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Death threats over FOIAs for prof emails

Several threatening phone calls were made last Thursday to The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank based in Midland, Michigan. The calls, which came in response to the Mackinac Center’s request for e-mails of professors in the labor studies departments of Michigan universities, are being taken very seriously.

“After we heard the five or six voice messages that were left last Thursday night, we felt that they rose to the level of seriousness that we did need to notify law enforcement,” said Michael Jahr, Vice President of Communications at the Mackinac Center.

Jahr explained that because the messages contained threats against public officials—including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—the FBI was also contacted.

The threat against Walker may have had to do with a perceived connection between the Mackinac Center’s FOIAs and ones made by the Republican Party of Wisconsin. A Wisconsin GOP leader filed a records request on March 17 seeking e-mails sent from the state e-mail address of William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin professor who had written a blog post opposing Republican labor legislation.

The request garnered national attention, with academics such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman alleging that Cronon’s academic freedom was at stake. Others pointed to laws against public employees using state resources for partisan political purposes as legitimate reason for acquiring the e-mails. Cronon maintains that he does not use his university-issued e-mail address for such a purpose.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed its FOIA requests last week, seeking e-mails from members of the labor studies departments at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University. The requests were leaked to the press and once again made the news. And then, on Thursday, came death threats from at least one caller.

“The person cited some of the key words that we had requested in our FOIA,” Jahr said. “She repeated some of them over and over so we got the impression that it was that which she was upset about.”

Ken Braun, Managing Editor of the Mackinac Center’s newsletter, wrote an article on Monday defending the requests.

“These requests are not only proper, but also respectful of the privacy of the labor professors involved,” he wrote. Braun indicated that previous FOIAs had yielded evidence of broken laws and misused taxpayer money on the part of universities and other state agencies.

According to Jahr, public records requests are a necessary and important tool for government watchdog groups like the Mackinac Center.

“We use FOIAs in our investigative reporting, and we have found instances of government wrongdoing and questionable uses of taxpayer moneys in the process,” he said. “We have a great track record of using FOIA requests responsibly and in the public interest.”

Jahr was also surprised by how quickly the FOIAs found their way into the hands of reporters.

“To have one leaked to the media before we even received a response was surprising and probably unprecedented,” he said.

But though the requests may be controversial, the universities are prepared to comply. Rick Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the University of Michigan, said the Mackinac Center’s request would be treated just like any of the other 400 requests the university receives each year.

“We’re handling it as we would handle any other FOIA request,” he said.

Fitzgerald indicated that the university was still determining whether the records requested by the Mackinac Center exist.

“We are still in the very early stages of identifying if we have any responsive records that fit those criteria,” Fitzgerald said.

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