Dive Brief:

• Delaware legislative leaders have effectively neutralized a proposal that would have made the state’s public universities more transparent under open-records laws.
• The proposed legislation would have required the University of Delaware and Delaware State University to fully comply with the state's Freedom of Information Act, but Democratic leaders introduced an amendment that passed a key committee vote on Thursday, giving the universities new exclusions to keep information private.
• An attorney with the Student Press Law Center said the amendment is laughable and does a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” on the bill, The News Journal reported.

Dive Insight:

With the amendment, the bill requires universities to disclose only documents related to contracts funded by taxpayers. As always, allowing taxpayer-funded institutions to keep information secret from the public is only going to hurt those institutions in the long run. And public universities, especially in today’s environment, can’t afford the negative public perception and suspicion created by keeping their records under wrap.

That’s not apparent to the University of Delaware, which has denied 82% of the 65 Freedom of Information Act requests it has received since July 2012. And even though FOIA requires public bodies to maintain logs tracking FOIA requests, the university denied a reporter's request for a copy of its log this spring, and Delaware State University said it doesn’t keep one. According to The New Journal, 48 states do not allow special exemptions to open records laws for publicly funded colleges and universities.