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CU Guiding Principles
2. Maintain a commitment to excellence.
3. Promote and uphold the principles of ethics, integrity, transparency, and accountability.
4. Be conscientious stewards of the university's human, physical, financial, information, and natural resources.
5. Encourage, honor, and respect teaching, learning, and academic culture.

CU Mission, Guiding Principles and Vision Statement

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CU Regents Actual Practices
1. All this excellence, integrity and transparency stuff is really an annoyance and a large size hassle.
2. Why do we have to bother with that stuff anyway?
3. Let's just do the bare minimum we can get away with and see
if that works.

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A reporter's job begins with trying to obtain basic information about the subject he or she is covering.

For a reporter covering the University of Colorado, that basic information includes minutes of the public meetings of the Board of Regents.

The Board of Regents are the guardians of the integrity of the institution.

What they are doing and thinking matters to the University community. Much of that doing and thinking is contained in the minutes of their meetings.

The minutes of the public meetings of the regents are very basic documents and should be among the easiest documents to obtain at the university, freely posted and promptly available after a meeting. This would be consistent with CU's Guiding Principles of excellence, integrity, transparency and the openness of academic culture.

But it turns out that is not the case at CU.

The minutes of regents' meeting are in fact not that easy to get.

It is apparently the regents' policy to not post minutes of one public meeting until after the next public meeting, which is often a couple months later.

Its unclear why this should be the case, but it is.

The minutes are then posted to the regents' BoardDocs web site.

This, of course, makes it difficult for the University community to keep up with the regents' thinking in something close to real time. This makes it difficult as well for the University community to have a voice and participate in University affairs. Also, the regents do not live stream their meetings.

The Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) can be a useful tool for a reporter trying to track down information. It is the state version of the federal Freedom of Information Act.

CORA is a handy tool, because it requires the recipients of a CORA request to respond within 3 days, not always the case for seekers of information from the University.

For example, consider this CORA request to CU submitted by a reporter for:

The reporter received a prompt response from CU:

This is not really an appropriate response to a CORA request.

CORA presumes documents of public entities (such as CU) are public and are required to be disclosed to the public unless there is an exemption for the document stated in the act.

To legally deny producing a public document in response to a CORA request the public entity must cite a provision of the CORA act giving the entity authority to deny producing the record. CU did not cite such a provision, and rather just hand-waved about not producing it.

So this CORA denial had no legal authority to support it.

Much less, being consistent with the ideas expressed in the CU Guiding Principles above, such as excellence, integrity, transparency and the openness of academic culture.

The reporter chose the direct route to responding to the CORA denial and sent the following email to the regents.

The reporter received no response from the regents to this email.

Several weeks later, the reporter filed another CORA request for:

The reporter received a very similar response to the one received on March 6:

This time, however, instead of sending a note to the regents, the reporter sent this email to the legal authorities at CU:

A 'Notice of Intent' states the intent of the sender to take a matter to court, in this case for for an unlawful denial of a CORA request. The Notice is required by law and provides a 3 day grace period before a case can be submitted to the court. The intent of the law is to provide time for both sides to potentially settle the matter without further legal proceedings. After the 3 day waiting period, the case may be filed with the court.

This notice that the reporter was going to take this case to court was credible to the University for a couple of reasons.

The reporter had on two previous occasions been denied access to documents by the University and, after providing such a Notice of Intent, filed suit in Denver District Court and subsequently obtained access to the documents.

It was also credible because the University was well aware that its response to the CORA request was not legally sound.

Two days later the reporter received this email from the University:

The March 6 response from the University and the April 17 response from the University were basically identical. Why then, several days after the April 17 response did a reporter receive a copy of the minutes, when in March, no minutes were received and no regent would even respond to an email?

Why did it take a credible threat of legal action to promptly obtain a copy of the minutes of a public regent meeting?

Where were the CU Guiding Principles?

Where was the notion of the University community?

Several weeks later the reporter sent in this CORA request for:

The reporter received this response:

This was the document forwarded from the regents as a response to the CORA request:

"the brief memorandum in the nature of minutes
as required by the board's parliamentary authority"

Is this an example of CU's commitment to excellence, integrity, transparency and the openness of academic culture?

This time the regents tried to come up with some quasi-legal justification for not producing the minutes but instead the document reproduced above.

CU cited Roberts Rules of Order as its parliamentary authority governing such matters, and its justification for not producing the full minutes of the meeting but only "the brief memorandum in the nature of minutes".

But it turns out that Robert's Rules of Order is not really appropriate for use by an organization such as the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

According to Wikipedia:

Typical organizations using Robert's Rules of Order include:

The University of Colorado is like none of these organizations.

The University of Colorado Board of Regents is a state-wide, publicly-elected board overseeing the largest institution of higher education and research in the state of Colorado, with four campuses, tens of thousands of students, billions of dollars in budget expenditures and a commitment to the high academic standards of public institutions of higher ed and research.

It's not really in the same class of organizations as hobby groups, family reunions, horse groups, gaming clubs, fraternities or country clubs.

So its unclear why these rules are used by the regents, especially when they produce results such as the "brief memorandum in the nature of minutes" above.

More directly: is there some reason why two weeks after an hour-and-a-half committee meeting the minutes for that meeting are not publicly available?

Is the use of Robert's Rules of Order for the CU Board of Regents really an application of the CU Guiding Principles?

Looking at these responses of the University to a reporter trying to obtain copies of what should be readily and promptly accessible documents, its hard not to conclude that the guiding principle in practice for the regents regarding transparency and openness is 'the bare minimum we can get away with.'

After the original version of this article was published, the reporter once again requested a copy of the minutes for a recent regent meeting: The reporter received this response: In fact, what was described as "draft minutes" of the meeting was actually the annotated agenda found on the regents' web site after a meeting. The annotated agenda consists of a standard meeting agenda annotated with an indication as to whether each item on the agenda to be voted on was approved or not. The annotated agenda (aka "draft minutes") contains no notes of what was said at the the meeting.

For example, here is the section of the "draft minutes" pertaining to public comment and the reports of the top officials of CU:

The document characterized as "draft minutes" returned as a response to a CORA request contains no indication as to whether or not there were any public comments, no indication of the content of the remarks of the Chair of the Board, and no indication of the content of the remarks of the University President.

Similarly for the rest of the items in the "draft minutes" - no remarks from the meeting are included.

This can hardly be considered 'minutes' of the meeting, draft or otherwise.

The annotated agenda on the regent's web site contains links to documents presented at the meeting, but no indication of the remarks or comments made by participants.

The reporter once again requested a copy of the minutes for a recent regent meeting: This time, the request was initially ignored by the University.

After the standard three business-day period provided in which a response must legally be returned to a CORA requestor, no response had been received from the University. The University was in violation of the law, not to mention the CU Guiding Principles.

The reporter then sent this email to the University: Again, the principle in practice of the regents seems to be "the bare minimum we can get away with," rather than a commitment to excellence, integrity and transparency.

The regents responded to the No Response email with this email: No document was returned in response to the CORA request, and no exception was cited for not returning a document, as is required by the CORA statute.

So once again, two weeks after a two hour committee meeting, the regents will not provide the public a copy of the minutes for the meeting.

The regents' reason for not providing the requested minutes this time is "At the next regular board meeting, the subcommittee chair will report to the board about this subcommittee meeting." And seemingly left unstated is the regents' attitude: and that's just the way we do things around here, CORA and Guiding Principles be darned.

Over the summer, the regents consolidated and restructured their committees into just 4 committees: Governance, University Affairs, Finance and Audit. The first meetings of the new Governance, University Affairs and Finance committees were held on August 16, 2017.

On August 24, 2017, a reporter requested copies of the minutes for the 3 meetings held on August 16.

The regents responded on August 28, 2017, with a virtually identical email as the one on August 4, 2017. The last paragraph of the August 28th response reads:

It turns out that at the September 7, 2017, regent meeting, the regents actually approved the public release of minutes of meetings going back 3 months, to June 12, 2017.

They did this as part of the consent agenda of the meeting. The consent agenda typically contains items believed to be not in dispute and likely to be approved without discussion.

The regents offered no corrections, comments, or discussions of any kind regarding any of the minutes or releasing them. The regents had simply sat on these minutes all summer until they could say 'aye' to approving the consent agenda in September.

A portion of the agenda for the Regent meeting
of September 7, 2017: Regents approve release to public
of meeting minutes for the previous 3 months.

The CU Board of Regents continues to act as a board of directors of a private-sector corporation, without any sense of responsibility or obligation to their constituents or the University community (see also CU Regents Aloof, Isolated from Constituents, University Community).

The regents have declined to respond to repeated requests for comments on this article.

-- Alan Sobel

September 10, 2017

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Note: This is one of an occasional series on the adventures of reporting on and at CU.