Michigan State University is suing ESPN over a public records request involving police reports relating to ongoing sexual assault investigations.
MSU argues in a court filing that it has been put in an "impossible position" because Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon's office asked the university to withhold the records and ESPN asked for them to be released.
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Read More… from Mich. State sues ESPN over sex assault investigation records
Western Kentucky University is asking for a stay in a case involving an Open Records dispute between the university and the Kentucky Attorney General's office.
In court documents, WKU has asked for the stay until a similar case involving the University of Kentucky is resolved.
WKU is suing the college's student newspaper after denying an open records request for paperwork about 20 sexual misconduct investigations among university employees in the past four years. The Kentucky Attorney General has intervened in the case.
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Read More… from Western Kentucky University asks for stay in Open Records dispute
Earlier this month, Fort Collins Coloradoan reporter Nick Coltrain won the First Amendment Award at the Society for Professional Journalists’ Top of the Rockies for a battle with Colorado State University. He wanted to know if there were inequities in pay between men and women — and discovered there were, but only after a lot of work. The school provided him with a printout of all the information — 150 pages of an Excel spreadsheet — rather than the files themselves.
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Read More… from How One Colorado Reporter’s Struggle Led To New Open Records Legislation
Education is a $1.1 trillion industry in America, one requiring vigilant public oversight – oversight that increasingly is frustrated when answers to simple questions are concealed behind an impenetrable wall of “student privacy.”
Ask a public university or a school district anything about any issue of public importance – sexual harassment by employees, crime on campus, athlete recruiting scandals – and you can expect to hear: “We can’t tell you anything because of FERPA.” Even when they know it’s not true.
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The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Public Records Office has changed the way people make public records requests to the University.
They now use Next Request, a web-based portal, to field public records requests. Before this change, requests were made via email and displayed as open or closed on the public records website.
Gavin Young, senior director for the Public Records Office, said the University of New Mexico is the only other school using Next Request.
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Read More… from UNC one of two universities to use new public records request portal
The confidential informant had an explosive tip for the University of Kentucky’s campus newspaper: An associate professor of entomology had been accused of groping students, and the college, after an investigation, had permitted him to leave quietly.
On the trail of a hot story, the paper, The Kentucky Kernel, requested files from the university. Officials turned over some documents, but they contained few details.
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Read More… from Campus Press vs. Colleges: Kentucky Suit Highlights Free-Speech Fight
