CC: Chancellor; Provost; Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Systems

Dear Mr. White:

I understand the "decision of the University," as you put it in your October 11 letter, "is final." I understand you believe "it serves no further purpose to continue a debate about the decision." I also have no wish to debate this decision further in letters between us. What I don’t understand is this: what is the University’s decision?

You write that the University is "not prepared to force Dr. Adams to produce all the email to and from his campus email address between the dates of September 15 and September 18, 2001." Should I understand this to be the University’s "final decision"?

I have never asked the University to let me see the e-mail messages sent to Mike Adams at his University e-mail address.

I have never asked the University to force Mike Adams to let me see his e-mail correspondence. I have asked the University to let me see the e-mail messages sent by him from his e-mail address on and between the said dates. I understand the University already has these messages in its custody and under its control. Dr. Robert Tyndall has assured me the University will, in accordance with your directive, do what is in its "power to ensure that the e-mail records under discussion are preserved." The University could hardly preserve these messages if Adams alone had them in his custody and under his control.

I also have not asked the University to let me see all the e-mail messages sent by Mike Adams from September 15 to September 18, if some of these messages contain any personnel records or personally identifiable student records. I have asked the University to separate the confidential from the non-confidential information in these messages.

The University’s "final decision," as you put it, is then evidently this: it will not do what I have not asked it to do. Why would the University decide not to do what I have not asked it to do? Is this really supposed to be the University’s "final decision"? This odd, even if not entirely novel, decision seems to be the result of an insufficiently intimate familiarity with the canons of logic.

I suspect the University has decided not to do what I have not asked it to do because a decision not to do what I really have asked it to do would put it in open defiance of State law.

The question is ultimately this: does the University believe any e-mail communication, sent by any employee of the University, from any University e-mail address, with the use of the University’s central computing facilities and services, could, under any conceivable circumstance, come under the Public Records Law of the State of North Carolina, as a public communication "made or received pursuant to law or ordinance in connection with the transaction of public business"? You said, in your October 3 letter, the "only records" in the e-mail correspondence Mike Adams sent, from September 15 to September 18, that could come under the Public Records Act would have to be "other official emails" (other than personnel records and personally identifiable student records), which would include, "hypothetically," e-mail letters "to the Faculty Senate regarding an academic policy, or to some other public agency regarding some research or other instructional activity of the university." But the University has not yet separated such "official" e-mail records, if any, from the other and "non-official" records, and let me and my representatives inspect them. I once more ask the University to do so. An officer of the University will have to do an inventory of the e-mail messages Mike Adams sent from September 15 to September 18 and separate them into the appropriate classes. The University should immediately let me see any "official" e-mail communications, other than personnel or student records. I also ask to see the resultant list of the different classes of these e-mail messages, as a public record.

If the University refuses to do an inventory of the e-mail letters Mike Adams sent on the relevant dates, or refuses to let me see his "official" messages, other than the ones exempt under the law, then it stands in open and absolute defiance of State law. The matter will then have to be finally decided in another forum.

If the University continues to claim some of the "non-official" correspondence Mike Adams sent on the relevant dates is exempt under the law, because "personal, and thus the property of a private person as set forth in GS 132-1.2(2)," in defiance of any reasonable interpretation of this section of the law, then this matter also will have to be finally decided in another forum.

Rosa T. Fuller

October 15, 2001