Remember last year, when e-mail controversies swirled around academics at Wisconsin and UVA? I fretted then that the episodes likely would find their way into bad legislative proposals aiming nuclear weapons at molehills…and then along comes this:
[Maryland] House Bill 62 would allow universities and community colleges to deny requests for “data or other information of a proprietary nature that: was produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of a public institution of higher education; was produced or collected in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical, or scholarly issues; and has not been publicly released, published, or copyrighted.”
If that’s not enough, the secrecy would extend to “correspondence or research produced by faculty of a public institution of higher education on public policy issues.”
But isn’t a public university professor a public employee?
“Professors are different than bureaucrats, and there are issues of academic freedom involved here,” said Del. Sandy Rosenberg, D-Baltimore, the primary sponsor.
He said the bill was prompted by controversies in Virginia and Wisconsin.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has sought a former professor’s emails under a state fraud law, and a state lawmaker sought the same emails under the state’s open-records law.
This was painted as an attack on academic freedom, on the theory that making professors’ emails public would have a chilling effect on research and open debate. The Virginia cases are still in court.
Meanwhile, Rosenberg read a New York Times column by Paul Krugman on a University of Wisconsin professor. After professor William Cronon wrote a piece criticizing his state’s new Republican governor and a blog post on a group pushing conservative legislation, Republicans filed a public-records request for his email.
This, too, was painted as an attack on academic freedom, even though some of Cronon’s emails were turned over and nothing came of it.
Filed under: 3. Access law | Tagged: academic freedom, Maryland, proposed exemptions |
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