11 Open Meetings Acts
Lance Werner
Case Law
Booth Newspapers, Inc v Univ of Michigan Bd of Regents, 444 Mich 211, 222-223; 507 NW2d 422 (1993).
Mallett, J. The dispositive issues in this case are whether the presidential selection procedure adopted by the University of Michigan Board of Regents violated the Open Meetings Act, MCL 15.261 et seq.; MSA 4.1800(11) et seq., or the Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq.; MSA 4.1801(1)et seq.
We find that defendant violated the OMA and the FOIA. Therefore, we affirm in part and reverse in part the Court of Appeals decision.
I
On April 28, 1987, Harold Shapiro announced his resignation as President of the University of Michigan, effective January 3, 1988. In May of 1987, the Board of Regents, consisting of eight members, appointed itself as the Presidential Selection Committee and began the process of choosing a new university president. The committee appointed Regent Paul W. Brown as chairman and formed three advisory committees to assist it: a student committee, a faculty committee, and an alumni committee.
By the fall of 1987, the Presidential Selection Committee had compiled an informal list of 250 potential candidates to replace President Shapiro. No formal applications were submitted by the candidates themselves. Rather, most of the candidates were recommended by third parties, who advised the committee of the candidates’ qualifications. The committee’s administrative secretary compiled a notebook of information relating to each candidate, and the board members reviewed these materials to evaluate the various individuals. To reduce the field of candidates, the committee made a series of “cuts,” narrowing the list from 250 to one.
The first cut reduced the number of candidates from 250 to 70. The Presidential Selection Committee entrusted Regent Brown with sole authority to make the first cut, and he did so after numerous telephone calls and meetings with the advisory committees and informal subquorum groups of regents. The acknowledged purpose of the telephone calls and the subquorum meetings was to achieve the same intercommunication that could have been achieved in a full board meeting. During this process, the board avoided quorum meetings because it would have been required to conduct a public meeting under the OMA. In fact, Regent Roach told an Ann Arbor News reporter on November 15, 1987, that if it had not been for the OMA and the desire not to discuss these matters in public,
we would [have been] able to sit down with all the regents present, discuss the problems and talk about all the candidates at a much earlier point. [Instead], it [took] three or four hours to go around the horn on the telephones and find out what everybody is thinking.
After gaining thorough input from all the regents, Brown’s first decision was largely an arithmetic function rather than a matter of judgment. However, any regent could review Brown’s list of seventy candidates and request the retention of a part