Big Ten presidents are answering questions about transparency after a new report revealed an effort to conceal certain conversations about the novel coronavirus and the schools' reactions from the public view.
Emails from officials at public, taxpayer-funded universities and colleges can be released under Freedom of Information Act laws (Northwestern is a Big Ten school, but it is private). Knowing this, Mark Schlissel, president of the University of Michigan, and Rebecca Blank, chancellor at the University of Wisconsin, discussed how to communicate and handle messages without having them subject to public records laws, according toa story published Friday by the Washington Post.