As nation observes Sunshine Week, open government adovcates report a mixed bag

By A. Matthew Deal and Emilie Yam, SPLC staff writers

Washington, D.C. - In a new, $450 million, state-of-the-art museum of news in Washington, D.C., media professionals, government officials and open-government advocates gathered on March 14 at the 10th annual National Freedom of Information Day Conference to discuss recent changes to the Freedom of Information Act and the importance of sunshine laws to journalists.

The conference was an early kick-off for Sunshine Week, an event that educates the public about open government, which began March 17 and runs through March 21. The week-long observance is sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Sunshine Week often features events like the Newseum's FOI Day to promote awareness among journalists and policymakers on issues concerning public access to information. These events serve as a way to educate journalists on recent changes and trends that affect their ability to get records from public institutions.

Sunshine Week focuses not only on the federal Freedom of Information Act but also on other topics surrounding open government, such as state open-records laws. These laws are the functional equivalents of the federal Freedom of Information Act for state public institutions, and they are usually more relevant for student journalists reporting on issues involving their high schools or universities.

Recent examples of both progress and setbacks to open government are prevalent.

In Connecticut, a commission decided Feb. 13 that the Yale University Police Department was performing a public function under state law, and that the public should have access to its records. In Virginia, the General Assembly on Feb. 26 passed a bill restricting the disclosure of information about donors to three public universities, much to the chagrin of open-government advocates. In Pennsylvania, a new law was signed Feb. 14 that updated the state's open records laws, informally regarded as one of the worst in the nation.

For better or worse, sunshine and access to information are news these days.

In December, Congress passed and President Bush signed a bill updating the federal FOI law for the first time in more than a decade. Corinna Zarek, FOI Service Center director for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said two of the biggest changes are the addition of penalties for agencies that take too long to respond to requests and the creation of an agency to mediate disputes when FOIA requests are denied. At FOI Day, however, some open-government advocates voiced concern over how well the law will be implemented.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, the Student Press Law Center each day will feature stories devoted to open-government issues. We have conducted several open-records tests to see how easily we could access information such as police incident reports at public and private universities, reimbursement records for high school superintendents, and student government association minutes and annual budgets.

We hope student journalists can take this collection of information and use it to enhance the quality of reporting at their institutions, learning from our experiences and drawing from the most effective strategies that we have learned through this process.

To learn more on open-government initiatives, go to SPLC's Website, or Sunshineweek.org.

Kissing the Republicans goodbye

by Emily Mullin

Before I delve into the core of this column and its fundamental purpose, I must first preface by telling you a little bit about myself.

I am a student at Ohio University where I study journalism and political science. I write for the local newspaper as a campus reporter and am the vice president and acting president of the OU College Republicans. I was, up until recently, actively involved in the presidential campaign to elect Rep. Ron Paul for many months.

Last week, a column I wrote assessing GOP presidential candidate and now nominee, John McCain, appeared in my local newspaper. While I found no fault in the article (in fact, I thought it to be well-written and more than adequately researched), my Republican companions and those of the right persuasion were not impressed by my candid evaluation of John McCain and the state of the Republican Party as it stands.

Many members of the club and local county Republican Party approached me with concern and some were outright enraged at my public display of criticism for the Arizona senator. I was accused of being "divisive" and "irresponsible" and was told that I should not have exercised my journalistic influence because my views were in conflict with those of the club and county party. I was advised that – despite my personal feelings – I must support John McCain for the "sake of the club" and for the "good of the party" or the club would take necessary steps to resolve the problem.

When I made it known that I had no intention of supporting or campaigning for John McCain, I was asked to step down from my position because it compromised party and club unity. When I refused to simply acquiesce and give up my position, I was threatened with impeachment.

For more on this op/ed piece, go to LewRockwell.com

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

State universities to arm police with assault rifles

by Toby Phillips

Tempe, Ariz. - Police departments at Arizona's three universities plan to arm their officers with military-style assault rifles within the next year, officials said Tuesday.

The new rifles would give campus police officers long-range shooting capabilities, allowing them to hit targets at the end of long hallways or atop tall buildings, officials said.

For more on this article, go to the Arizona Republic

The coming fall of higher education

Population Shift Sends Universities Scrambling Applicant Pool Forecast To Shrink and Diversify

By Valerie Strauss,Washington Post Staff Writer

Colleges and universities are anxiously taking steps to address a projected drop in the number of high school graduates in much of the nation starting next year and a dramatic change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the student population, a phenomenon expected to transform the country's higher education landscape, educators and analysts said.

For more on this article, go to the Washington Post. Also, check out the following post by Lew Rockwell on the LRC blog on where to find a real education.

Education Department Agrees to End Controversial Upward Bound study

This article orginally appeared in the Feb. 24 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was reposted on the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission's Website as a pdf file in its news clippings sections. It is from HEPC's Website that this article is adopted.

By KELLY FIELD

Washington, D.C. - Yielding to pressure from Congress and grant recipients, the U.S. Education Department has reluctantly agreed to abandon a controversial evaluation of the Upward Bound college-preparation program.

The study, which began last year, was designed to measure whether Upward Bound would have a bigger impact on college-going rates if it were refocused on higher-risk students. The program helps prepare low-income and first-generation students for college.

But the evaluation, which required grantees to recruit twice as many students to their program as normal and assign half of them to a control group, was unpopular from the start (The Chronicle, August 17, 2007). Critics, led by the Council for Opportunity in Education, a lobbying group for the federal TRIO programs for disadvantaged students,said it was unethical, even immoral, of the department to require programs to actively recruit students into programs and then deny them services.

"They are treating kids as widgets," Arnold L. Mitchem, the council's president, told The Chronicle last summer."These are low-income, working-class children that have value, they're not just numbers."

He likened the study to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which the government withheld treatment from 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis so that scientists could study the ravages of the disease.

But Larry Oxendine, the former director of the TRIO programs who started the study, says he was simply trying to get the program focused on students it was created to serve. He conceived of the evaluation after a longitudinal study by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., a nonpartisan social-policy-research firm, found that most students who participated in Upward Bound were no more likely to attend college than students whodid not.

The only students who seemed to truly benefit from the program were those who had low expectations of attending college before they enrolled.Mr. Oxendine concluded that the program was serving too many high-achieving students—students who really belonged in Talent Search, a less-intensive, less expensivefederal college-preparation program that is also part of TRIO.

To test this theory, he proposed a study comparing Upward Bound participants who were at high risk of not attending college with a control group of nonparticipants and with Upward Bound participants who were more likely to enroll in college.

"Upward Bound has lost its focus," Mr. Oxendine, who retired last summer, told The Chronicle in July.

"My hypothesis is that we're serving the wrong students now, and ifwe serve the right ones, we will see significant improvement."

Battle Against a Study

But the Council for Opportunity in Education, which says the Mathematica study was "contaminated" because students were allowed to participate in other collegepreparatory programs, including Talent Search, fought the plan tooth and nail. In May, it began a lobbying push that sought to undo the department's actions through legislation.

The effort, which the group dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, focused on members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Robert C. Scott, a Democrat of Virginia who sits on the U.S. House of Representatives education committee. Their fight bore fruit last summer, when both chambers of Congress adopted amendments to legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that would prohibit the department from proceeding with the study, or at least from forcing institutions to participate in it.

Then, in December, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill for the 2008 fiscal year that barred the Education Department from spending any of its budget on the evaluation.

Changing Course

But the department did not knuckle under until last Thursday, when Assistant Secretary Diane Auer Jones sent a letter to grantees saying she had decided "to terminate theevaluation and to engage stakeholders, including Congress, in discussions about a new evaluation that would be responsive to our collective needs and concerns."

Ms. Jones said that the department had already set aside enough money to continue the study through the end of the year, but that "in the context of the controversy surrounding the evaluation," had decided to end it sooner.

Mr. Oxendine could not be reached for comment on Friday.

In a statement, Mr. Mitchem credited Congress with the department's reversal.

"With those strong bipartisan messages, it was clear that the department could notcontinue on its current path," he said. "We are greatly relieved that this ill-advised evaluation is finally behind us."

N.C. alone in college hiring secrecy

by Corey G. Johnson, staff writer

Fayetteville, N.C.- North Carolina is the only state in the nation that selects the top leaders of all its public universities in secret.

In 49 other states, the names of the finalists for university president or chancellor positions are made public, a Fayetteville Observer study shows. Six states release the names of all applicants.

A few states have no single governing policy, according to the survey of 118 university systems or individual schools. Some universities in those states close the process, but at least one school or university system in every state, except North Carolina, selects leaders in public.

For more on this article, go to the Fayetteville Observer

FIRE secures victories in Wash., N.J.

Philadelphia, Penn. —The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has successfully intervened to protect the rights of student groups at New Jersey, and Washington state after student governments at both universities threatened to de-fund the groups for engaging in constitutionally protected expression.

At Montclair State University, the Student Government Association froze funding to the student newspaper, The Montclarion, in retaliation for the paper's attempts to gain access to closed-door SGA meetings. Meanwhile, at Central Washington University, in Ellensburg, the College Republicans were investigated and faced possible loss of funding after they posted flyers promoting an on-campus speech by controversial illegal immigration opponent and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist.

"These two cases—on opposite sides of the country—are disturbing examples of the willingness of student governments to punish their fellow students for their expression," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.

"Both cases had happy endings this time, but how many other students and groups suffer such assaults on their liberty in silence? Student governments need to understand that, just like college administrators, they may not control student expression simply because they control the purse strings."

To read more, go to FIRE's Website.

The First Amendment returns to the Bay area

SFSU settles free-speech suit with College Republicans, FIRE

SAN FRANCISCO —On Monday, March 3 San Francisco State University settled a lawsuit challenging its speech codes by agreeing to modify several unconstitutional policies to make them consistent with the First Amendment. The settlement also requires SFSU to pay damages to members of the university's College Republicans as well as to pay the College Republicans' attorney fees.

The lawsuit—part of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Speech Codes Litigation Project—was filed in July 2007 by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund.

To read more, go to FIRE's Website.

Bigotry of the mind

Read a Book, Harass a Co-Worker at IUPUI

by Azhar Majeed

In a stunning series of events at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Keith Sampson, a university employee and student, has been charged with racial harassment for reading a book during his work breaks.

Sampson is in his early fifties, does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, and is ten credits shy of a degree in communication studies. He is also an avid reader who usually brings books with him to work so that he can read in the break room when he is not on the clock.

Last year, he began reading a book entitled Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The book, which has garnered great reviews in such places as The Indiana Magazine of History and Notre Dame Magazine, discusses the events surrounding two days in May 1924, when a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight in South Bend with members of the Ku Klux Klan.

As an historical account of the students' response in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice, the book would seem to be a relevant and worthwhile read, both for residents of the state of Indiana and for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.

For more on this article, go to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

What your econ and poly si profs don't want you to know

Nationalism and socialism

by Faustino Ballve

Nationalism appears to be a modern phenomenon having its origin in the nationalities constituted in Europe between the 16th and the 19th century concomitantly with the disappearance of feudalism and of the Romano-Germanic Empire that came into being with Charlemagne and was totally liquidated with the unification of Italy.

In fact, however, the spirit of nationalism is very ancient.

It has been and still is present as a factor in both political and economic history. The only thing that has changed is its form. It was this spirit that animated the absolutist and totalitarian regime of the Egyptians, that of the decadent Roman Empire, and the mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries, and, after a brief eclipse that lasted from the Congress of Vienna to the First World War, revived in the form of the so-called controlled or planned economy under the combined influence of war and socialism.

For more on this article, go to LewRockwell.com.

Calif. prof. booted for altering loyalty oath

Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer

Hayward, Calif. - California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word "nonviolently" in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

"I don't think it was fair at all," said Kearney-Brown.

"All they careabout is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don't care if I meant it, and it didn't seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn't matter. Nothing."

For more on this article, go to the San Francisco Chronicle.

A depiction of the oath Kearney-Brown altered may be found here.

Higher ed included in Pa. open records overhaul

The following article was originally posted on the Student Press Law Center's Website on Feb. 28, and is reprinted with permission.

New Penn. law opens access to more public records

By A. Matthew Deal, SPLC staff writer

PENNSYLVANIA — A bill updating the state's more-than-50-year-old open records law was signed by Gov. Ed Rendell Feb 14.

The new law revising the state's much-criticized open records act will make it easier to access some information at public colleges and universities but will not extend to some state-supported institutions.

Before the update, Pennsylvania's law was widely regarded as one of the worst in the nation, according to attorney Craig Staudenmaier. He represented the student newspaper Patriot News when it sued the Pennsylvania State University Employees Retirement System to access information about football coach salaries.

Staudenmaier said the main problem with the older law was that government records were assumed to be closed unless those requesting records could prove that they concerned an agency's use of public funds or related to decisions of a public body, such as the minutes of a meeting.

The updated Right-To-Know Law, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Dominic Pileggi, introduces a number of reforms. All records will assumed to be open unless government agencies can prove the information should be exempt from release.

"Many times, we say that legislation is ‘historic' or call it a 'landmark' piece of legislation," Pileggi in a Feb 15 press release.

"Sometimes, that's a bit of a stretch. But I think those words accurately describe Senate Bill 1. For the first time in over 50 years, we have a modern, responsive Open Records Law in Pennsylvania."

The law, which will not fully take effect until January 2009, requires that public institutions designate one person to handle open records requests.The law also establishes an Office of Open Records that would allow those whose requests have been denied recourse for appeal short of litigation.

"We think overall it is a great position. It creates an administrative process, it allows people to appeal decisions; there are a number of positives," said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

Melewsky said that the association is concerned about some parts of the new law. For example, Melewsky cited exceptions that shield information about autopsy reports and information about those under the age of 17.

The law allows an agency to refuse to release records "identifying the name, home address, or date of birth of a child 17 years of age or younger."Melewsky said that this could affect reporting on topics as common as what students made the honor roll for a given semester.But Melewsky said she believes the bill is a remarkable improvement.

"It is never going to be perfect, but I believe it is a huge leap forward," Melewsky said.

The new law mandates procedures for how public institutions are to deal with open records requests, and it creates specific definitions for the types of institutions that are subject to records requests. This includes colleges and universities under the State System of Higher Education.

The law also defines community colleges as public institutions subject to Pennsylvania's open records laws.That provision effectively reverses a 1996 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision.

The court ruled against the Community College of Philadelphia's student newspaper, Student Vanguard, which sued for access to campus police records after the paper's open-records request for the documents was denied.The state Supreme Court decided that the community college did not perform an "essential government function" and would not be subject to the state's open record laws.

Other state court decisions at that time had ruled that universities like Temple University and Pennsylvania State University were not subject to open records requests, despite the fact that they receive a substantial amount of public funding.

The new law defines Temple University, Lincoln University, University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University as "state-related institutions," which are not subject to the same open records requirements as public institutions and community colleges. These "state-related" universities, however, will now be required submit an annual report that will disclose administrative salaries and other tax information.

Joseph Sullivan, who represented the Student Vanguard, said that during the past 12 years a dramatic increase in public funds into colleges and universities had increased the expectation of accountability.

"The viewpoint is that with this enormous investment that we should know what they are doing," Sullivan said.