Some University faculty have expressed skepticism about the intentions behind Freedom of Information Act requests they have received in recent years from Virginia residents and organizations. While acknowledging the right of individuals and organizations to file FOIA requests to obtain public records — such as course syllabi or emails — some faculty also claim that the law has been weaponized and created a sense of curriculum policing at the University.
According to the Code of Virginia, the Virginia FOIA law ensures access to “public records in the custody of a public body or its officers and employees.” FOIA says that “all public records shall be available for inspection and copying upon request,” unless there is an exemption invoked.
Exemptions include certain personnel records, scholastic records, health records or other information which is shared with a public institution under the condition of confidentiality. Any Virginia citizen can file a FOIA request to receive records from a state public body.
As a public body, the University and its employees are subject to records requests with a few exceptions. The Office of the University Counsel receives FOIA requests and forwards them to the individual whose records are being requested.
As of Nov. 5, the University has received 849 FOIA requests in 2025 according to University spokesperson Bethanie Glover. The number of annual FOIA requests has more than doubled since 2021 — the University received 786 requests in 2024, 633 in 2023, 472 in 2022 and only 404 in 2021.
According to Assoc. Sociology Prof. Ian Mullins, recently some FOIA requests have targeted faculty within the College of Arts and Sciences Engagements program. The Engagements program is a yearlong sequence of small, seminar style courses for first-year College students that aims to introduce them to the liberal arts and sciences.
Janet Spittler, Engagements program co-director and associate religious studies professor, confirmed via an email statement to The Cavalier Daily that every course in the Engaging Aesthetics Pillar — one of four pillars in the program which focuses on exploring the world through “the lens of human creativity” — has received a FOIA request for its syllabi. Spittler was not able to confirm when these requests were filed, nor whether the requests were limited to the Fall 2025 semester or not.
Mullins himself has received several FOIA requests over the past few years, the first being in July 2021 when the University sociology department as a whole received a request from a reporter at Campus Reform — a news publication self-described as a “conservative watchdog” focused on higher education in the U.S. — for all spring 2021 course syllabi in the department.
Campus Reform editor-in-chief Zachary Marschall did not clarify the specific reason behind this request, but elaborated on the general purpose of FOIA in an email statement to The Cavalier Daily.
“The higher education system lacks transparency and accountability, and FOIA and public records requests are essential tools to help average Americans understand how academia operates,” Marschall said.
Mullins said, however, that his concern for faculty peaked when Walter Smith, chair of The Jefferson Council Research Committee, submitted a request in March 2023 for all of Mullins’ text messages, both sent and received, concerning the University from Aug. 15, 2022 to March 5, 2023.
“When I got FOIA’d for my text messages, that's when it felt different,” Mullins said. “Getting FOIA’d is never a good experience, because it's intended to be a form of harassment.”
Jefferson Council President Joel Gardner said that as long as the FOIA requests relate to the University, it should not be interpreted as a harassment tactic. He emphasized that the main purpose of these requests is to understand what faculty are doing regarding the University.
“They put [FOIA] rules in place for a reason — that is, the sunlight should be shining on what public employees are doing,” Gardner said. “They're not trying to FOIA texts going back and forth between friends or relatives … but if it has to do with the University, I don't see what the issue is.”
Smith’s submission did not give a specific reason for the request, as reasoning is not required under Virginia FOIA law. Mullins said that oftentimes, he did not know what the requesters were looking for or hoping to find in the records. Despite being unaware of Smith’s motives, Mullins fulfilled the request.
Smith, however, said that he never actually received Mullins’ text messages from the Office of the University Counsel. According to Smith, once the Office of the University Counsel gave him a cost estimate of around $500 to $600 for fulfilling the request, he decided not to pay the price.
As for his reasoning behind the request, Smith said he was curious about Mullins’ behavior over text regarding the University. Smith emphasized that business involving the University conducted over text should be considered public record, and should be saved in case of requests for these records.
“I had looked through the course catalogs and seen some of Professor Mullins’ descriptions, so I thought he is probably among the more left wing of the professors,” Smith said. “I [wanted] to see if he [was] doing U.Va. stuff on his texts. I don't know the answer, because U.Va. wanted something like $500 or $600.”
Smith’s inquiry came shortly after former Board of Visitors member Bert Ellis’ text messages regarding the University were obtained by a transparency advocate via a FOIA request. This prompted Smith to consider submitting FOIA requests for text messages concerning the University to learn more about professors' behavior outside of their syllabi or emails.
A document obtained by Mullins from a local non-profit organization lists Smith’s FOIA requests between Jan. 18, 2022 and March 7, 2023. The document, which the University shared with the organization, shows Smith’s requests to University faculty as well as whole departments. These inquiries range from the astronomy department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee meeting minutes to the University’s agreements with certain software companies.
According to the document, Smith filed over 100 FOIA requests for University and faculty records within this time frame.
A little more than a year after the FOIA request for his text messages concerning the University, Mullins received a request in June 2024 for “records (including but not limited to emails)” in his possession that included certain keywords dated between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 6, 2024. The keyword list included words such as Israel, Palestine, Jewish and all of its iterations, genocide, Gaza, Zionism and murder. The Office of the University Counsel notified him of the request which came from a Virginia resident.
Assoc. Art History Prof. Christa Noel Robbins said that she received an identical request with the same keyword list from the same requester in June 2024. Robbins said that the request seemed too “capacious” to have a clear motive.
“I spoke directly to the FOIA Office at U.Va. when I got this request, because that just seemed impossible,” Robbins said. “I am an art historian of the Modernist Period, and the Jewish Museum is named in multiple records … But the fact that ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ in any iteration needed to be FOIAed was crazy.”
Mullins acknowledged that FOIA can be a powerful tool for researchers and journalists, but claimed that some organizations and individuals use it as an intimidation strategy.
“While FOIA is a really useful law — researchers depend on it and journalists depend on it in order to create a sense of transparency and accountability — political actors use it as an easy form of harassment,” Mullins said. “[The request] takes two minutes to file, and then it takes up potentially the next four months or so of someone else's life.”
Gardner said that he finds no fault in the effort to understand what is going on inside of classrooms at public universities, emphasizing the importance of these institutions to be transparent with the public.
“If [the request] is anything to do with how the curricular is formed, or what's contained in the curricular, I can't even begin to imagine why that's an issue at a public university,” Gardner said. “What's being taught to the students should be open [and] available to the public … Why is it harassment to ask for the truth?”
Smith agreed, stating that his FOIA requests have never had the goal of harassment but rather are solely attempts to learn the truth about what professors are doing and teaching
“This is nothing more than an inquiry to find out what's going on. How can I know the truth if I don't know what's going on?” Smith said.
Similar to Mullins, Media Studies Prof. Robin Means Coleman acknowledged the positive aspects of FOIA law and how records requests can be a valuable resource in research. Specifically, Coleman gave the example of an individual who is studying certain trends in higher education filing a FOIA request to a university with the hopes of the records helping their research.
Although Coleman emphasized that individuals and organizations have the right to access these records, and that these rights are crucial for holding public institutions accountable, she also stressed that this right has been abused to target certain offices and faculty at universities across the country.
“I'm not opposed in any way to the spirit [or] the principles of what's behind [open records requests],” Coleman said. “The challenge that folks are facing is navigating the weaponization of that really useful tool … It becomes sort of de facto censorship that faculty have to worry about.”
Coleman has yet to receive a FOIA request relating to her faculty role at the University, but received several while in her previous role as vice president and associate provost for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion at Northwestern University. Still today, she receives requests relating to this previous role.
Gardner, on the other hand, does not see these requests as an attempt to tamper with University operations. For him, red flags have been raised about why faculty have expressed concern with receiving these requests.
“A faculty member is, in fact, a state employee and they should be as susceptible to FOIA as any other state employee,” Gardner said. “My question is, what do they have to hide?”
Walt Heinecke, immediate past president of the U.Va. chapter of the American Association of University Professors and associate professor of Education and Human Development, expressed a similar sentiment to Coleman, describing FOIA as a “double-edged sword” that, if misused, has the potential to interfere with professors’ work.
In 2017, Heinecke received his first FOIA request which requested records of some of his emails. He said that he recalls the request to be “vague” and not clear what the requester was looking for. Since then, he has not received many requests in comparison to some of his colleagues.
“'I’m not one of those targeted professors who does research on issues that are related to what the right wing is interested in shutting down,” Heinecke said. “A lot of my research has been on science and technology. I have done some work on race, but I haven't received any targeted FOIAs about any of my classes.”
Heinecke said that it seems that the professors targeted with FOIA requests tend to be those who teach on the topics of race, political extremism and Palestine.
Coleman noted that an abundance of requests not only disrupts the individual receiving them, but the institution itself.
“It is often someone who is under the employ of an organization, who is doing this fact-finding or information-seeking with a particular agenda or to stall or halt the progress of an institution of higher education by burying that institution with these requests,” Coleman said.
Specifically, Coleman noted the need for a team of people to respond to these requests, taking away their attention from the institution’s educational mission.
“We don't want administrators spending time responding to particularly frivolous requests. We do want our staff and administrators to be focused on the teaching and learning mission [and] the values of the institution.”
Both Heinecke and Robbins similarly stated that professors responding to large numbers of FOIA requests takes time away from teaching and researching.
“We no longer operate in safe spaces. Our work is open to public scrutiny as it always was, and we're accepting of that, but the fact that people are scrutinizing it in bad faith has made our jobs just that much more difficult,” Robbins said. “It robs time, not only from our research, but from our students.”
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