Dive Brief:
- The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s soon-to-be former Chancellor Phyllis Wise deliberately tried to keep university business private by discussing it over her personal email account.
- Inside Higher Ed reports that Wise wrote in one of the released emails that her chief spokeswoman, Robin Kaler, advised her not to use email during litigation, and that she was deleting emails from her personal account after sending them to be safe.
- The emails lend credence to the idea that UIUC officials fired Steven Salaita rather than revoke his job offer after his anti-Israel tweets last summer — potentially damning evidence against a university currently being sued.
Dive Insight:
The round of released emails also show that Christopher Kennedy, chair of the Illinois board, lobbied against retaining adjunct professor James Kilgore, a convicted felon and former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who served jail time after participating in a bank robbery. The email chain has given critics proof that university trustees had undue influence on faculty hiring decisions.
The University of Illinois policy explicitly says personal email is covered by Freedom of Information requests. The system announced that several of its administrators and other campus employees did not make their personal emails available to FOIA officers, prompting an internal ethics investigation and the release of 1,100 emails. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner seems to be taking the opposite tack following similar accusations against his ed chief.