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If COVID19 transparency is the only factor, the NCAA tournament has a clear winner
If the NCAA tournament were based on COVID19 transparency, who would win Monday night? Why Don't We Know reporter Noah Ram dove into the data after the final four games were played and came up with a clear winner.
WaPo: Big Ten presidents used ‘portals’ to keep secret communications about COVID19 and football
The Washington Post is reporting that Big Ten university leaders used a third-party “portal” to keep secret what would otherwise be public communications about whether the football season should resume. As Why Don’t We Know reported in Season 1, Episode 6, these portals are becoming increasingly more popular among
Frostburg State doesn’t want negative COVID19 press, so it’s silencing resident assistance, according to student news
Yet another public university is trying to silence students who work in campus housing from speaking out about their university's handling of COVID-19 cases, even though both students and public employees have substantial First Amendment protection to speak about issues of public concern. The Bottom Line, the student newspaper at Frostburg State University,
Dallas school district says public records requests can be indefinitely delayed in pandemic
All across the country we're seeing government offices of all shapes and sizes use the pandemic as an excuse not to respond to open records requests in a timely manner. We discuss this at length in this week's bonus episode. This example came across our desks after production for
RAs at Cal Poly fear retaliation in talking about COVID19 outbreak in dorms, student news site reports
October 1, 2020 In our first WDWK episode "EXTRA," we explored how many public universities unconstitutionally gag student residents assistants from speaking to the media without first getting permission. A new example of that emerged this week at Cal Poly, where a floor of a residence hall
North Carolina U’s contradict themselves on open searches
In episode six, The Portal, we mentioned that North Carolina State's current chancellor, Randy Woodsen, was chosen in a secret search. This is true of all North Carolina public university chancellors. Universities there have interpreted an open records law exemption related to public employee personal records to mean that
EXTRA: When speech isn’t free, but it should be
As students return to campus amidst a global pandemic, news stories are popping up, citing the concerns of resident assistants in dormitories about how some universities are handling safety. Almost all of the concerns are from RAs who are speaking anonymously, and almost all of the stories cite policies
University of Utah doubles down on media policy identified by WDWK as violating the First Amendment
In Episode 2, we revealed that many major universities have unconstitutional policies, gagging the rights of student athletes, and telling them that they cannot speak publicly without first getting permission. This flies in the face of the First Amendment. Monday, the University of Utah not only doubled down