Another Reminder, Courtesy of the U of Virginia, That Nothing Is Private at Public Universities

The University of Virginia has agreed to turn over a potentially enormous trove of climate-research e-mails and other documents to a conservative group that filed a demand for them under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The demand centers on more than a decade’s worth of e-mail messages from, to, and about Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist who left the university in 2005 to become director of a research center at Pennsylvania State University. The organization, called the American Tradition Institute, joined with a Republican state legislator to file its request after the university went to court to fight an attempt by Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, to use a different law to get the same documents, which he said he needed to investigate possible climate-research fraud. In a court document signed yesterday, the university said it would produce the materials within three months.