UO President’s Office staff to face discipline for deleting documents from Archives 02/24/2015

UO President’s Office staff to face discipline for deleting documents from Archives

  02/24/2015

http://uomatters.com/2015/02/uo-presidents-office-staff-to-face-discipline-for-deleting-documents-from-archives.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Just kidding, that will never happen, and this situation is not funny.

The latest Rich Read report in the Oregonian doesn’t have anything about what documents the President’s Office is hiding from the public. This is despite the fact that many emails in the Presidential Archives, about matters clearly related to the public’s business, mention attachments that were not in the archives. Other things that clearly should have been in the archives – e.g. documents and correspondence about Knight Arena funding – were not. Or at least I couldn’t find them.

CAS Dean Andrew Marcus gave me VPAA Doug Blandy’s takedown letter at 5:10 PM on Jan 20th. At that point the administration knew almost nothing about what was in the Archives or how I had obtained them. The administration’s normal response in these situations is “we can’t comment about a discipline matter under investigation”.  Instead they sent out the prejudicial email below, just 2.5 hours later.

And now, having prejudged the decision by the UO Archives to release the Presidential Archives as “unlawful” in his off-the-hip email, Interim President Coltrane needs to find some scapegoats to make that hasty judgement look true.

The chances that this will be followed by an investigation of what Johnson Hall has hid from the public are pretty slim.

Date: January 20, 2015 at 7:39:38 PM PST
From: “President’s Office” Reply-To: pres@uoregon.edu
Subject: Archive release investigation

Dear Colleagues,

We have recently learned that a significant number of archived records from the President’s Office have been unlawfully released. These records contain confidential information about faculty, staff and students, but our current understanding is that no social security numbers, financial information or medical records were shared.

We have launched an investigation of the incident, and we have put staff members on administrative leave, pending that investigation. The information was sent to a university professor, and we have already requested that the professor return the information and refrain from any public release of confidential information. To our knowledge, only one record has been shared externally at this point.

We are committed to taking steps to mitigate the potential injury associated with this situation.

Sincerely,

Scott Coltrane, Interim President