Your Email Privacy

Blog readers will know that because UC is a public institution, it is subject to public records requests.  Some outside groups have approached various public universities around the country and demanded faculty email correspondence - mainly to make various political points.  Note that comparable private universities are not subject to such requests. 

A recent court decision involving the U of Virginia protects faculty emails, as described in an article in Inside Higher Ed.  An interesting point in the article is that apparently the Virginia legislature took note of the public/private discrepancy and bought the notion that a continued situation in which faculty correspondence was public at public universities but not at private universities put the former in an uncompetitive situation. 

You can find the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/18/virginias-high-court-protects-privacy-researchers-emails