News

TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Document trail reveals how ‘green energy’ left S.C. college in the red

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The story of the University of South Carolina's attempts to turn wood chips into too-cheap-to-meter electricity reads like a chapter out of "The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook: Government Contracting Edition."According to detailed accounts published over the past two months in the Columbia, S.C., newspaper, The State:

  • The construction of a $20 million biomass power plant got rolled into a pre-existing contract for electricity, without the competitive bids that would normally have been required for a building of that size.
  • The plant was months late in powering up, in part because that sole-bidder construction company failed to apply for the necessary permits.
  • It only worked about once every five days.
  • Oh, and one time, it exploded.
Reporter Wayne Washington's analysis of 1,816 pages of public documents, many of which The State helpfully republished online to accompany his reporting, makes for a compelling narrative.

TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Connecticut court case may be a ticket to greater secrecy for college athletic scandals

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The formula for Coca-Cola. The recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The list of people buying tickets for Connecticut Huskies football games.The first two are legally protected trade secrets -- and third one will be, too, if the University of Connecticut gets its way.Connecticut's Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in December in a case testing whether public colleges may refuse to honor open-records requests for the identities of those buying tickets to sporting events.Ordinarily, any document in the possession of a public university must be disclosed on request, unless the university can point to a specific exemption that makes the document confidential.

Supreme Court shows interest in case of student disciplined for off-campus MySpace group

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The Supreme Court appears to be showing initial interest in Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, one of a slew of off-campus speech cases awaiting its consideration.The court requested a response Monday from the West Virginia school district to the certiorari petition filed on behalf of Kara Kowalski, the court docket shows.Kowalski, a former Musselman High School student, was suspended in 2005 for creating a MySpace group that school officials claimed was intended to ridicule another student.The title of the webpage was “S.A.S.H.,” which Kowalski said was an acronym for “Students Against Sluts Herpes.” But posts by other students on the page quickly devolved into disparaging comments about a specific classmate.The 4th U.S.

Why Penn State’s (many) problems may include a Clery Act crime reporting violation

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To the extent that it is understood at all, the Jeanne Clery Act is known as the federal law that requires college police to tally and disclose reported crimes on their campuses.So it may seen anomalous that a crime not reported to police at all -- the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old boy in the football team showers at Penn State -- might be the basis of a Clery Act violation.To understand why requires understanding the scope of a university's disclosure obligations under Clery -- which, it seems increasingly clear, many colleges and universities thsmselves either fail to understand or affirmatively ignore.The U.S.