‘Phooey on FOIA’ - The American Conservative
The article argues that while legal frameworks like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) were designed to ensure governmental transparency, public universities often obstruct this process through excessive fees, bureaucratic delays, and deliberate obfuscation. This resistance suggests that many institutions view themselves as sovereign entities rather than public trusts, hindering the scrutiny necessary to maintain accountability in higher education. The narrative highlights a growing disconnect between statutory rights and practical reality, where standard transparency mechanisms are often rendered ineffective by institutional hostility. By contrasting historical examples of whistleblowers who bypassed formal channels with current struggles to access basic records, the piece illustrates how the spirit of open government is being eroded, forcing advocates to seek alternative methods to expose institutional practices and funding sources. This issue is highly relevant to open data because it underscores the critical importance of machine-readable, standardized data publication alongside legal access rights. The author advocates for enforcing recent legislation that mandates agencies publish data in accessible formats, arguing that true transparency requires not just the ability to request documents, but the proactive release of information in ways that allow for easy analysis and public oversight of public spending and operations.
Source: theamericanconservative.comPublished on 2023-06-29