Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Editorial: Tech officials keep secrets
They promised to release records about the shootings to the public but still keep some hidden.
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Leaders at Virginia Tech have reasons not to want people delving too deeply into the events of April 16, 2007. For one thing, the community hardly wants to keep reliving that day's terrible shootings. For another, nagging questions about the administration's response have persisted.
Nevertheless, the school remains a public institution, and the people of Virginia must be able to hold public officials accountable. That requires access to documents that record the events of April 16. Tech has been too coy about releasing them.
Disclosure was part of the settlement reached between Tech and most of the victims' families. The school is to place the essential facts in a public archive.
Yet when journalists from the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper reviewed the available records, which total an estimated 20,000 pages, they discovered some were missing. They knew because lawyers for the families previously had received some of the documents and Virginia's Freedom of Information Act wisely requires public officials to explain what documents they withhold and why.
The withheld records include notes from a meeting of senior university officials the morning of the shootings as well as student records.
There is something unsettling about a taxpayer-funded agency like a university playing favorites with public records. The families and their attorneys are members of the public like anyone else, albeit ones with a justifiably intense interest in what happened that day. State open records law does not let agencies pick and choose who gets to review documents. If it was appropriate to release them to the lawyers, it is appropriate to release them to a reporter or any other citizen who asks.
Equally troubling, some of the records no longer exist. The researchers found a note stating that the shooter's counseling records had inadvertently been destroyed but no explanation how. That alone demands more information from officials.
A case certainly exists for keeping personal records of the shooter secret. Few people, we suspect, would want their college transcripts or mythical "permanent record" from their high school years open to public scrutiny even after death. The rest of the secrecy has little justification.
State law allows Tech officials to hide working papers, but often that is not a smart choice. With so much scrutiny on the university and so many conspiracy theories floating around, only a complete reckoning might clear the air. Besides, openness is what officials promised the families.
