Wisconsin Faculty Urges Administrators to Fight ‘Misuse’ of Open-Records Law

The Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison voted overwhelmingly on Monday to urge the campus’s chancellor, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, and its university counsel, John C. Dowling, “to take a leadership role in contesting and resisting the misuse” of the state’s open-records laws. The senate resolution, adopted in response to a controversial attempt by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to gain access to a Madison professor’s e-mails related to the state’s debate over collective bargaining, argues that university officials need to champion academic freedom and fight efforts to use open-records requests to harass or intimidate faculty or staff. At the urging of members who warned it not to take too negative a tone, the senate voted to omit language calling on Ms. Martin and Mr. Dowling to reconsider how the institution responded last week to the state GOP’s open-records request. Rather than taking a hard line against the request, the university has agreed to hand over some e-mails while withholding “private e-mail exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom.”