The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 29th, 2015
Neither the legal principle of academic freedom nor the receipt of outside financial support for his work gives a public-college lecturer a right to declare his correspondence private, the University of Kansas argued this week in state court.
In a brief filed in a records dispute involving Arthur Hall, a lecturer who serves as director of the university’s Center for Applied Economics, the university argued that only higher-education institutions, and not their individual faculty members, have a right to academic freedom under the First Amendment. It also disputed Mr. Hall’s assertion that the state’s open-records law does not cover his correspondence as director because the center is financed with private funds from businesses.