Preservation of Regents Recordings: Please Stand By - The Answer

In a prior post, we noted that we had received a communication from a representative of the Regents about the policy we had cited that recordings of Regents meetings would be deleted after one year.* Yours truly had been told that the one year rule was the policy with the only explanation being given was that CSU trustees deleted their recordings after one year. But it was noted that at a point in 2019, the recordings stopped being deleted.**

I then inquired whether the policy had been changed to indefinite preservation. What I learned was that in fact there is no policy, nor was there ever a policy. It's just what someone used to be doing. And now someone is no longer doing it.

So it turns out that yours truly had forgotten the rule he learned over a 40-year career at UC and on various Academic Senate committees: When someone says there is a policy, ask to see it in writing. Often, "policies" turn out to be "practices," not official policies. And also often, it turns out that no one knows who decided on the practice. My favorite line from the latest season of the detective show Goliath: "So this decision was made by no one and yet somehow it happened." Video below:

In any event, yours truly is glad the Regents are no longer deleting their recordings. But since there is no official policy of keeping them indefinitely, or any official policy at all, he will continue preserving them indefinitely. That will be the official policy of this blog.

PS: We haven't finished our review of the March Regents meetings due to other obligations; specificially, we haven't reviewed the second day. But we will get there. And we have preserved the recordings, just in case:

https://archive.org/details/public-engagement-and-development-committee_202303.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/03/preservation-of-regents-recordings.html.

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**To get further into the weeds: In the early years of this blog, the Regents live-streamed the audio of their meetings. There was no posting of the audio after the meetings. So, if you had the time, you could record from the stream as it occurred, but there was no after-the-meeting source online. Yours truly suspected that in fact there was a recording even though it wasn't being posted. So he would file a Public Records Act request for it and get it by postal mail. Eventually, the formality was dropped and he would just get a CD copy of the audio recording without the official filing. He then posted the audios, eventually on archive.org. At the time, archive.org had limits on the size of the files that could be posted, so when the Regents began providing video, yours truly would just post the audio track of the video. And the Regents would deleted the video after one year. Eventually, the size limit on archive.org was lifted and we went to video posting, our current procedure.