MarshaWoodbury, Ph.D.
(You can see a more formal web page).
.....home. 
Roger and Marsha at Lake Rotoiti, Dec. 30, 2001
MarshaWoodbury, Ph.D.
(You can see a more formal web page).
.....home.
Roger and Marsha at Lake Rotoiti, Dec. 30, 2001
Why are these my four favorite words? Here's how other people see me.
See our Stanford Reunion 1998, Italy XII at Stanford, 1998,, and Italy XII at Jan McClain's House, 2003 photos.
Ex-Univ. of Illinois Pres. Stanley Ikenberry, Dr. M., UIUC
Chancellor Michael Aiken.
Our sons are Luke and Matthew.
We lived for 18 years in Marlborough, New Zealand.
We own a home and land near Blenheim, on the South Island,
and we sell our grapes to be blended into
Oyster Bay wine. (not imported into the USA yet). We have pictures of our recent trip at pix.html and more.html.
After two trips to Sweden in 1995, I became
extremely interested in international communications and fallout from uniting the world through the global web.
So I started CPSR-GLOBAL.
It's a moderated listserv, fed to USENET: comp.org.cpsr.talk.
You might be interested in an early effort of mine in an online journal, Freedom of Information Laws Affect the Autonomy of American Universities in E Law - Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law.
My paper for the Fourth International Conference on Ethics in the Public Service, presented in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden, Conflicting Loyalties? When the Public Relations Office Administers the Freedom of Information Act.
Marsha Woodbury, Ph.D.
College
of Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995
Dr.
Frederick Rodgers, Advisor
Committee Members: Paul Thurston, Nick
Burbules, Steve Helle
This dissertation is an evaluation study of the Freedom ofInformation Act (FOIA) inIllinois and how that act wasimplemented by public universities, particularly by the largestuniversity in the state, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Universities are used as a focus for the evaluation,for if freedom of information is not found there, where else can acitizen expect it?
The FOIA went through a decade of incubation beforebecoming law. The author chronicles this process of debate,bargaining, and amending. The author describes the acrimoniousFOIA policy-making process in the Illinois legislature, that led tovagueness in wording and allowed for no enforcement orevaluation. The Actleft latitude for interpretation andimplementation.
The author examines the complexity of information policyand the demandsof federal, state, and local laws on universities.These institutions must balance all their roles, from policing thestreets to recycling garbage to lobbying in the legislature tohandling information.
This dissertation/evaluation of the FOIA takes the viewpoint of the legislators and the consumers. Every FOIA request calls for a decision, forcing the administrator to take action. As part of her methodology, the author used FOIA requests to every public university in Illinois and the Big Ten schools. The author asked for data that the Act required each public body to keep on hand; universities varied broadly in how they complied. One university altered FOIA copies of records, and, when their deed was discovered, quickly released true copies of the originals.
In Illinois, all letters of denial are open to public review.The author attempted to collect every denial from every public university, along with other records, but the task proved difficult because of institutional impediments, most often in the form of poor record-keeping. This evaluation attempts to analyze the errors, as well as unanticipated results, such as the frequent use of blind copies. Many universities use the public affairs/relations office to handle FOIA.
In creating the FOIA, the legislature left no one in charge of overseeing it. In effect, each requester became the attorney general for the state, with the costly option of taking cases to court when not obtaining satisfaction from the institution. Costs and barriersto litigation are discussed. The author analyzes different ways of measuring the usefulness of the law, and recommends changes at the institutional and legislative levels.
