By: Diane Benjamin
See if you can follow how ISU responded to my FOIA. I was looking for emails mentioning Charlie Kirk around the time he was on the ISU campus. Read the below chain, what don’t they want you to know?
Original request 9/12/25:
All communication in any form by any ISU employee using the words Charlie Kirk
Time frame: 1/1/2025 to 9/11/2025.
They claimed that was too many emails and asked me to narrow it.
On September 22, 2025, the University received your narrowed request for the following:
Trying limiting the scope to April 2025
That was still too many.
On September 29, 2025, the University received your further narrowed request for the following:
Narrow search to 4/1/25 – 4/13/25. Removing duplicates creates less to review!
Still too many.
On October 6, 2025, the University received your further narrowed request for the following:
Narrow request to 4/6/2025-4/10/2025
Again, too many – request is now down to 4 days
On October 13, 2025, the University received your further narrowed request for the following:
Narrow time frame to 4/7/2025-4/9/2025
Same story repeated for 3 days
On October 20, 2025, the University received your further narrowed request for the following:
Narrow to 4/8/2025 – 4/9/2025
Realize the request is only for 2 DAYS now?
Still too many.
On October 28, 2025, the University received your further narrowed request for the following:
Limit request to social science departments, including political science.
Final response:
Your narrowed request still constitutes a request for all records within a certain category (e.g. “all communication”). In accordance with FOIA Section 140/3(g), where the undue burden on the public agency of providing all records in a category outweighs the public interest in providing the information, the request will be denied unless there is a way to narrow and reduce the request to manageable proportions.
This request, as submitted, would be denied pursuant to Section 140/3(g) as unduly burdensome for the following reasons:
- The University does not maintain emails in a way to filter out specific departments (ie. “social science departments, including political science”). There are over 300 departments on campus, and “social science” is not the name of a department. The University determined that the History Department and Political Science Department have over 125 employees. The University would have to manually input each and every employee in order to run an email search. In addition, the only way to search for “all communication” in other forms would require contacting each and every University employee in the History Department and the Political Science Department.
- Time spent to manually obtain, review and redact the materials for exempt materials would be unduly burdensome to the operations of the University.
ISU either has a really bad email management system or they don’t want you to know what their employees/professors said.
I would challenge this. There is no way they can’t pull all emails with the words “Charlie Kirk” from any or all departments and any job title in a matter of seconds. I think they are proving they have something to hide.
What if some readers were to narrow the requests as needed and individually file FOIA as required by State of Illinois statute?
Perhaps the desired information is not available due to the probable confusion of many of the ISU participants cannot even tell if they are animal or vegetable, let alone cognizant of life
So what is “too many?” What is that number? Who decides what too many is and therefore constitutes an undue burden? The State or ISU?
Maybe you can request emails that were generated by the Political Science Department employees only and have Charlie Kirk in the Subject Line. Or maybe you can request emails that have the words Charlie Kirk and “fascist” within the body of said department’s emails. Certainly, that would narrow the scope of the search.
What ISU is doing is nothing more than a cover-up, and a clear circumvention of the Illinois FOIA law.
They said too many if requesting emails from everyone in a department.
What, exactly, are you wanting to know? What is the purpose of this? Seriously, I’m curious.
What were professors saying about Charlie Kirk? Evidently a lot.
Perhaps they were, but who cares? He still came and spoke. Also, when they do a search like this, it searches every single email account at ISU, that means all 20,000+ students as well. They’re not going to search each individual email account for all faculty and staff one at a time. Talk about a waste of time and money.
Students emails aren’t subject to FOIA. Why would they be searched?
Because if you do a wide search, I’m not sure you could differentiate and email address in a search. They’re all @ilstu.edu, I’m guessing the only way to do it is one at a time.
Again, why does it matter, he still came and spoke, and I think, started good discussion afterward, regardless of what professors said about him.
Sounds like government, unaccountable!
Again, why does it matter?
If I had the emails I would know
Would know what?
I don’t read minds!
So, you’re just snooping. Got it.
Worried?
Not one bit.
I disagree with BNIndy about “why does it matter?”, but s/he is right about the search parameters. I’m sure there are conversations ISU doesn’t want public, but the rejection seems legit. ISU has an internal IM and group discussion application (Teams) as well as their email system, and not sure if their voice mail boxes are saved or searchable, and there may be other things included in ‘All Communications’. Then as BNIndy said, the various accounts are not typically easily separated as far as student vs faculty vs staff vs ‘internal accounts’ like automated error messaging or mass communications, much less ‘by department’. I don’t know if the Results were excessive but the Search Pool was huge. Checking ~25K accounts, x2 for email + IM, x~10 per person, that’s ~500K things to check through for just one day.
If you can narrow the request to specific individuals, not forcing ISU to cross check their departments to find them; or only one communication method (I’d recommend Teams, where people are more informal and likely to reveal something like that child-killer-wannabe VA Dem); or maybe add some more keywords, then you might get some results.
I would have to know names! I don’t
@Karl Sila
I know someone who was forced to resign from their faculty position at ISU because they supposedly made a “threat” to no one in particular in an email. It was no threat, and even if it was, they never named a victim. I’m almost positive that their email was flagged for one word of this so-called “threat.” If they have the resources to flag emails for keywords, which is what they seem to have done in this person’s case, then I refuse to believe they can’t do the search that Diane is requesting easily.
I think they are stalling. The question is why.
DuckDuckGo.com > ilstu political science instructors > https://pol.illinoisstate.edu/faculty-staff/
Looks comprehensive, 49 people including Grad Student TAs. Includes a link to additional Emeritus professors. Probably need to parse out other departments of interest to helpful readers.