A question of standards - University of Virginia

A great editorial by Barbara Hollingsworth at The Washington Examiner:

U.Va.'s dishonorable double standard
University of Virginia students pledge not to lie, cheat or steal under the nation's oldest student-run honor system -- and to report any of their peers who do.

But U.Va. administrators apparently don't think they have an obligation to do the same. On April 23, university officials received a subpoena from Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli requesting the e-mails of former U.Va. climatologist Michael Mann in an investigation into whether Mann fraudulently used manipulated climate data to apply for $500,000 worth of taxpayer-funded research grants.

At first, they indicated their intention to comply. However, angry protests from academics around the country accusing Cuccinelli of a "witch hunt" convinced them to take a second look at their "options." But those options boil down to two: Turn over the documents subpoenaed under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by the July 26 deadline, or ignore Cuccinelli's request for any "correspondence, messages or e-mails" between Mann and 39 other prominent scientists between 1999 and 2005.

And a bit more:

On Dec. 17, Assistant Vice President for Public Affairs Carolyn Wood told Marshall: "The University does not have any e-mail data for Mr. Mann. When Mr. Mann moved to Penn State his U.Va. account was terminated and all data was later deleted."

Wait a minute. If Mann's e-mails were all deleted, why did U.Va. ask for-- and receive -- an extension to comply with Cuccinelli's subpoena? By happenstance, university officials also received another FOIA request on Dec. 17 regarding another former U.Va. climatologist -- Patrick Michaels, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

But Michaels' correspondence was apparently not deleted after he left; Greenpeace is reportedly currently waiting for word on how much it will cost to duplicate his e-mail cache. So even though Mann and Michaels worked in the same department on the same floor and used the same computer server, U.Va. supposedly preserved one scientist's electronic trail -- and destroyed the other's.

A real question of ethics -- even if the files were deleted from the server, any competent backup system will have them on tape in a vault somewhere. For one person to have the archives (and with a cost being talked about, it sounds like the tape-in-vault scenario) and not the other, this is seriously fishy. That work was funded by our tax dollars and is, by Federal law, in the public domain. We have a right to access this and for it to be withheld by some administrator and policy wonk is not cool. For them to lie to us is even less cool.