P-2-P not only OU restriction on access to P-2-P typical

In the context of Ohio University’s short-sighted effort to restrict, if not end, use of new computer technologies for illegitimate and legitimate data transfer, I thought readers might like to know that Ohio University is also making every effort possible to restrict access to public records and university services that allow transparency in university decisions and communication among faculty.

Last year, after the AAUP chapter at Ohio University proposed an evaluation of three top university officials (President, Provost, and VP for Regional campuses), a normal request by a faculty member for mailing labels that groups not associated with OU regularly use was blocked by John Burns, OU’s Legal Affairs Director, and the group also was ordered not to use campus email and snail-mail services to conduct an evaluation that the administration had not authorized.

As it turned out, the AAUP chapter created its own mailing lists and placed the evaluation instrument in the hands of nearly 1200 tenure-line and long-term non-tenure-line faculty members on the main and all regional campuses in four hours rather than the four days campus mail services would have taken. OU’s censorship of the very organization upon whose principles its employment contracts and governance procedures are based no doubt contributed to the evaluation yielding an overwhelming expression by faculty of “no confidence” in President Roderick McDavis, Provost Kathy Krendl, and Vice President Charles Bird. It also generated the $1000 it took to conduct the evaluation and bolstered a formerly nonexistent chapter treasury. This unintended consequence of restricting access to normal campus information channels and resources allowed the AAUP chapter to develop its web site and fund an all-faculty meeting for next month featuring a panel of AAUP activists from several Ohio public universities with AAUP collective bargaining.

Ohio University’s efforts to deny faculty access to public records (the mailing lists), as well as email and campus snail mail, ultimately was a disaster for OU’s “leadership” and helped bring a faculty with little interest in unionization to the point of attracting well-funded organizing efforts by the Ohio Education Association.

I thought President McDavis would have learned a lesson about the consequences of censoring faculty and violating the Ohio Public Records Law. Evidently, however, he and/or his “cabinet” have not yet learned this lesson. This week when I inquired about a week-old request for faculty mailing labels, I was told that there was a hold on them and that the OU Office of Legal Affairs was reviewing the request. These are labels that are freely given to any administrative office on campus for all-campus mailings. The apparent intent in side-railing requests for faculty mailing labels to the legal beagles is to slow, if not stop, faculty communication via printed materials. And, when it comes to use of email, Ohio University threatens a faculty group such as the AAUP with unstated actions when email use involves particular messages unapproved by top administration.

The first instinct of this administration—whether it’s a student with a beer in a dorm room or a student protest group exercising free-speech rights outside of a designated “free-speech zone"—is to censor, restrict, threaten, prosecute, place on probation, snitch on students to the recording industry, find a scapegoat to fire, create self-serving and self-protecting task forces and committees, and on and on. The only result has been creation of a campus of fear for all employees who haven’t the protection of tenure. It certainly has failed to elevate the stature of the university administration or the once well-regarded institution they supposedly administer. Just the opposite has occurred on campus, in the community, in the state, and nationally.

In taking this latest step banning use of new computer technologies, Ohio University will again suffer unintended consequences. And so will its faculty and research staff who will fight bureaucratic requests, reviews, and some belated approvals of P-2-P technology. These restrictions surely won’t bring Ohio University any closer to President McDavis’s demand that research dollars at Ohio University double or to achieving the research imperatives of Provost Krendl’s ill-fated, unfunded “VisionOhio” plan.

Prior to the installation of Roderick McDavis as president and his appointment of Kathy Krendl as provost at Ohio University, Legal Affairs Director John Burns quickly processed any request for records he knew to be subject to the Ohio Public Records Law. Since McDavis became president and appointed Krendl provost, John Burns now regularly contorts irrelevant language in the Ohio Public Records Law in efforts to justify not releasing records created by and distributed among some public employees. Usually after postponing access for days, weeks, or months, the person seeking the records gives up, the time in which the records would be useful passes, or—under threat of going to Ohio’s new “open-records-friendly” attorney general—finally releases what never should have been refused in the first place.

The mention of Ohio’s attorney general resulted in release of the requested mailing labels in less than 24 hours.

Joseph Bernt, Professor of Journalism at Ohio University, at 1:35 pm EDT on April 26, 2007