Paper Trail

An angry professor uses a state law to get colleagues' e-mail messages and other records

Text: Examples of e-mail messages acquired by Alexei Kojevnikov Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By PIPER FOGG

Academics are legendary for their feuds. Petty disagreements, vindictive behavior, personal insults -- most colleges have seen them all. The University of Georgia, where professors in the history department are entangled in what one of them calls a "knock-down, drag-out fight," is no different. This one, though, is all on paper.

Upset after the department voted narrowly against hiring his wife, Alexei Kojevnikov, a historian of science, got hold of records and e-mail messages of his dean, his department chairman, and four of his colleagues. The hundreds of pages of correspondence and notes include salary offers to outside professors, opinions about job candidates' qualifications, and records of tenure decisions and spousal hires. The documents even refer to one administrator's cancer diagnosis.

How did he manage to find such sensitive information? He simply asked for it.

Like most states, Georgia has an open-records law, or "sunshine law," which allows anyone to receive copies of records created by public employees, including faculty members at public universities. Though many states prevent the disclosure of personnel records, Georgia is not among them.

The professor has taken advantage of that. He suspects that Robert A. Pratt, chairman of the history department, sabotaged his efforts to get Mr. Kojevnikov's wife, Jessica Wang, a job in the department. He also thinks some of his colleagues may have taken part in a campaign against Ms. Wang, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles. Ultimately he wants the chairman punished, if not fired. He'd also like to see the university adopt clear policies on spousal hires. He insists that his mission has the greater good in mind. "It's still doing a lot to help the department," he says.

His colleagues have a different take. Some think he's on a fishing expedition, to satisfy some personal vendetta. Others worry that he has completely lost perspective. A few sympathize with his situation but say he has gone too far.

On one level, the case highlights how spousal hires can roil departments. But what is alarming, say some professors, is the precedent that Mr. Kojevnikov has set in requesting his colleagues' e-mail messages. They worry that their in-boxes could far too easily become fodder for public consumption. There is also the risk that people could make repeated requests, bordering on harassment. Some of his colleagues think Mr. Kojevnikov has already crossed that line.

Advocates for freedom of information argue that society has an important interest in ensuring access to public records. Charles N. Davis, director of the Freedom of Information Center at the University of Missouri at Columbia, says professors create a needlessly secretive culture: "Sometimes they have a hard time remembering they work for the state."

Jonathan Knight, director of the academic-freedom department at the American Association of University Professors, says there must be something short of complete openness that balances the public's right to know with the need for a degree of confidentiality in the functioning of academic departments. "The notion of everything being open is as problematic as everything being closed," he says.

Easy Access

The whole affair started, from Mr. Kojevnikov's point of view, when he and Ms. Wang decided that they were tired of working thousands of miles apart. So when the couple heard last fall that Georgia's history department was seeking an assistant professor of U.S. history, Ms. Wang's field, she applied. Because she had tenure at UCLA, she asked to be considered only at the level of associate professor.

When the department did not bite, the couple sought job offers at the University of British Columbia. Mr. Kojevnikov reasoned that those outside offers -- which they secured in January -- would persuade the department to hire Ms. Wang, in order to keep him on the faculty. He was wrong. Ms. Wang did interview as a potential spousal hire on the Athens, Ga., campus the following month -- but the department's secret vote on her candidacy was 11 to 11, just one vote shy of the majority she needed.

Mr. Kojevnikov says he did not suspect what he calls "foul play" until after he floated the idea of a half-time tenured position for Ms. Wang, which the department voted 14 to 9 to approve. On the same day, the department also voted to offer a full-time spousal position to a sociology professor's husband, a Latin American historian, in order to keep the sociologist from accepting an outside offer.

A few days later Mr. Pratt, the chairman, announced that a Board of Regents policy did not allow part-time tenured positions. Mr. Kojevnikov says he did not understand how Mr. Pratt had let the more recent vote on his wife go forward without authorization for the half-time slot. "That's what outraged me," he says. "I started making inquiries."

On April 14 he made an official request for all of his department head's records since January 1 concerning academic hiring and retention issues. He also asked Garnett S. Stokes, dean of arts and sciences, to turn over her correspondence with Mr. Pratt, as well as with any members of the history department, concerning the department's hiring and retention.

At the same time, Ms. Wang made official requests that four history faculty members, Diane Batts Morrow, Chana Kai Lee, Miranda Pollard, and Eve Troutt Powell, turn over any records from late January to late March related to departmental hiring. She also requested "raw notes of the minutes" from several departmental faculty meetings.

Three of the four professors returned no documents, saying they had nothing that fit the criteria. Ms. Stokes turned over hundreds. Mr. Pratt turned over documents, too, a total of about 120 pages, but Mr. Kojevnikov suspects that he has held back six times that amount. So the professor and his wife made subsequent requests for material on Mr. Pratt's and the four professors' computer hard drives.

Bob Taylor, manager of open-records requests at Georgia, says technicians have gathered a couple of dozen megabytes worth of material. He told Mr. Kojevnikov that as with the other documents, the law would require university officials to go through the hard-drive material to redact references to medical records or personal data, such as Social Security numbers. That would take hours, and would cost the professor $44 per hour. Mr. Kojevnikov has put that request on hold.

Accusations Fly

Still, the historian of science has riled many of his colleagues. In the spring, the controversy bled onto the history faculty's e-mail list, where people traded accusations and insults. Ms. Pollard, a European historian, accused Mr. Kojevnikov of being a hypocrite for "happily trawling" through professors' correspondence while "pretending to uphold faculty rights against abuses."

She suggests that he may also be racist and homophobic for singling out her, an outspoken lesbian, along with the department's only three black women, as well as the department chairman, who is black. "There's no rhyme or reason, unless you believe people of the same race are likely to form a conspiracy," she says in an interview. "It's a personal vendetta without merit."

Ms. Troutt Powell is likewise offended by Mr. Kojevnikov's requests, especially the presumption that she may be hiding something. "Why not ask the whole department?" she says. She suspects that she, Ms. Lee, and Ms. Morrow were chosen because they are all friends of Mr. Pratt. Mr. Kojevnikov, she says, is "sexist and racist. It's become a legalized case of harassment."

Ms. Morrow says she assumes that Mr. Kojevnikov took aim at those people whom he presumed had voted against his wife. "I found the whole thing astounding," she says. Mr. Kojevnikov says the accusations are unwarranted, and that his wife is the real victim.

In an e-mail message that Ms. Lee sent to the departmental list, she wrote to Mr. Kojevnikov: "From your perspective, I am sure that it has been quite disappointing that a department majority (not four black folks and a white dyke) voted not to make Jessica an offer the first time around. ... I have heeded my mother's wisdom and tried to ignore you ('Baby, when you see a fool walking down the street, immediately turn around and go the other way!'). Since early spring semester, I have watched you unravel, and some of this has been downright embarrassing. ... You obviously have much deeper problems. ... Get off your knees, lick your wounds, take inventory and prepare for the next experience. We do not always get our way."

Mr. Pratt, the chairman, has also jumped into the fray, at one point calling Mr. Kojevnikov "delusional" on the e-mail list, saying that he had "a warped perspective" and that "no one has been able to shut you up." He sent an apology the following day but ended with the caveat, "I'm just a department head, not a saint."

'Misdeeds' and 'Abuses'

After poring through the hundreds of pages of records, Mr. Kojevnikov says he has uncovered Mr. Pratt's numerous "misdeeds" and abuses of power. He says the tie vote against his wife should never have been accepted as valid, because Mr. Pratt had not received authorization from the dean to offer a full-time spousal hire in the first place.

Ms. Stokes, the dean, says she wanted to make sure that Ms. Wang had the support of the department before deciding whether or not to allocate a spot for her. "I don't want to bring in a faculty member who isn't well respected," she says. Ms. Wang has outstanding credentials, the dean says, but departments make hiring decisions in a variety of ways. People had to decide, she says, whether Mr. Kojevnikov is "worth two people."

Some faculty members argue that spousal hires have always been negotiated on a case-by-case basis, and that there are no hard and fast rules. Most colleges don't have formal policies about such hires, say higher-education experts, because administrators want to maintain flexibility and discretion over who gets special deals. But Mr. Kojevnikov thinks that the lack of clear-cut policies is unfair.

He also has concerns about some telephone calls made by the department chairman. They include separate calls to his counterparts at British Columbia and UCLA, contacts that Mr. Kojevnikov calls "inappropriate."

Mr. Pratt declined to be interviewed, citing the possibility of litigation. Mr. Kojevnikov has told colleagues on the e-mail list that this is something that should be solved "administratively, without the need for litigation." But in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Pratt said Mr. Kojevnikov's claims that he had been denied due process were "unsubstantiated" and "unfortunate." Rather than accept a departmental decision that he resented, "Professor Kojevnikov launched a personal campaign to discredit the university's administration (me in particular) for what he has termed 'administrative improprieties,' despite his failure to prove any such allegations," Mr. Pratt said.

A few professors in the department, however, think that Mr. Kojevnikov has a right to be upset. William W. Stueck, a historian of diplomacy, says Mr. Pratt "erred badly." He believes that the chairman might have swayed some decisions, perhaps even causing the tie in the first vote, by campaigning against Ms. Wang. In an e-mail message to the departmental list, Mr. Pratt denied waging any such campaign.

Mr. Stueck also points out that the sociologist's husband was hired despite being an untenured assistant professor "with very few publications," and that he works in Latin American history, a field in which the department already had three scholars. Meanwhile, he says, Ms. Wang's field, U.S. history, is the department's bread and butter.

"But there's a difference between making errors ... and being unethical," says Mr. Stueck. He has privately advised Mr. Kojevnikov to get off "the warpath."

James C. Cobb, another member of the department and its former chairman, understands Mr. Kojevnikov's frustration. "There's got to be a sense of his own rejection in this," he says. But by singling out his colleagues, Mr. Cobb says, Mr. Kojevnikov has probably undermined his own position.

How Open Is Too Open?

Many faculty members do resent the Pandora's box that Mr. Kojevnikov seems to have opened. They also complain that the university has been too willing to comply with his requests for records, without stopping to consider the implications for professors' privacy. "Whatever he wanted, whatever he needed, he would get it," says Ms. Batts Morrow.

But that is the way the law requires the university to act, says Arthur H. Leed, a lawyer at Georgia who helps administer the open-records law.

"We're not taking sides," he says, explaining that he tries to make sure professors know that their records are always accessible. Every year he gives a presentation on the law at an optional faculty orientation. And the university's Web site notes that faculty members' e-mail messages, written records, and information stored on computers used for university-related work are all fair game.

Still, not everyone in the history department realized just how broad the law was until this year's drama unfolded. "I'm not sure we understood just how far this could go," says Mr. Stueck. "Now we've learned this with a vengeance."

Most professors in the history department say that they are already careful about what they write in e-mail messages, but that this has been a strong reminder. Mr. Cobb says that people have been conditioned to think twice about using e-mail to convey sensitive information. Imagine, he says, what they would find if the university started taping phone conversations.

During a history-faculty meeting in April, Mr. Kojevnikov announced that he and his wife would accept the British Columbia job offers but would not start there until the fall of 2006. Some of his colleagues are dumbfounded that he wants to stick around another year. The professor, who is a Russian citizen, did not immediately tell people that immigration issues would necessitate the year's delay.

And while summer has provided what some say is a much-needed interruption, it is unclear what will happen in the fall. "It's going to be a soap opera without end," predicts Mr. Stueck. After all, on May 20, just before the summer break began, Mr. Pratt wrote a note to Mr. Kojevnikov. He requested copies of correspondence between the professor and his wife -- in accordance, of course, with the open-records law.