The last blog commenter, Cherry Mole Sauce, felt this latest Herald Leader article on UK's continued fight to hide its secrets, deserves a post. I agree. This editorial article (http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/editorials/article95386857.html) discusses president Capilouto's most recent defense plan (http://uknow.uky.edu/content/tension-competing-values-0) to wear down open record requests by simply declaring some moral high ground, openly refusing to follow the law and fighting in court or suing anyone who asks for open records they do not want to give out. Or as President Capilouto put it:
"in a handful of very specific cases, we are faced with the decision of whether transparency is more important than the need to protect the privacy and dignity of individual members of our community"
What does:
" the need to protect the privacy and dignity of individual members of our community"
have to do with the University violating the Open Records law about the adequacy of its search for minutes of the policy-advising CoM Compensation Committee or information on BoT public meetings?
The university has ongoing at least 2 and probably 3 lawsuits with respect to fighting the state's Attorney General's decision on open records requests, then there are lawsuits related to suing 2 newspapers and Dr. Lachin Hatemi for requesting open records they didn't want to give, and oh yeh, don't forget the never ending Dr. Paul Kearney vendetta legal case.
So you wonder how your taxpayer dollars are being spent at this public state university? It is no wonder that they are raising tuition and reducing staff. With all of these legal expenses related to hiding this public information from the public, as well as their vendetta to drive out of the university challengers of their authority, there is little left to invest in education.
This gets old, but the older it gets the more important it gets. Why spend all this time and money to fight open records requests that by law they are required to release and in reality have nothing to do with protecting the privacy of the university community? In other words, "what are they hiding?"