Ahead of the Curve

The curved neuroscience building

Inside Higher Ed takes note of the recent UCLA policy on requests to faculty for public documents such as emails.  Blog readers will recall a recent posting on that new policy.

...Carole Goldberg, a professor of law and vice chancellor of academic personnel at UCLA, is co-chair of the joint Academic Senate-Administration Task Force on Academic Freedom, which drafted the statement. She said that no particular incident at UCLA had inspired the statement, but that faculty and administrators wanted to “get ahead of the curve” on academic freedom and scholarly communications, in light of several high-profile incidents in at other public institutions in recent years...

Full story at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/14/ucla-produces-statement-designed-protect-faculty-inappropriate-open-records-requests

As noted in our prior post, we still suggest awareness (caution) that your emails and other documentation could be made public since privacy guidelines are inevitably open to subjective decisions.  In addition, emails you send to another person at some other public university - perhaps not in California - might be obtained under different rules there.

Our prior post is at http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2014/01/someone-may-want-to-see-what-you-are.html