State settles public records case with Eastern professor after supposedly “private” records were purposely and widely distributed.
If there’s a moral to the story of Professor Syed Hasan’s recent public records act suit against Eastern Washington University it would be this: If an agency is going to withhold public records by citing an exemption to the law’s disclosure requirements, it had better be consistent. 
The Center for Justice represents Professor Hasan and, just last week, CFJ successfully concluded a negotiated settlement of his public records complaint against the university. Under terms of the settlement, the state will pay $11,500 in penalties, fees and costs to resolve the case which stems from a public records request that Professor Hasan made of the university in April 2007.
The relationship between the EWU administration and the Indian-born educator has been a stormy one for most of the 38 years he has taught in what is now the College of Business and Public Administration. For example, after Professor Hasan filed grievances against the university, EWU officials secretly decided to swap out the hard drives from his university-issue computers and search them for evidence of wrongdoing. This was in 2003. The following year, the university sought to discipline him because the search of his hard drives revealed he had downloaded federal circuit court decisions in alleged violation of university rules. That charge, and others, were the subject of a 2005 arbitration proceeding in which the arbitrator found no evidence to warrant disciplining Professor Hasan.
Professor Hasan, both before and after the recent efforts to discipline him, has filed numerous public records requests with the university. The one he filed in April of last year, that led to the recent lawsuit, sought copies of the most recent curriculum vitae and publication lists of EWU faculty assigned to the Accounting/Information System departments. The request was repeatedly denied with the assertion that, among other things, the requested records constituted “personal information” under RCW 42.56.230(2), the disclosure of which would violate a faculty member’s “right to privacy.”
That was in May. In December of 2007, the university decided to provide the information Professor Hasan had sought. Only EWU decided to provide the information to someone else, specifically the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The information was shared with AACSB as part of an accreditation process and, in the process, the university also e-mailed the information to the entire faculty of the College of Business and Public Administration. So much for the privacy assertion.
“The university’s refusal to turn over the documents is hard to understand in light of Professor Hasan’s frequent requests for the records,” said CFJ attorney Jeffry Finer. Given the history of conflict between EWU administrators and the professor, he said, “the refusals [to provide the records] could appear punitive.”
Still, Finer said he was pleased and impressed with the way the state Assistant Attorney General assigned to the case handled it.
“The Assistant Attorney General took the high moral ground in stating, clearly, that Professor Hasan has the right to make as many requests as he wants,” said Finer. “She acknowledged that he is part of the public and has every right to make public records requests. It was in this spirit that settlement was reached.”
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