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SUNSHINE WEEK: Student journalist fights for access at community college
© 2007 Student Press Law Center
March 13, 2007
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Earlier this week
Last year's stories
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A citizen's right to know and journalists' rights to report are threatened every day, say the organizers of Sunshine Week, who planned the weeklong program to highlight freedom of information issues and emphasize the importance of open government. The Student Press Law Center is celebrating Sunshine Week with a series of reports on how student journalists can encourage open government and use open records to expand their journalistic horizons and let the sunshine in.
Student journalist Miguel Morales has reported stories that have rocked his
community college’s foundations.
But after unearthing controversies
by using open records requests and building trust with key whistleblowers,
Morales said reporting on campus issues has only become tougher.
For the
39-year-old Morales, journalism was not his first pursuit in life. After
spending about 10 years as a HIV outreach worker, Morales enrolled part-time at
Johnson County Community College in Kansas in 2001 and set his sights on a
career in journalism.
“Writing was the one thing I could always
do,” he said.
In March 2005, Morales received an anonymous e-mail
from someone who told him to examine attachments to the agenda of a recent board
of trustees meeting. He did, but found nothing that seemed out of the
ordinary.
Morales then received a tip and documentation from his
anonymous source that documented that Charles Carlsen, the college’s
president, had allegedly sexually harassed college administrator Teresa Lee
since 2003. Lee alleged that Carlsen had touched her breast with his forearm and
performed other acts that made her feel uncomfortable.
College officials
had not responded to Lee’s complaints against Carlsen, the popular leader
of a campus with a performing arts center that bears his name. Lee agreed to
speak on the record for a story, understanding it could lead to her losing her job,
Morales said.
While none of Lee’s coworkers could confirm her
claims, Morales confronted Carlsen about the accusations. During an interview,
he said that the president’s face said it all.
“He just
turned red,” Morales said of Carlsen’s reaction when asked about the
harassment allegations. Carlsen denied everything Lee alleged in the
complaint.
Following the meeting with Carlsen, Mark Ferguson, the
college’s attorney, confronted Morales about investigation, saying
Lee’s accusations were not credible. “I felt he was intimidating me
into not writing this story,” Morales said.
Despite the perceived
threats, Morales continued to investigate and found another potential instance
of unaddressed sexual harassment, which involved student employee Andrea Evans
and her campus services department supervisors. After Evans shared documents she
kept that detailed the harassment charges, Morales’ harassment story
broadened.
After reporting for more than a year, The Campus Ledger
published the results of Morales’ investigation on April 14, 2006. In
two stories, he detailed the harassment claims involving the president and the
campus services employees.
Less than a week later, Carlsen resigned from
his post after 25 years as president. The college board of trustees launched an
independent investigation into the matter. The campus services employees in the
other alleged harassment case left the college.
“I have had two
heart attacks, an angioplasty, and quintuple bypass surgery. It is apparent to
me from the stress of the last two weeks that immediate retirement is the
appropriate step to take,” Carlsen wrote in his resignation letter, dated
Apr. 20, 2006.
After the stories were published, The Campus Ledger
received another lead — this time from one of the former campus services
managers. The former manager alleged that the college was improperly paying
overtime to campus employees.
Along with reporter Kevin Mimms, the
student journalists began looking into the matter, but because of the
controversy surrounding Carlsen’s departure, administrators would tell
little to Campus Ledger reporters, hesitant of further negative
publicity, Morales said.
“It’s my story that’s not
getting them the quotes that they need,” Morales said.
The two
turned to using open records requests to get the information they needed —
but found further road blocks.
“Denied left and
right”
College officials declined open records requests for
budget information that would show potential overtime violations because their
letters were “poorly worded” and even criticized the reporters for
using the Student Press Law Center’s state open records request letter
generator, rather than authoring the open records letters themselves, Morales
said.
“A request is a request whether it’s [from] a letter
generator or if it’s written in crayon,” Morales said in an
e-mail.
Morales recalled one instance where an administrator denied an
open records request because “you’re going to write a story about
it.”
“It got to the point last spring where they
weren’t responding at all,” Morales said.
With an interim
president still to be named and as the independent investigation into
Lee’s alleged sexual harassment was scheduled to end in the June 2006,
Morales and his staff asked the college’s publication board for permission
to publish throughout the summer. The publication board approved the request,
but it was soon overruled by the college board of trustees, which Morales said,
“didn’t want to spend any more money” for a summer paper.
But Morales and Mimms would not let that stop them from chasing the
story.
“We scraped up our money, found a printer and got donations
from employees and students at the college, and published our own paper,”
Morales said.
By July 2006, Morales and Mimms had reported in The Lexicon —
the alternative paper they created — on the search for a new president and
the results of the independent investigation confirming Carlsen’s
harassment, which cost the college more than half a million dollars.
Today, Morales says many open records requests continue to be refused by
administrators without clear reasoning, but he said the newspaper is “just
collecting all our rejections” hoping to “integrate them into a
story.”
“I think they just don't know what information
citizens can request nor do they know what they can release,” Morales
said. “So our information requests get denied as a
precaution.”
Johnson County Community College spokeswoman Julie
Haas said administrators understand which records are public under state law.
She said the college has responded to every records request from Campus
Ledger reporters.
“We responded to everything that I know
of,” Haas said. “I want to know what it was that [Morales] perceives
that we didn’t fulfill.”
While he has received some of the
budget information requested, Morales said the data has been difficult to
interpret.
“We asked for budget numbers. They’re not giving
it to us electronically, they’re giving us [printed] spreadsheets,”
Morales said. “It’s hard for us to manipulate the
data.”
Morales would not clarify which documents or the sources of the data he is
requesting for his ongoing investigation into alleged overtime violations,
saying only that the college’s budget and documents related to it are a
“treasure trove” of information.
“It didn’t
really hit me”
Morales and The Campus Ledger
staff’s efforts did not go unrecognized. At its convention held in August
2006, the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Morales and Campus
Ledger staff with the First Amendment Award given to individuals and groups
for efforts to preserve and strengthen the First Amendment for their harassment
story.
Morales said when he found out about the honor, he did not
understand the magnitude of the award. He said he was unsure if he should even
make the drive to Chicago to accept the award, but his instructors told him that
it was “a big deal and [he] should really go.”
Even though
college administrators are now more hesitant when a Ledger reporter makes
an inquiry, Morales said he “wouldn’t do anything different”
in his reporting of the harassment story. He said it is best to get to know the
people in campus offices and use formal open records requests as a last
resort.
“Be nice — know where document is,” Morales
said. “Don't just slap the letter down on [the administrator’s]
desk.”
Morales said he plans on graduating from Johnson County Community
College at the end of the summer, and wants to complete his degree at the
University of Kansas. Eventually, he said he would like to return to Johnson
County Community College to teach journalism.
For Morales, whose name
means “morals” in Spanish, he said he believes he “finally
found my calling” in journalism.
“I let my ethics and
integrity guide me,” he said.
By Jared Taylor, SPLC staff
writer
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