EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law has a carve-out for some taxpayer-funded universities, including Penn State. But it shouldn’t.
Few things irritate a journalist more than a public institution’s lack of transparency.
Mine flared up again recently when I read a Washington Free Beacon report about Penn State University’s strategic plan for its law school.
The plan outlines a strategy to teach future lawyers to become progressive (Marxist) activists. Over the next five years, Penn State Dickinson Law will emphasize “antiracist principles” and the “core value of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.”
In keeping with the plan, the law school requires first-year students to take a course called “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws.” One student says he dropped out entirely after being told that “he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political ‘coalition’ … dedicated to ‘building a more anti-racist’ future,” the Free Beacon reports.
How the Free Beacon obtained the “antiracist” strategic plan (an internal document) it didn’t say. But the finding raises questions about what other political projects Penn State may be dumping taxpayers’ money into without them knowing.
The state legislature sends about $242 million to the Big 10 university each year. And one would think that the public has the right to know how this money is being spent. But it doesn’t – at least not fully under state law.
Pennsylvania has a relatively strong Right to Know Law that gives individuals and journalists access to records at most public education institutions in the state.
But there’s one glaring exception. Penn State, a lobbying powerhouse, and a handful of other universities managed to get themselves a special carve-out.
I’m not the only journalist who’s been frustrated by that. News outlets in the state have been highlighting the transparency issue for years. As the Centre Daily Times, the main newspaper in Penn State territory, explained recently:
Penn State is considered a “state-related institution,” alongside Pitt, Temple and Lincoln, and the [Pennsylvania Right to Know Law] treats them differently than other universities in Pennsylvania. For example, schools within the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, like Slippery Rock, Kutztown or Shippensburg universities, are all fully subject to the RTKL.
But the state-related universities lobbied hard in 2007 to be excluded from the law, said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, of which the Centre Daily Times is a member. Because of the exclusion, information that is publicly accessible at most universities, like contracts, bids, financial reports and other documents, is largely inaccessible at Penn State. …
[T]he state-related universities in Pennsylvania are outliers among other states. Amy Kristin Sanders, the John and Ann Curley chair in First Amendment studies at Penn State, said nearly every other state university system, except Delaware, requires their state universities to comply with the public records law.
These universities do have to file “’a statement that specifies the amounts and purposes of all expenditures made from money appropriated by this act and other university accounts’ with the state Department of Education, the General Assembly, and the auditor general,” according to a 2023 Spotlight PA investigation.
However, the documents, obtained through a Right to Know request, “show that the state-related universities report their appropriation spending as a lump sum,” Spotlight PA reports.
In the name of transparency, Penn State does operate a Public Accountability page on its website that includes some financial records. But the university itself chooses what to include.
And, to state the obvious, public entities generally aren’t good watchdogs of themselves.
Most states recognize this by requiring all their public higher education institutions to comply with their open records laws. These laws provide important checks and balances that help to ensure tax dollars are being used to educate, not indoctrinate.
Given what we now know is happening at Penn State, the state legislature needs to erase the carve-out in the Right to Know Law. It’s time bring sunshine to higher education in Pennsylvania.
