At its first-ever meeting on Tuesday, a free-speech advisory group at Ohio University “discussed the critical importance of transparency” — and then unanimously voted to close its meetings to the public.
Transparency is one of the group’s core values, Scott Titsworth, dean of the Scripps College of Communication and a member of the advisory group, said in a statement posted online. “The group decided meetings should continue to be held in private in order to accomplish the work at hand in an efficient manner and meet the expected delivery deadline for recommendations.”
Although minutes of the meetings will be released and members of the group will be made available to the news media after the meetings, the decision has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and others. “We are extremely disappointed with the university’s decision to convene that advisory committee outside of the public’s eye,” said J. Bennett Guess, executive director of ACLU of Ohio. “It is extremely ironic, even absurd … that they would be meeting in secret.”
Universities across the nation are grappling with their free-speech policies in the wake of appearances on campuses by white nationalists, and the counterprotests they often provoke. Ohio University’s advisory group was created last month by M. Duane Nellis, the university’s president, after the campus was criticized for its new “freedom of expression” policy, The Athens News reported at the time.
The group, which includes one representative each from the administrative, faculty, graduate-student, student, and classified-employee senates, is responsible for reviewing comments on the policy and recommending changes. The chief of police, legal counsel, head of event services, and senior spokesman for the university are also part of the group.
‘Next-Level Inanity’
The Ohio chapter of the ACLU and others took issue with a portion of the “freedom of expression” policy that restricts demonstrations inside university buildings. “Demonstrators, rallies, public speech-making, sit-ins, marches, protests, and similar assemblies are not permitted in the interior spaces of university buildings,” unless they take place in a pre-approved venue, the policy says.
A university spokesman said the advisory group, since it is not legislating or creating university protocols, wouldn’t be subject to Ohio’s open-meetings laws.
Mr. Guess said that the university may be within its rights to convene the group in secret, but that it should be operating under “the highest standards of open-meetings practices because they are dealing with issues that are very clearly of importance to the entire college community.”
Jonathan Peters, a scholar of media law at the University of Georgia who earned his undergraduate degree in journalism from Ohio University, said on Twitter that the decision was “some next-level inanity.”
When reached for further comment, Mr. Peters, who also serves on the board of ACLU of Ohio and is licensed to practice law there, said it was the “height of irony” for the group to dedicate itself to transparency and then close its meetings to the public.
It is an “open question whether that advisory group would be subject to the open-meetings act,” Mr. Peters said. “Even if we assume that the group is not subject to the open-meetings law, I still think that Ohio University is behaving badly.”
Correction (11/17/2017, 4:34 p.m.): This article originally described imprecisely the makeup of one of the university’s senates. It represents all students, not just undergraduates. The article has been updated to reflect that.