Over the last two years, I’ve written more than a few stories drawing from public records requests. But sometimes, an institution’s response to those requests—or labored, muddled, confusing non-response—becomes a story of its own. Case in point: The Ohio State University.
In August of last year, I received a tip that the university had abruptly called off its diversity hiring training. That was significant and puzzling news, so I requested the emails of several administrators discussing the training. The request’s timeframe spanned just three days—emails sent between August 21, 2023 and August 23, 2023.
Anyone who has used electronic mail over the last three decades can deduce that this request was not extensive. Indeed, other organizations routinely request the emails of dozens of administrators, often with no narrowing search terms, over a timeframe of many months or even years.
So it’s notable that OSU did not carry out the request until this Monday, July 29. It took eleven months to send a 254 page document.
Again, that request was uniquely narrow, and it turns out that 100 pages of the records consisted of attached spreadsheets. Another 100 pages consisted of presentation slides that included only a few sentences each. Anyone could easily read through them in about an hour to determine they didn’t require redactions. OSU clearly did not need extensive time to process the records, yet it waited almost a year to send them.
But that’s not the only case of long delays:
Prior to Monday, I had seven pending requests with OSU, the most recent of which was made five months ago. The university routinely delays, though, in some cases, it has hurried along in response to outside pressure. This is not real transparency. If Ohio’s university leaders and policymakers want reform, they should look closely at the OSU’s official and de facto public records policies.
My saga underscores the problems with the current system. With seven outstanding requests, on July 26, I reached out to the university’s Assistant Vice President of Media and Public Relations Benjamin Johnson—who, oddly, manages communications regarding record requests. I asked if the university could make someone available to comment on my seven pending requests and the university’s records policy, implying that I was planning to write about its track record on public records requests.
Rather than responding to my email and phone message, Johnson simply provided records responsive to three of my outstanding requests—two of which had been made in August of 2023 and one in December of 2023.
To be fair, over the past year, OSU has complied with several of my requests. In June, I received a batch of records requested seven months prior. In February, I received 193 pages fulfilling multiple requests simultaneously. While that response was quicker, it was still not ideal, and it occurred less than two weeks after my attorney sent OSU a letter urging them to expedite the process.
Overall, that’s a lackluster track record. The university looks even worse when its response times are compared to similar institutions. For example, on August 21, 2023, I requested the emails sent over a month-long period by three OSU administrators that discussed a narrow range of topics and included one of five terms. On Monday, eleven months later, I finally received these documents. Oddly, OSU expanded the scope of my request, not limiting it to just those containing one of my listed terms. It added up to 530 pages.
Eleven months is a remarkable delay, but compare that to a similar institution.
Earlier this year, I made a nearly-identical request to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, asking for emails sent over a three week period by three administrators that included at least one of five terms. The university returned 106 pages of responsive records three weeks later. I’ve had similar turnarounds for requests from the University of New Mexico, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
OSU hasn’t just stalled on requests for emails. In December, I requested the College of Engineering’s “inclusive strategies reports.” The college’s equity task force required each search committee to create such a report, detailing their DEI efforts during the hiring process.
As it turns out, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Engineering required the same type of document from its search committees. When requested, UNL sent them to me in a matter of days—I wrote about them for The Free Press.
Seven months later, OSU still hasn’t provided the search reports—though, in this week’s batch of records, it provided a set of similar reports created by the College of Education and Human Ecology, which I requested at the same time.
The timing raises questions.
One business day after I emailed and implied I’d write about the delay, OSU carried out two requests, from approximately a year ago, virtually overnight. It also sent one set of hiring documents requested in December, though not the other. Was OSU nearly finished with these requests from six and eleven months ago, and I just very coincidentally emailed when they were almost done? Or did they rush these requests? And if they did, why can’t the rush my other four requests?
Wanting some clarity, I followed up with Johnson, noting that my other pending requests were “still quite overdue” and asking for “an update or comment on when I can expect to receive those records.” Johnson replied:
Your remaining public records requests are not ‘overdue.’ As I have explained, we receive hundreds of public records requests annually and process them in the order they are received. We have processed numerous requests for you and released hundreds of pages of records. We continue to process your remaining requests in accordance with Ohio law.
This is confusing. The documents did not follow an in-the-order-they-were-received fashion. Two of my pending requests were made in October, but I just received documents from a December 2023 request. Several months before I received the records from my August 2023 request, I received documents from a handful of requests made in October 2023.
It’s worth emphasizing: these records would provide transparency on important issues. In November of 2023, after waiting on a records request for about eight months, I finally got my hands on a set of “Diversity Recruitment Reports” created by search committees in the College of Arts and Sciences. Those documents revealed overt viewpoint and racial discrimination. One search committee boasted that it went out of its way to only select finalists of one particular race. Throughout, the documents suggest OSU has engaged in legally tenuous practices.
Even here, OSU has made it hard to know what’s going on. The university says it created a new hiring taskforce that ended many of the practices described in its “Diversity Recruitment Reports.” Johnson told me:
The new framework will … replace any existing, locally created evaluation forms or templates, such as the Faculty Search Diversity Recruitment Report in the College of Arts and Sciences. Instead, colleges will use standardized evaluation tools, and any legally required demographic data will be captured through the university’s central human resources platform.
But again, the university has ducked scrutiny. New hiring guidelines could reflect well on the university, showing a good faith effort to change course. I wanted to read those guidelines for myself, so in October of 2023, I asked for a document listing the members of the Faculty Hiring Taskforce, any related reports and memoranda, and the resulting guidelines. As of now, I’m empty handed.
These delays raise questions about compliance with OSU’s own public records policy. Mirroring the language of Ohio’s Sunshine Laws, the policy states that records will be “made available within a reasonable period of time,” which it describes this way:
The prompt/reasonable period of time within which public records must be made available to a requester will depend upon a number of factors, including the volume of the public records requested, the ease of retrieval, the medium on which the public records are stored, the need for any legal review, and any need for redaction. (Emphasis original.)
It’s with this policy in mind that I suggested my requests were “overdue.” OSU could claim that my requests require hours of close review for the purpose of redactions. But in every case when I have received records from OSU, after waiting many months, the university’s redactions have been minimal, reflecting Ohio’s relatively disclosure-friendly public records laws.
But combing through its records policy hoping for an explanation might give OSU too much credit. The university has never really offered a compelling explanation. When I inquired about the long delay on my earlier request for the College of Arts and Sciences “diversity recruitment reports,” Johnson implied that unrelated school events were somehow relevant to their processing, saying via email that “we’re heading into two weeks of board meetings, move-in and the start of the school year, but I know we’re working on your request and I hope to have more info soon.”
This is a mess, but it could be cleared up with better policy. Something like this:
- All communications regarding the fulfillment of public records requests should be carried out by the university’s records office, or the general counsel’s office, and not the public relations office.
- All requests for non-exempt records should be carried out within a 30 day period. If the records office believes it cannot carry out a request in that time, it should provide notice to the requestor, giving both a reasonable explanation for the delay (e.g. a page count) and an estimated date of fulfillment.
- The records office should provide annual reports regarding the fulfillment of public records requests. The report should include a log of all requests made in the calendar year, the number of requests made, the number of requests processed, the average processing period for all records requests, and the average processing period for the longest ten percent of request processing periods.
- The university’s records office budget should be expanded to accommodate the large load of public records requests and bring its processing time in alignment with that of other flagship state universities.
Herein lie real implications for the future of Ohio’s flagship university. As I’ve documented, OSU implemented policies that pushed the school’s education and research agenda toward explicit political activism for years, with an overt focus on the themes of identity politics. The university has gestured at reform, but we can only gauge that reform through transparency. It’s telling that Ohio State continues to remain opaque.
Image Christie’s — nara.getarchive.net & Edited by Chance Layton
