Interesting reporting from NC Policy Watch. It says that University of North Carolina officials read faculty emails and searched backup computer information for as many as 22 faculty members to search for the leaker of the agreement in which Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman pledged $25 million to UNC’s journalism school and got the school named for him in return.

The gift grew into a controversy when patron Hussman made his objections known to the hiring of 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones as an endowed professor at the school. Her hiring ultimately fell through and she took her Pulitizer Prize-winning resume and work on the history and impact of slavery in the U.S. to Howard University.

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A Raleigh newspaper obtained the Hussman gift agreement. It disclosed for the first time that Hussman had not actually given $25 million, as announcements had indicated, but pledged that amount over a period of years, beginning with $1.3 million annual payments over nine years. The remainder is to be paid over a five-year period but only after both Hussman and his wife were dead.

The university has said leaking such agreements could jeopardize other gifts. The journalism faculty whose records were searched have said they came into possession of the agreement as I did, through the Raleigh newspaper report. But university officials were furious and went to great lengths to investigate faculty while ignoring another leak of confidential information. The report says:

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The university swiftly launched an investigation into how the Hussman agreement was made public. But no comparable investigation appears to have been launched into how Hussman, an alum outside of the hiring process, was given access to confidential information and documents in Hannah-Jones’s hiring process. That same information, part of a confidential personnel process, was not available to reporters or the general public.

It’s a familiar double-standard in university dealings with wealthy benefactors. We’ve seen it in Arkansas.

In this case, documents were provided only after two years of effort and then heavily redacted. The article quotes journalism professor Deb Aikat:

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Aikat said both the investigation into faculty and Hussman’s access to hiring and tenure information set terrible precedents.

“If we are not told when investigators may be accessing the information in our e-mails and on our computers, without our knowledge and without any warning, if we don’t even know who has this access, how can we have confidence that we can keep confidential the things that should be confidential?” Aikat said. “And if donors can be given access to information they tell us should be confidential without our knowledge and without any consequence or investigation or anything, how can anyone who applies for a position or undergoes the tenure process believe that it is confidential and that it is fair?”

UPDATE: UNC tried to cover their butts today but faculty members seem unimpressed by the hairsplitting — claiming they did ‘inquiry’ not an ‘investigation.’