Michigan State University is a public land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. | Wikimedia Commons
Michigan State University is a public land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. | Wikimedia Commons
The Mackinac Center's Legal Foundation has announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Michigan State University (MSU) for violating the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The request for information was for documents related to an employee who was controversially terminated from a job at the university. MSU told the Mackinac Center that collecting the requested documents would take six hours of staff time. However, the university hasn't handed the documents over for almost six months after the first appeal was made.
On June 26, the Mackinac Center submitted a FOIA request asking for any email communication from MSU's president, Samuel Stanley, relating to Dr. Stephen Hsu.
“The public deserves to have expedient access to public records,” Steve Delie, the Center’s policy lead on transparency and open government, told the Mackinac Center. “We have waited five months for a request that should have taken less than 20 hours to produce. When government entities keep making these kinds of delays, they’re not working diligently to respond to the public’s requests.”
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