MU IS SENDING SIGNAL IT HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE

Something happens when government says "no" to news organizations seeking information.

An assumption is made that government is hiding something -- something the public might be interested to know.

So who is "government," and who are these "news organizations."

In Columbia, Mo., home of the University of Missouri, there are two cases in court right now that deserve special mention.

The first involves WDAF, a television station in Kansas City, which asked the university for records on students who have committed acts of violence and some sex offenses. These are the kinds of crimes that, if they had been committed anywhere but a university campus, would have been handled by a police department or sheriff's department, and there would have been no question about WDAF's access to that information.

But because these crimes were committed on a university campus, they were investigated by campus police. The university has refused to provide information about the crimes.

You might expect the university to argue that the privacy of students is at stake. Mainly, the university is arguing that the its curators can't be compelled to give out records it never sees and doesn't control.

That was the finding of a 1983 case in which the Columbia Daily Tribune sought some university records.

However, the Missouri Legislature subsequently passed a law saying state universities are subject to Missouri's open meetings and open records law.

The purpose of the law is to open government, not to give government a legal footing for shutting out the public.

In the other case, The Kansas City Star is seeking internal audit records of the four UMC campuses.

Here again, the legal arguments come down to who controls university records. And the issue is further refined to whether physical control or legal control is at stake.

The easy solution to these lawsuits is for the University of Missouri to hand over the requested records.

By forcing the issue to be decided by a court, the university is again sending a signal that the requested data would somehow be detrimental to the university's reputation -- a cloud that never would have formed if the information sought by The Star and WDAF has been quickly handed over.