Some of Michigan's public universities find ways to prevent taxpayers, who help fund them, from knowing their business -- such as the president's expenditures or trustees' decision-making process. Schools like the University of Michigan aren't shy about invoking exceptions to the Freedom of Information Act to avoid disclosing information.
Here's another way that can block the public from learning about the schools' activities:
Anna Clark writes in Columbia Journalism Review that "transparency comes at a cost — and a seemingly arbitrary one at that."
“It’s often cost-prohibitive for most organizations to pay for the material,”David Jesse, a higher education reporter for the Free Press, says about obtaining school records. Clark writes:
The Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Central Michigan University recently conducted a FOIA audit of the state’s 15 public universities. It asked for a year’s worth of information on expenses from the university presidents and governing boards, and also police reports on campus sexual assaults. The goal: to compare how universities respond to requests for public information, and how much they charge.
No university denied the requests. But the price to fulfill all of them totaled more than $20,000. That ranged from Eastern Michigan University and two other schools that offered records for free, to the University of Michigan, where it would cost $2,774 just for presidential spending records. UM attributed that cost to its estimate that it would take 46.5 staff hours to search for records, and many more to review and duplicate documents.
In total, presidential expenses were the most costly records; it would take $10,750.93 to fulfill them all. Arielle Hines, president of CMU-SPJ and a senior journalism major, questioned the hours it would take to fulfill the requests. “What archaic system are you using?” she said. “You have to think they’d have some kind of auditing process for the president, and if not, that’s a bigger story.” (Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that Hines, the editor of CMU Insider, has pushed for more and better transparency at public universities.)
The universities also collectively charged $5,104.51 for sexual assault police reports and $4,759.54 for governing board expenses. Eight universities indicated that the requests would take more than a thousand hours to fulfill at up to $78 per hour. These are requests that Hines described, in a Bridge column, as “crafted specifically to make retrieval easy and to minimize ‘review.’” The audit, she wrote, demonstrated that “at too many public universities, members of the public are priced out of public records,” and “revealed a system largely hostile to any sort of reasonable openness.”
Student journalists on other campuses have conducted similar experiments that illustrate not only the costs of public information, but also the unpredictable rates. In 2011, The Michigan Daily, the campus paper at the University of Michigan (which I once wrote for), FOIA’d a year’s worth of information on parking tickets issued by campus police, and information about employee use of purchasing cards (PCards) from all the Big 10 universities. It found that most schools provided the information for free. Michigan State charged a total of $450. UM, on the other hand, charged $1240 for the ticket information, and “unspecified thousands of dollars” for PCard information.
