Apparently the University of Michigan really doesn’t want people to know when it hires couples together as faculty.
The editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan at the University of Texas-Austin wrote in a Detroit Free Press op-ed that Michigan’s second-largest university responded to her open-records request for the names of such couples with an exorbitant asking price: $1,280.
In a letter dated Aug. 6, the university’s Freedom of Information Act coordinator, Pat Sellinger, informed me that her unit could handle my request but that given “the amount of time estimated to search for, retrieve, copy and review to separate exempt from nonexempt records within the scope of your request, production of responsive nonexempt records will result in unreasonably high costs for the university.” …
Given that two universities provided me with the documents at no cost and in a fairly short period of time, that number should make jaws drop. When I asked Sellinger why the disparity, she chided me for asking “inappropriate” questions.
Even Michigan’s open-records law, which lets agencies charge a fee for “a public record search, the necessary copying of a public record for inspection, or for providing a copy of a public record,” doesn’t come close to explaining the four-figure price tag, she said.
Several states already fulfilled her request free of charge, and others gave reasonable explanations, saying their state laws don’t require them to “compile information from multiple sources.” Fair enough.
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