Michigan Center Says It Wants to Know if Labor Professors Misused Public Resources

After nearly a week of refusing to explain its motives, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has stated why it submitted open-records requests to Michigan’s three largest public universities seeking e-mails by labor-studies faculty members regarding the debate over collective bargaining in Wisconsin. In a statement posted on the Web site of the free-market-oriented group, Ken Braun, the managing editor of one of the center’s newsletters, says he is seeking to learn whether the scholars “had actively employed university resources to enter the political debates.” At a minimum, he says, such an investigation might raise questions about the expenditure of tax dollars on public universities. It is also possible, he writes, that the e-mails “might suggest that the faculty had acted illegally.” He adds, “We were not interested in some sort of bizarre crusade to expose any political bias of professors.”