Continuing our celebration of Sunshine Week, we thought we’d shed some light (get it?) on the unique problems that accompany open-records reporting at a student-run publication.
It may come as a shock, but as a news outlet covering a wide array of student affairs, we at The Post frequently find ourselves requesting information from, well, Ohio University.
There are a bunch of run-of-the-mill documents and records The Post and other organizations regularly ask of the university. For example, we annually request the salaries of university employees and the breakdown of the university’s General Fee.
But when we’ve asked for something a little out of the ordinary — say, the log of who has flown where on the university’s private plane — we waited for about five weeks. That’s a log that you’d guess is updated with each trip and should be pretty easy to photocopy. But, there you are.
When we enter murkier legal waters, the university can quickly clam up completely. There is little-to-no leeway with any documents that can possibly be tucked under the large umbrella of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. We’ve spoken with people who work frequently with open-records laws who’ve said some of the legal reasoning the university has used doesn’t quite add up.
Sometimes it even seems as if we are denied access to records because the university believes we’ll swallow the denial without qualm simply because we’re students, soft and inexperienced.
The Post once asked a university official to cite the exemption in Ohio law that permitted the university to deny a records request. The official cited FERPA and after being told that is a federal law, not a state law, the official admitted to being unaware of the distinction.
Of course, there is an exemption in the state law for records protected under federal law, but the interaction illustrates a bigger problem. For some officials, “FERPA” is an automated response that comes in handy whenever they don’t want to hand over a document, even if the officials don’t understand the legal machinery whirring behind the act. And the excuse is used with the assumption that we won’t understand either.
Another problem we face as a student-run publication is funding. We have no publisher with deep pockets to front the costs of legal counsel, which is needed to convince the courts to compel Ohio University to divulge the information.
The Columbus Dispatch, for instance, recently challenged Columbus City Schools in court after the school board had meetings with its lawyer that were closed to the public in order to discuss its data-rigging scandal. The board settled with The Dispatch, agreeing to not close meetings in a similar way and to cover the newspaper’s $170,000 in legal bills.
The Dispatch donated the money back to the district, but The Post doesn’t have that kind of money to challenge the university if we disagree about open records — even if we’re positive we’ll win and the university will have to eventually cover the expenses.
The Athens News and The Athens Messenger might be in a better financial position to challenge the university, but we’ve never heard of them taking issue with the university’s behavior during our time in Athens. In fact, it was The Dispatch that beat all three local newspapers, including The Post, in calling out the university’s Board of Trustees for voting behind closed doors, a violation of Ohio law.
Granted, The Post has yet to encounter an egregious broach of open-records law. If we did, we would rally and find a way to take as much legal action as possible. Yet Ohio University, which has its own legal office, assuredly has the upper hand.
But who doesn’t love a good underdog story, right?
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Records requests sometimes tricky for student-run media"
