accurate quotes. Our social media guy captures clips to post online or insert in our articles. We know that other media have consulted our video files when researching their own articles.
Rather than publish a recording many hours in length, we break the video into clips devoted to specific committee sessions, generally lasting an hour to an hour-and-a-half. While these longer recordings don’t generate large viewership — they tend to have 50 to 150 viewers each — they are extremely valuable to the people who do consult them. Occasionally, we excerpt shorter clips that do go viral.
We like it when people have no recourse but to visit our website to check out the board-meeting videos. It boosts our image as an independent group that is serious about UVA board governance. But the cause of transparency is far more important than running up our click count. We heartily endorse Hodges’ bill, which would make all of Virginia’s public universities more accountable.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
