This is an obvious attack on liberal and progressive ideas based on fact and science. Conservatism isn't prevalent in institutions of intellectual research which depend on reality and facts so they aren't victimized as much by the FOIA abuse.
You may find conservative researchers at religiously based schools that are funded with public resources which can use a religious freedom pretext to fight any FOIA on them.
How can private university researchers interact with researches at public university researchers without also getting caught up in the abuse? They need to carry a private cellphone and a private PC at home to communicate with their colleagues, I guess. Or are private communications on personal time still subject to FOIA?
"to further their own commercial interests" and "an important tool for a wide variety of groups, like" the Chinese and their interest in the latest research and ensure their big brother domination of Chinese students researching and studying here. Indeed, many countries can use our FOIA against us.
Yet trump's taxes - a proven tax cheat - are unobtainable. Adding insult to injury to the rest of us, the tax system is so complicated we need to pay for a piece of software or expert help to comply with our tax laws.
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I notice the NYT lumps in Pro Life groups as those "evil" entities that are abusing the FOI. How is requesting the names of people that oppose your political opinion gaming or abusing the system? Gee, maybe those evil Pro Life people want to execute them or some other evil thing those Pro Life people do. not that executing 50 million babies every year is evil.
Don't mix academic and research pursuits with partisan and industrial and political advocacy. That shouldn't be hard to do since there have been millions of academics who have done exactly that.
You know who you are.
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More whining from academics who, as usual. want their cake and to eat it too. Living off the public dollar carries obligations with it. Taxpayers deserve to know ALL the facts, whether in some obscure bureaucratic office or in a university lab. Time for ivory tower types to realize there is a quid for the quo and vice versa.
@JPE this "wanting to know the facts" is really just harassment od these researchers that cost the taxpayers millions of dollars to fulfill the requests. If you want to know what they are doing, read their research. Most are very open about it even before it is officially public.
I have more faith in the professor who is being paid 0 dollars to serve on the IRS Advisory Council - what does he have to gain? - than I do businesses who will lose money if the government listens to the results of his research.
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Harassment seems to be a standard tool across industries, but government agencies are sometimes equally intimidating when it comes FOIA requests. I won't be surprised when the FDA or BLM or Forest Service start employing similar tactics against critics. It is a measure of the broken state of government that neither party sees much wrong with this state of affairs. Accountability is always a standard imposed on other people.
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Intimidation is a standard American corporate tactic, as is anything that advances or maintains market domination.
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You hit the nail on the head. We must do everything we can to quell the intimidation and bullying associated with anyone who puts profits over people
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Intimidation technique famously abused by Judicial Watch
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Claudia Polsky is one of the foremost thinkers of our time on the question whether scholarship can be protected from litigation attack. Ask yourself whether the rules should be different whether the scholar does research at a public vs private university. The answer is plainly no. The public records laws are aimed at making government transparent to the citizens when it is acting in a uniquely governmental manner. Conducting scientific research is a shared function, both public and private, and I see no reason why public professors’ ability to collaborate with colleagues should be stripped away if the same is not true for private academics.
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Using encryption for emails and files would seem a possible
antidote to this?
This reminds me of the ways private insurers flexed muscles to eliminate the public (medicare) option from ACA in 2009.
Where there is private profit to protect, all manner
of muscle flexing is permitted.
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@bl, no, unfortunately, because under FOI you have to produce the unencrypted email.
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@frequent commenter
But only if you can find the key. What happens
if the key goes "missing" for some files?
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Probably not very easy to do, maybe impossible in some cases, but, as much as possible move your research outside the university (if a public university).
If you are receiving research grants, try to arrange to set up a private corporation to get the grant money and do the research.
Use private email.
Yes, this flies in the face of the whole point of a research university but sometimes you do what you have to do.
Perhaps a university's office for fulfilling FOI requests can have a staff of one and it just takes as long as it takes.
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@NYCLugg, if your research is financed by a government, it makes no difference whether you set up a private company to do it. If you're a professor doing research at a university, it's (almost always) part of your job requirement, not an extra.
The problem is the misuse of attempts to make government accountable by well funded interest groups with a desire to interfere with scholarship. That has to be faced directly. In the case of a state university, the activities of professors should be exempted from open records requirements because they are scholarly, not the functions of a political body. I know that's a tricky matter but it has to be faced.
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@NYCLugg What you are describing is illegal at a public university. However, a practical way around this would be for Prof. Ventry to switch jobs to a private university, where it is not possible to compel the release of emails, etc. Businesses using FOI requests to threaten professors at public institutions, as described here, could result in the most controversial thinkers staying away from public universities, depriving students and colleagues of exposure to new and challenging ideas.
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Use private email or even text on your personal cell phone about something work related one time and you can end up with the entire contents of your personal email and phone subject to open records request. The mandate isn’t restricted to government accounts; it is for any platform on which you’ve done “work,” even if that’s replying to a text from a colleague after hours.
What ends up happening is vague emails that don’t say anything (“regarding the thing we spoke about yesterday, you should go ahead and do it”) or just calling each other which takes way more time.
I believe in Sunshine Laws and FOIA, but they can also make it really hard to do your job and it actually encourages decreased transparency as everyone becomes more and more paranoid about the way things could be interpreted or be misused.
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