Who's Killing Higher-Ed Transparency in Virginia?
The previous post, Look What UVA is Hiding, highlights the excessive use of the "working papers" exemption to prevent access to the UVA President's documents, emails and texts under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). While the headline may unfairly imply that UVA, or by extension its leadership, is guilty of overreach in the interpretation of state law, it turns out that many other Virginia universities utilize the exemption.
ProPublica and the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO spotlight in The Chronicle of Higher Education how they were thwarted in efforts to obtain documents shedding light on Christopher Newport University's encroachments on adjoining neighborhoods.
"Virginia may have the broadest and most explicit exemption for college presidents’ papers in the country," says the article. "While presidents have said that public scrutiny would hamper frank dialogue and 'reflective' decision making, the exemption renders their perspectives — and the colleges’ inner workings — less visible to the media and Virginia taxpayers. Legislative proposals to repeal or narrow it have failed in the face of opposition from the higher-education lobby."
At UVA, FOIA attorneys are theoretically independent from the university administration. They report to the University Council, which reports to the Attorney General's office. That is a common, though not universal, pattern in Virginia's public higher-ed institutions. At the Virginia Military Institute, by contrast, the director of communications and marketing handles FOIA requests.
In our article, we compared how UVA’s FOIA team released the emails and text messages of Board of Visitors member Bert Ellis with how it blocked The Jefferson Council's attempt to obtain emails between former Rector Whitt Clement and President Jim Ryan.
Jeff Thomas, the Richmond author who submitted the FOIA request for Ellis, informs us that the UVA lawyers were not cooperative with him either. The lawyers "did not release public documents to me but withheld them. They and then the AG’s office fought me every step of the way in and out of court. After I sued, pro se, and won, public documents were released pursuant to a court order by a judge who found that UVA FOIA attorneys violated FOIA law. The attorneys who broke the law received no sanction, so far as I am aware, which leads me to believe that it is their unofficial job description to violate FOIA. Judging by your article, they seem to be doing so regardless of whose records are FOIAed."
It appears that the reluctance of UVA lawyers to cough up documents can be traced to policies set by the AG's office, that those policies in turn are influenced by state law, and that state law is influenced by higher-ed lobbyists who don't want greater transparency. Round and round we go.
Virginia's FOIA law has more bullet holes than Sonny Corleone's body. It may be impossible to bring greater transparency to higher ed at the level of the individual institution. It may require changing state law and taking on the higher-ed lobby in Richmond. That in turn may require boards of visitors across the state to direct their institutions' lobbyists to advocate plugging some of the exemptions in state law.
