Wednesday was the third annual International Right to Know Day, which is celebrated in more than 20 countries. Its intention is to celebrate and raise awareness for the public's right to information in democratic societies, according to the organizer's Web site.
That right to know has been severely hampered at Ball State University recently.
Earlier in the provost selection process, selection committee chairman O'Neal Smitherman told the University Senate that the evaluation forms about the candidates would be made available for public review. However, upon visiting the Office of the President to review these forms, students and faculty discovered the university is requiring an agreement to be signed before the documents are made available. The agreement declares that the information is "for [viewers'] personal information only," and viewers "agree not to distribute this information publicly."
If this were an open university with an interest in democratic input, such an agreement would never have been drafted. The university should have encouraged publication of these opinions to spark and fuel discussion. The people whose comments are on the forms have nothing to fear, as their names have been cut off from the bottom of the forms.
These documents should be made completely public.
However, Executive Director of University Communications Heather Shupp said the feedback forms "are records that are not required to be made public. They are at the discretion of the institution ... They are simply being shared with a group of people within the university that is large."
But if the records are not allowed to be reproduced or distributed in any way, the university community is only as large as the number of people who can fit into the Office of the President at one time. Truly open records are available for print and discussion - as are truly open selection processes.
Because of the privacy agreement, faculty members in the American Association of University Professors, which met Wednesday, said they were hesitant to express their open and honest opinions to the university community.
This is wrong. No one at this university should fear or worry about the right to discuss the direction and leadership of the university, especially if it is said to be an open environment.
In hoping to maintain the privacy of evaluation responders, Ball State has put in place a system that restricts open discussion and limits the power of informed decision making to the few who have open access to all the information. By attempting to foster a more open process, the university has managed to do just the opposite.
Those responsible for this decision should have retracted their statements about these documents when they realized they didn't want to actually have the evaluations go public. But they didn't; instead, they've put up a fight for something they should not have.
So on this day that people all over the world were celebrating their right to know, their freedom of information, Ball State administrators were celebrating their information monopoly.
Meanwhile, students, faculty and staff were left with nothing to celebrate.
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