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EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — The University of Oregon said Wednesday that 22,000 pages of documents that were released illegally have been returned.
The economics professor widely believed to have gotten them from the university archives, Bill Harbaugh, acknowledged that he had obtained them, and had given them back.
Interim President Scott Coltrane caused a stir last week with a campus email saying that two employees were on leave because the records were released without a check for material about students, faculty members and others covered by state and federal privacy laws, or for information covered by attorney-client privilege.
The records in electronic form covered the years 2010-2014 from the office of the school's president.
The school won't say more about the return of the documents, a spokesman said Wednesday, and there was no word on the fate of the two employees, believed to be university archivists, The Eugene Register-Guard (http://bit.ly/1EQiMNw) reported.
"This is a personnel matter; we won't be able to provide any details related to the return of the documents," said spokesman Tobin Klinger.
Acting Provost Frances Bronet said in a widely circulated letter that the school had hired a Eugene law firm to look into the release of the documents "so that we can identify how and why confidential documents were disclosed, and take steps to ensure that something like this never happens again."
Harbaugh said he sought the documents in the archives because it's hard to get information through a public records request, a slow process that often results in steep fees and heavily redacted documents.
"If I did something wrong, I'd expect to get in trouble for it. I haven't done anything wrong," Harbaugh said.
Only one document from the records appears to have been made public, posted on a blog Harbaugh runs.
It described a proposal by a former top university lawyer to abolish the University Senate, a venue for faculty member influence.
There was no evidence the school ever acted on the idea.
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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com
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