Officials from the state’s flagship public university routinely talk about a commitment to transparency, yet Ohio State University has a track record of interpreting the state public-records laws in ways that shield some vital information from public scrutiny.

Records explaining how the university spends or invests public money, protects students from criminals on campus, prescribes painkillers to athletes and evaluates the job performance of its president are a few examples of documents that OSU has deemed private, a Dispatch analysis has found.

When a former employee fired shots inside the Wexner Center for the Arts before taking his own life in November 2015, OSU officials shielded many records about the incident from the public.

The deadly episode that unfolded as students returned from Thanksgiving break was shrouded in so much secrecy that even the center’s major donor, Leslie H. Wexner, complained about the lack of communication.

Wexner’s scolding in a handwritten memo, obtained last year by The Dispatch after a public-records request, helped university officials craft a better response to the next tragedy: the November 2016 attack on a group of students and faculty by a knife-wielding student who was then shot and killed by a campus police officer. The university quickly provided public safety reports and even the attacker's academic record.

As evidence mounted in 2010 that then-football coach Jim Tressel violated NCAA rules, Ohio State quickly made public his cellphone records that proved he had lied to his bosses and the governing body of college athletics. But when a Pittsburgh newspaper asked to see the calls to and from football coach Urban Meyer’s cellphone three years later, OSU said Meyer's calls to recruits were protected as a trade secret. Tressel, too, had used his phone to call star high-school players.

Every other public university in Ohio has made public the names of students who have been disciplined by their schools for committing acts of violence against other students and their punishments by the school. But not at Ohio State, which even has shielded information from students who were victims.

The Ohio Public Records Law was created so the public can assess how taxpayer-funded government agencies function. The law allows access to documents, emails, reports, videos, databases and photographs. The law is open to some interpretation because it doesn't list every conceivable record, but Ohio Supreme Court rulings and opinions of the Ohio attorney general's office generally have leaned toward advising agencies to err on the side of making records public.

Ohio State says that it takes each request as it comes, and evaluates each based on its own merit. OSU officials acknowledge that they don't necessarily interpret laws the same as other public universities.

"We're committed to communicating in an open and transparent way," said university spokesman Chris Davey. "The challenge is ... that we never want to compromise the privacy of our patients, students or members of the community."

To mark the kickoff of national Sunshine Week, an annual event to promote the importance of an open and transparent government, The Dispatch analyzed five years of public-records requests made to Ohio State. It found that many people and organizations struggle to obtain what they seek.

Among them: professors seeking answers about why they were denied tenure; lawyers representing a fired band director; and an OSU student who wanted a copy of a gender-discrimination investigation. News organizations were told by the university that it had no records detailing the number of Ohio State athletes who suffered concussions; arrests made during football games; documents about animal research.

OSU is one of the state's largest public employers, with more than 27,000 employees. It serves hundreds of thousands of students, alumni and patients. It hosts more than a million visitors and sports fans each year. It operates a $6.2 billion budget, with at least $385 million coming from taxpayers.

Lawyer David Marburger, who co-wrote the book "Access With Attitude" about the failures of Ohio’s public-records law, said that it’s extremely difficult to obtain records from universities, and especially from Ohio State.

“Ohio State is an impenetrable barrier,” Marburger said. “OSU is very difficult to get meaningful accountability from, and that’s been the case since 1983 when I started practicing law. It’s always been this way at Ohio State. Always, always, always.”

Davey, responding to Marburger's assessment, said: "That's patently false."

Playing defense

Experts on Ohio public-records law said the deck is stacked against people requesting access to records. Most government agencies have in-house lawyers, a law director or prosecutor who can review requests and provide legal arguments for approving or denying them.

In 2015, Ohio State had more than 30 lawyers and paralegals working in its legal-affairs department, up from 19 five years earlier. These lawyers specialize in public records, compliance, labor law and sex discrimination, to name a few.

“It’s not a level playing field. The private citizen is hard pressed to fight this, to pay for lawyers,” said Jack Greiner, a Cincinnati lawyer who sued Ohio State for records involving NCAA violations on behalf of ESPN.

The sports-entertainment giant has deep pockets to pay for court battles. Most citizens do not.

If someone decides to sue for a denied record, OSU lawyers are paid the same whether it's handed over or not. But individuals are hamstrung, because hiring a lawyer to fight for records can cost thousands of dollars.

Those who are denied access also can pay $25 to the Ohio Court of Claims for mediation. But decisions in that court do not carry lasting legal weight, as they do when a case is heard by a Common Pleas court or the Ohio Supreme Court.

“There’s a certain attitude at Ohio State that you can’t beat us, so forget it,” Marburger said. “They have great relationships with the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch. They have lots of prestige, and they are a giant institution that is well-liked by the public. Based on all of that, they know they’re hard to beat.”

Secret discipline

Since December, Ohio State student Patrick Owens has worried that he might run into the man who jumped him from behind and left him with a bruised rib cage, bloody scratches and a bruised arm.

His attacker was John E. Veracco, a fellow OSU student.

Owens, 20, was at work in a restaurant when he was attacked Dec. 1. He called OSU police, who charged Veracco with assault and aggravated trespassing.

Owens later tried to learn what the school did to punish Veracco for assaulting a fellow student, which is a violation of the university’s code of conduct. OSU officials told Owens that Veracco was instructed to have no contact with him, but nothing more.

OSU's response left Owens unsettled. Would he bump into Veracco, who was a friend of a friend, in a classroom or the student union?

“They told me it wouldn’t be appropriate to violate his privacy,” Owens said, explaining why OSU gave him no other information other than that Veracco was ordered to have no contact with him.

Veracco told The Dispatch that Owens shouldn’t be entitled to such information. “What happens to me is private and should be kept private,” he said. “It’s none of his business.”

OSU investigated Owens' complaint that he did not receive adequate information from the university after The Dispatch raised questions about it on Thursday. Davey said the university has a policy that requires Ohio State to inform crime victims of disciplinary outcomes, but said that it did not fully inform Owens of the actions taken against his attacker.

"We are troubled that, in the instance referred to by The Columbus Dispatch, this policy was not followed," Davey said. He said the attacker was criminally charged, found in violation of the code of conduct, issued a no-contact sanction, suspended for a semester and banned from campus. Owens was told of the no-contact order, but not all of the discipline.

"We have reached out to apologize that not all information was shared when requested and to offer any support that we can going forward,” Davey said.

According to court records, Veracco was sentenced to 90 days in jail for the assault. A judge suspended all but two of those days and placed him on probation. Veracco told The Dispatch that he plans to return to campus after his suspension.

Owens’ story is the kind that prompted Congress in the mid-1990s to amend the federal student-privacy law, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, so that the public, students and parents would know who has committed acts of violence on campuses and how schools have punished them.

These are students found responsible by a campus judiciary of such acts as sexual assault, physical assault, homicide, arson and vandalism. Three years ago, The Dispatch asked every public university in Ohio to release that information. All did, except one — Ohio State.

“If you're accused of ... criminal behavior anyplace other than the campus of a college, even if you're ultimately not convicted, those charges create a public paper trail that enables people to evaluate for themselves whether you're a dangerous person to be around,” said Frank LoMonte, a lawyer and executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for transparency on campuses.

Student-discipline records also are of public concern because accused students are judged and disciplined by faculty members and fellow students — many of whom have no experience in law enforcement, criminal law or the courts.

The judiciaries lack public oversight, sometimes rush to judgment and strip the accused of due-process protections. Unlike in a criminal proceeding, in which the standard for a finding of guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt, such judiciary boards use a lower standard: more likely to have happened than not.

Xavier University, for example, quietly expelled a star basketball player in 2012 soon after a student said he had sexually assaulted her. Cincinnati police launched an investigation that found the woman had lied. But it was too late for the star athlete.

Campus judiciaries also mete out punishment that sometimes does not match the crime. Records that The Dispatch received three years ago from other universities in Ohio show the University of Toledo issued a one-year suspension to a student who, while high, slashed another student to death. And Bowling Green suspended a student who beat another so badly that he needed reconstructive surgery, then allowed him back when the ban was lifted. That student eventually was convicted of robbery and sent to prison.

With the exception of sexual assaults, Ohio State says that it doesn’t track student discipline cases by the act committed, only under the broad umbrella of a violation of the student-behavior code. OSU officials said they have no way to discern, for example, an assault that resulted in serious harm or one that resulted in a chipped fingernail.

"Because Ohio State's disciplinary records do not classify incidents according to any sort of criminality, the university does not have any records" responsive to The Dispatch's request to see them showing outcomes of cases of violence, OSU spokesman Benjamin Johnson wrote in an email.

Ohio University and the University of Cincinnati faced that same situation with classification of incidents, but went through all of their records to produce those that were public.

“When colleges refuse to level with the public about how they’re punishing serious criminal behavior, it’s almost always because they know their disciplinary system can’t stand up to public scrutiny,” LoMonte said. “I sure wouldn’t send my kid to a college that said, 'How we punish criminal misconduct on this campus is none of your business.’”

Why not?



The Ohio attorney general's office counsels government agencies — including public universities — to promote transparency.

"Our default is, why not give it out?" said Damian W. Sikora, who leads the attorney general's public-records office. "Transparency and openness are good things."

Last year, Ohio State University denied a Columbus TV station access to complaints about violations of the federal sexual-harassment and discrimination law, commonly known as Title IX, because, “the language of this request is too vague and ambiguous for us to identify any responsive records.”

Ohio State has been under federal scrutiny for its handling of sex discrimination and harassment on and off since 2010.

In 2014, it settled one investigation with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, vowing to fix several violations, including the “sexualized conduct” in the marching band. A second investigation was launched in 2015 after a student complained about the university’s response to her sexual assault. A third, initiated in January, involved a sexual assault by a professor.

Last year, HBO's "Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel" asked for the university’s policy on dispensing painkillers to athletes and statistics on how often they were used. Ohio State denied the request because it said it had no such records. The NCAA’s chief medical doctor has been ringing alarm bells about the use of painkillers in college sports, and the Internet is full of news stories about athletes who ultimately have become addicts.

Without records or access to records, it’s impossible for the public to know whether Ohio State team doctors are dispensing drugs or whether athletes are at risk.

Davey repeated that each request is judged on its own merit and many are thoroughly vetted by Ohio State's legal team.

Delayed response



The Ohio State trustees were so impressed with President Michael V. Drake’s first year on the job that they rewarded him in November 2015 with a $200,000 bonus, the maximum allowed under his contract.

The Dispatch requested records used to support the bonus, but trustees said they didn’t do a written evaluation but rather talked about his pros and cons on the job.

Emails obtained after a records request, however, show that the trustees did make written comments about “confidential feedback/advice” for Drake. Ohio State released those records two years after Drake received the bonus.

Ohio’s public-records laws allow agencies a “reasonable time” to produce records for inspection or explain why they aren’t doing so. Because that language is vague and "reasonable time" is undefined, some requests languish at Ohio State.

In the past five years, the university has fielded more than 3,000 public-records requests, about half of them from members of the media who report on topics of public interest about the university. It also created an office to handle public-records requests in 2013. Johnson, the OSU spokesman, said the university has reduced its response time from an average two years ago of 20 days to 16 days last year.

In nearly half of the cases in the past five years, Ohio State responded within a day. More than a third of those requests were for police reports or coaches' contracts — basic information that is readily accessible.

But in nearly 20 percent of the requests, Ohio State was slow to respond, with requesters waiting at least a month for an answer.

A Columbus TV reporter waited 253 days for records that detailed how OSU spent public money on the upkeep, maintenance and security enhancements at the university-owned president’s residence in Bexley.

A reporter who writes about health care waited more than five months to obtain records about compensation for the CEO of Ohio State’s medical center.

After Drake was named president in 2014, Ohio State waited nearly four months to make public his contract and the amount of public money spent on the presidential search.

And in one of the most ironic twists, it took Ohio State six months to make public the letter written by Wexner, the L Brands founder and former Ohio State trustee for whose father the Wexner Center is named — the note that scolded the university for its lack of transparency after the Wexner Center art gallery shooting.

“Being secretive encourages suspicion and speculation and damages the trust of patrons, donors and the public. Communication also is a fine art!” Wexner wrote. “Further — what is the example to students - faculty - staff - etc. - etc.”

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jriepenhoff@dispatch.com

lsullivan@dispatch.com

mwagner@dispatch.com