UCLA must provide reporters, students proper access to public records

When UCLA denies or delays members of the media access to public records, it robs the students who pay thousands of dollars in tuition every year.

By guarding information that should be public, the university is stealing people’s right to know how its money is being spent, and how it is acting in its capacity as a public institution.

On Sept. 9, 2013, a Daily Bruin reporter requested email conversations between UCLA employees that mentioned their involvement with a story she had been working on for more than nine months.

UCLA Records Management and Information Practices didn’t fill her request until more than a year later, on Sept. 13, 2014.

The disheartening contents of the emails aside – many of them made shockingly harsh judgments of Sonali Kohli’s character and skill as a journalist for no apparent reason other than her status as an undergraduate student – the actions of UCLA are unacceptable, and verge on illegal.

According to the California Public Records Act, a public institution like UCLA has 10 days to respond to a records request, and has the right to ask for up to a 14-day extension if the office has “the need to search for and collect the requested records from field facilities or other establishments that are separate from the office processing the request.”

After that, the public office must give an estimated date as to when the records will be made available or explain why it considers the records exempt from disclosure.

So why then did UCLA take so long to fill the request?

According to the university, the emails Kohli requested were voluminous and required several rounds of time-consuming legal review. But there is no reasonable excuse for it to take a year to fulfill a request that the university initially estimated would take only a few months.

It is clear that UCLA is part of a large group of universities denying journalists access to public information, and thereby denying the students and taxpayers who foot the bill for the universities.

In recent months alone, this has happened to professional journalists looking for information from the University of Montana and the University of Oregon.

The list of incidents like this abound. Sometimes, universities are really trying to protect exempt records that contain sensitive student information subject to privacy laws.

But UCLA has often denied or delayed requests for records that aren’t controversial in nature. Kohli wanted emails that mentioned her own independent journalism project. Another Daily Bruin staffer asked for undergraduate GPAs since 2003, with all personal information redacted. She has been waiting for 60 days and was told the records would cost $600. Another staffer waited 96 days to receive a list of all lawsuits settled by UCLA between 2006 and 2013, and the records that were finally released were incomplete and consisted of less than one page of information.

When the university fails to hand over public information, all Daily Bruin reporters can do is keep asking. And that means UCLA students are left in the dark.

In order to change the culture of denying the release of clearly public records, students need to take up the issue of freedom of information. We can no longer stand to allow the university to hide public information under the guise of privacy.

This isn’t just an issue for student journalists. It is an issue for all students.

So long as UCLA can continue denying the Daily Bruin information, it is potentially hiding injustice from the entire student body and the taxpayers who fund the university.