The Information Age has brought vast stratification in regards to the methods of dissemination through digitized communication. No form more so than email muddies official correspondence between high-ranking officials in a given institution, directly affecting knowledge to the people they serve through access to public records. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account to discuss official State Department matters looms over her presidential campaign, smearing her potential reputation as one who can transparently lead the Oval Office.
In another presidential election, quite a bit closer to home, email correspondence between the state Board of Regents, certain UI faculty, and controversial hiring of Bruce Harreld to head the UI have gone dark after their 14-day grace period, Deleted Item Retention Area, according to Daily Iowan reporting.
Official records, such as tuition and development grants, are held for public record at least five years, while other records, such as payroll, are indestructible. However, the nuts and bolts in cross-faculty, and potentially future faculty, communication only holds a public record shelf life of a mere two weeks. As a result, purged emails are irretrievable, isolating UI constituents from the administrative process.
Just as Clinton’s campaign has been marred from lackadaisical conversation regarding pertinent national concerns, the UI hiring is under similar firestorm. Following her disdain toward the 2011 State Department to change the traditional nomenclature of “mother” and “father” to “parent one” and “parent two,” Clinton critiqued that the decision will fuel “a huge Fox-generated media storm led Palin et al.” She also displayed her incompetence of distinguishing her public and private emails to assistant Nora Toiv through the then-recently reported Chinese hacking of government-employee information.
Most importantly, though, the federal investigation into Clinton’s personal emails portrays a leader attempting to quell the controversies of Wikileaks as well as the Haiti earthquake disaster. However, the most controversial of email correspondence, such as those regarding Benghazi (which spurred the federal investigation of Clinton’s private email), released to the public contain heavy redaction, exacting further levels of gatekeeping between the U.S. public and its political leaders.
In the UI presidential-hiring process in particular, further questions are posed to the regents’ jurisdiction because of the lenient allowance of deleting emails; the lone act of purging such emails mulls the possibility of a less-than-acceptable hiring procedure. This notion is exacerbated through further mounting UI faculty inquiry.
UI Chief Information Security Officer Jane Drews’ comments to the DI illuminate the email retention policy’s shortcomings, deflecting the obscured negative consequences of the 14-day period, while focusing on the positive benefits given accidental deletion. There must be retention policy that reflects that of other pertinent official records.
Computer-mediated correspondence has become paramount in the administrative process. The state and its public academic institutions have failed to adapt transparency through the digitization of official communication. Though official scandals, such as Clinton’s, have the capacity to be investigated federally, accessibility to official correspondence is not directly available to the Iowa public. Residents of the state must then depend on whistleblower tactics, such as hacking, to receive facets of public record they deserve. This is a paradigm that needs to change.
