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The Report:

What did the universities tell us?

An audit of how Mid-American Conference public universities respond to Freedom of Information Act requests showed Central Michigan University was the only college to refuse to release documents regarding sexual assault on campus.

The CMU chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists conducted an audit including each of the 12 MAC public universities to determine the difficulty of obtaining what should be public information from all MAC schools in regards to sexual assault on college campuses.

SPJ is a registered student organization on CMU’s campus. It is a nationally recognized organization with chapters on many other college campuses. The organization aims to help college students get real world experience in the journalism world, as well as provide them with resources, tips and tricks for interviews, internships and writing skills.

The group chose to request sexual assault documents because it’s a very well-known topic discussed in the media, SPJ President Patricia Alvord said.

“The Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University made our team curious about investigating other universities to see if they would be willing to cooperate with us,” Alvord said. “We know that there is a lot of personal information that goes with sexual assault, so we were also curious how universities would go about redacting that information while also following the law and fulfilling our FOIA request.”

SPJ chose to audit Mid-American Conference schools to explore FOIA/open records laws in multiple states, while keeping a connection to CMU. Most schools in the MAC also have similar enrollment numbers, which makes the information more comparable.

Click here for

each university's

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Results

Six of 12 Mid-American Conference public universities provided incident reports regarding sexual assault on campus. Akron, Ball State, Miami (Ohio), Toledo, Northern Illinois, Bowling Green State provided the records without any request of payment.

CMU, however, was the only public university in the audit to outright deny the request for sexual assault incident reports.

“The university is denying your requests for reports and arrest records for the following reasons: the records contain information of a personal nature on individuals — possibly embarrassing and intimate details — the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of the privacy of those individuals,” Mary Roy, freedom of information officer for CMU, said in her response.

“In addition, the records contain the names of students and other information which could lead to identification of those students. This is information protected from disclosure under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act without the consent of the students.”

Essentially, CMU chose to deny the reports because it may embarrass students, and the information is protected under FERPA. Other universities, however, were able to provide the information after redacting the personal information like student’s names.

Bowling Green State provided incident reports, but they were heavily redacted due to FERPA guidelines — the same reason that CMU said it could not provide the information.

Northern Illinois’ responses were also heavily redacted. They provided 29 incident reports and one 20-page arrest report.

Miami University initially responded with: “We would not classify an incident of a sexual nature with stalking, dating violence or domestic violence as the sole incident type.”

SPJ then clarified that they were only looking for cases of "rape, gross sexual imposition and sexual battery." Following the response, the university provided 62 incident reports that included when and where the incident occurred, and when it was reported.

Ball State provided many blank incident reports and a sexual assault informational packet, which included information about who to contact and victim’s rights.

Two universities, Ohio and Buffalo, responded to the initial request, but needed more time to collect all of the information needed.

Eastern Michigan demanded an estimated $167.87 deposit payment before providing incident reports. After receiving the reports, there would be another estimated charge of $167.88, totaling the $335.75 estimate provided by EMU officials.

Kent State provided statistical totals in the rape, sexual battery, sexual impositions and public indecencies, but did not provide individual incident reports.

Western Michigan granted the request in part after rejecting police reports. WMU provided Annual Security and Fire Safety Report information that noted each sexual assault case at the university each year. This information is readily available on the WMU website, however. The university provided statistical evidence of sexual assault-related police reports, which included:

19 cases in 2016
16 cases in 2017
2 cases in 2018.

The Society of Professional Journalists Chapter at CMU will be holding a symposium to discuss the results of the FOIA audit at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12 in Moore 105.

By Dylan Goetz