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Yale's openness on display in two stories

By Mark Obbie

Yale University makes news on two related fronts in this Yale Daily News story about the university's debate over the gossip site JuicyCampus.com (via How Appealing) and this NPR Morning Edition story on a fight over public access to Yale campus police records. Neither story adequately explains why the law treats private universities differently, but both otherwise do a good job of explaining their respective controversies.The Daily News' Isaac Amsdorf takes a thorough, neutral look at the campus debate over muzzling the gossip site, which has stirred up controversies on other campuses over anonymous users' verbal attacks on fellow students. Implicit but well-explained in the story is the reality that while Yale may have the legal right to block access to the site on computers using the university's Internet pipeline, that might contradict Yale's traditional belief in fighting speech with more speech, not with censorship. In the second story, NPR's Tovia Smith puts Yale's police-records fight in useful national context. After a public defender was blocked from viewing campus police officers' personnel records, she won an official public-records ruling that orders the university to comply with the state's open records law, even though Yale is, of course, a private university. Smith explains the public-private issues fairly well, and touches on similar struggles elsewhere in the U.S. Because of an unusually broad state law, Smith says without further explanation, the push to treat campus police the same as city police has gained traction and may lead to a court fight. Most revealing interview: the Harvard official's complaint that a "paparazzi climate" in the news media argues in favor of keeping secret the details of what happens when private university police interact with students and the public. The only notable omission in Smith's report: There's no recognition of the Clery Act, which requires disclosure of at least some campus crime reports. If she'd had another 30 seconds or so, Smith could have examined why that federal law isn't generally understood to require disclosure of incident reports and individual officers' records.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).