Docs RE Funding for the Division of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies (DLMRS), University of Arizona History Department

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Arizona Public Records Law, I hereby request the following records:

1. History Department Budgets and Division of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies (DLMRS) Budgets, 1980-present
2. Minutes of History Department Faculty Meetings 1980 - present
3. Minutes of meetings for the Advisory Board and Fundraising Committee for the DLMRS, 1989- present
4. DLMRS donation contracts
5. Emails and paper correspondence regarding budgets, the availability of public funding for the DLMRS, and the recruitment of funds from private donors between / among:
-----the dean’s office in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
-----history department administrators
-----DLMRS faculty and administrators
-----members of the Advisory Board and Fundraising Committee for the DLMRS
-----College of Social and Behavioral Sciences development professionals
-----private groups with religious affiliations
6. Schedules / calendars for development professionals in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences 2000-present
7. DLMRS Correspondence with church communities and private educational institutions with church affiliations about:
-----recruitment of graduate students for the DLMRS
-----hiring of graduates of the DLMRS
-----lectures and community classes to be given by DLMRS faculty and students
8. Documents relating to the most recent Academic Program Review Self Study & Report for the history department: self-study, report, and correspondence between the department and provost’s office regarding the report
9. Documents (e-mails, paper correspondence, meeting minutes, petitions, policy statements) relating to "voices...raised calling for [the] dissolution" of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 1994.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 business days.

Sincerely,

A. Espinosa

Thank you for your response.

Your requests for clarification refer to items 5 and 7 in the original request. The requested clarifications on these items are provided below.

While it is understood that documents requested in points 5 and 7 may take some time, regarding the other portions of the request, which refer to straightforward, easily obtainable records of decision-making discussions and funding allocations in publicly funded academic units that train history educators for the state’s school systems (e.g. requests for meeting minutes for named groups, budgets for named groups, appointment calendars for public employees, documents relating to the history department's most recent self-study) please provide the minutes, budgets, reports, and calendars requested promptly. It is now four months since the original request was placed. For the straightforward portions of the request that is an unreasonable delay.

RESPONSES to your requests for clarification:

1. In general, what type of information is sought?

The views of the Protestant minister and founder of the history department’s “Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies” (DLMRS) were described as follows in one of the Division’s newsletters: “He saw in the Reformation movement a grand alliance of Luther, the refugee Protestants, and the heads of the infant nations against the yoke of the Roman papacy and the power of its lieutenants, Charles V and Philip II. In the sixteenth century the cosmic struggle between God and Devil broke history’s surface to take an enduring and unmistakable shape” (p. 6, Division Newsletter, Desert Harvest, Vol. 9 No. 2, https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/DH_9.2.pdf). It would seem that the elements of denominationally partisan theology and anti-Catholic bigotry in this stance -- and the inappropriateness of the institutionalization of this perspective in a public university in the American Southwest -- should have been clear to administrators in a non-sectarian, publicly funded social science program. Indeed, in 2005, while efforts were being made to endow chairs in the “Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies” (DLMRS), one of the division's spokespersons openly acknowledged that “Reformation Studies” was a scholarly subfield that had “excluded Catholicism as an object of interest” and had not “made researchers on Catholic subjects sufficiently welcome to its ranks, and this remains true to this day.” (Susan Karant-Nunn, “Changing One’s Mind,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4, Winter 2005, cf., e.g. the discussions on attitudes in the field on pp. 1112, 1116, and 1122. )

In this context, of interest are public records which shed light on the degree to which university professionals whose salaries are paid with public funds coordinated with private religious groups to install in a publicly funded, land grant university a publicly subsidized academic program in a field with an acknowledged history of religiously-based exclusion and bigotry targeting the largest single denomination (Roman Catholicism) in the tax-paying constituency of the university. Bafflingly, Division newsletters reveal that not only were publicly paid development professionals used to endow positions in "Reformation History," but publicly funded units within the University of Arizona outside of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences appear to have used tax-sourced funds allocated to meet the needs of their students and run their own educational programs to make donations to endowing chairs in “Reformation Studies” in the history department (e.g. UA College of Education, UA College of Humanities: p. 7, Division Newsletter, Desert Harvest Vol. 14 No. 1 https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/DH_14.1.pdf).

Why? Perhaps the provision of the documents requested will shed some light on why the UA's "College of Education," for example, was asked to use some of the sadly limited and vitally important public funds available to it to donate in support of endowing "Reformation Studies" in the history department. It may also shed light on why an Arizona Supreme Court Justice who wrote a dissent objecting to the use of public funds in Catholic schools on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state ( https://www.philanthropy.com/article/arizona-court-upholds-scholarship-tax-credit/ ) served as one of the chief fundraisers for endowing a Protestant minister's publicly subsidized program in "Reformation Studies" in the University of Arizona's history department ( https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/board-advisors (current); p. 4 of Division Newsletter Desert Harvest Vol. 11, No. 2, https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/DH_11.2.pdf )

Also of interest:
1. the donor base for the endowed chairs in this division appears to have included Protestant institutions but not Catholic institutions (see, for example, the donor lists provided on pp 4, 6-8 of Desert Harvest, Vol. 18, No. 2, https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/DH_18.2.pdf )
2. the ongoing existence of this publicly subsidized program appears to be continuing to differentially benefit private, religiously partisan groups and institutions (e.g., by providing lectures in local Protestant churches (https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/summer-lecture-series) and by training a number of scholars, the cost of whose education has been subsidized by Arizona taxpayers, for employment in out-of-state, private, Protestant colleges (https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/alumni)).
3. in a context in which the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences is struggling financially, the DLMRS appears to be continuing to receive public, tax-sourced support for a program that serves the academic / educational needs of some students and some religious denominations within the public constituency more than it serves the needs of others (p. 3, Desert Harvest Newsletter, Vol. 38, No. 2, https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/Desert%20Harvest%2C%20vol%2028%2C%20no.%202%2C%20fall_winter%202020-21.pdf )

There are a number of taxpayers in Southern Arizona who want the character, history, funding sources, and outputs of this public program fully documented and broadly understood in the community that provides tax support to this university. Whether this program is an appropriate place to apply the limited tax funds available for "history" programs in Southern Arizona merits public discussion based on the university's documentable, publicly accessible track record: has the university been deploying its funds and its professionals in a way that respects the constituency's educational needs and constitutional rights? Has it been applying tax dollars in support of "public" programs that disproportionately benefit certain religious groups? Do its funding priorities inappropriately "take sides" in historic religious conflicts?

Please do what is legally required and provide the documentation requested on the extent of the coordination between private, Protestant interests and a public institution which is prohibited by the Arizona constitution from sponsoring "sectarian" instruction ( Ariz. Const. art. 11, § 7.), and whose tax-funded mission is to serve the needs of the entire taxpaying constituency, not just select, religiously partisan portions of it.

2. Who are the specific individuals and groups of interest?

Requested are internal and external correspondence, policy statements, announcements, donation contracts, and meeting notes RE the establishment of DLMRS, RE donations to its endowments and scholarship funds, RE its past and present use of the labor of publicly paid administrators and development professionals within the university and RE its requests for provision of publicly sourced funds for its students and programs, involving the following individuals and groups:
University of Arizona Provost Paul Sypherd
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean Holly Smith
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean J.P. Jones III
Dean of Libraries Carla Stoffle
Director of Development for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Ginny Healy
History Department Head Helen Nader
History Department Head Kevin Gosner
DLMRS Head Heiko Oberman
DLMRS Head Susan Karant-Nunn
DLMRS Head Ute Lotz-Heumann
DLMRS Program Coordinator Luise Betterton
DLMRS Support Staff Sandra Kimball
Advisory Board Chair Stanley Feldman
Advisory Board and Fundraising Committee Members Sandy Hatfield, Richard Duffield, Morris Martin, Toetie Oberman, Nancy O'Neill, George Rosenberg, Bazy Tankersley, Harriet Silverman, Hermann Bleibtreu
University of Arizona College of Education
University of Arizona College of Humanities
St. Philips in the Hills Episcopal Church, Tucson
Our Saviour's Lutheran Church, Tucson
"a coalition of Northwest [Tucson] Lutheran churches" (cf. p. 2 of https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/DH_1.2.pdf)
St. Nicholas Anglican Church, Scottsdale
Stuttgart Lutheran Congregation
Dove of Peace Lutheran Church
Trinity Presbyterian Church
Concordia College, Irvine (Lutheran, Missouri Synod)
Luther College, Iowa (Lutheran)
Covenant College, Georgia (Presbyterian)
Wuppertal / Bethel Seminary, Germany (“Protestant”)
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Evangelical Christian)
Boston Trinity Academy (“Christian”)
Conrad Grebel University College (Mennonite Church)
School of Divinity, University of Aberdeen UK (Church of Scotland)
Hope College, Michigan (Reformed Church)
Tusculum College, Tennessee (Presbyterian)

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to the straightforward portions of the request being addressed promptly, and will keep checking back as additional materials that require more research are uploaded here, until the request is complete in full.

In reviewing the DLMRS newsletter archive again, I have recognized that a few individuals who were involved in the creation and funding of the DLMRS were not included in the response transmitted to you on 08/09/2021. Rather than listing them individually, I request that the range of the search for points 5 and 7 be expanded to include from 1990-present, within the University of Arizona:

all provosts
all Deans of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
all chairs of the history department
all fund development professionals within the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
all directors and assistant directors of the DLMRS
all administrative / support staff for the DLMRS
all members of the DLMRS advisory board and fundraising committee

I would also like to add the following item to the original request:
10. any correspondence between University of Arizona provosts and history department administrators regarding the self-study process and self-study reports produced by the history department, 1990 - present.

Thank you again for your attention to this matter.

To University of Arizona Office of Public Records:

Do you need Arizona Public Records Law Request #2021-0180 broken up into discrete parts in order to begin posting materials? If so, I will be happy to submit separate requests for each portion of the original request.

To University of Arizona Office of Public Records:

In reviewing MuckRock's follow-up inquiries for this records request, I noted today that their last two follow-ups have contained an inaccurate projected delivery date (January 3). A request for correction has been submitted to MuckRock. (MuckRock is a service that submits records requests to public agencies, generates follow-up messages every two weeks, and posts all of the resultant correspondence with public agencies on its website where the entire correspondence, as well as any records that are produced in response to the records requests, are made accessible to the public.)

In reviewing the correspondence relating to Request #2021-0180, I note that in October of 2021, in response to a query RE whether your office needed Request #2021-0180 broken up into discrete parts in order to begin posting materials, you replied, "Our office is continuing to process your request, and we will begin providing records on a rolling basis after they have been reviewed for responsiveness, redaction and/or withholding. There is no need to submit duplicate requests to our office for the same records."

As you note, this request is quite voluminous and will take time to complete in full. Though I do not wish to narrow the request, I do wish to request that the first two items on the list:

1. History Department Budgets and Division of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies (DLMRS) Budgets, 1980-present
2. Minutes of History Department Faculty Meetings 1980 - present

be given priority as you begin to post records on a rolling basis.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

To University of Arizona Office of Public Records:

Neither of the links provided worked on 1/27/22, well before the expiration date you stipulated. Please provide working links to the material.

Vol. 29, No. 2, fall/winter 2021-2022
https://dlmrs.arizona.edu/sites/dlmrs.arizona.edu/files/Desert%20Harvest%20newsletter%20Fall_Winter%202021.pdf

In the above-linked newsletter, Ms. Plummer, the acting director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies and author of "From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation" (Routledge, 2017), has written a piece discussing the public records requests placed here.

Among several inaccuracies in the piece, three in particular should be noted:

1.

Ms. Plummer states that anyone who attributed anti-Catholicism to "Reformation Studies" as a discipline "obviously knew little about Reformation Studies."

In fact, the previous director of Ms. Plummer’s own division published an article in 2005 in which we learn that "in 1980, a debate at a scholarly conference ‘brought briefly into the open confessional views that only the Protestant devout ought to undertake Reformation scholarship.’” In the same article, Ms. Karant-Nunn mentioned that in 1990 and 1999 German and North American societies for “Reformation Studies" held joint conferences and that “neither organization had made researchers on Catholic subjects sufficiently welcome to its ranks, and this remains true to this day.” In short, “the field of Reformation Studies, narrowly defined, has excluded Catholicism as an object of interest.” (“Changing One’s Mind,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 1112, 1122, 1116)

This is the actual recent history of "Reformation Studies" as a discipline, openly discussed in a published work by the previous director of the University of Arizona’s “Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies.” If academic specialties with histories of religious exclusion of this kind seek a permanent establishment for themselves, it should be in privately funded institutions, not in publicly funded institutions where tax dollars drawn from members of the religion their discipline has targeted and excluded are used to subsidize their work. It is immaterial what the intentions of Ms. Karant-Nunn herself, Ms. Plummer or other administrators in the division may have been and may be: the character of the broader field itself is the problem. Entrenched attitudes in a discipline do not change over night, nor do programs in fields with that kind of a history attract many applicants from the religions their practitioners have a long history of disparaging and excluding in the past.

It is difficult indeed to imagine that any scholarly "discipline" that had openly admitted to fostering this kind of contemptible bias with respect to any other religion -- Islam or Judaism, for example -- would be welcomed in a public university. The open question here is why at the University of Arizona a field with this kind of recent history was not just tolerated but institutionalized and endowed when the targeted and excluded population happened to be Roman Catholic.

2.

In her newsletter piece addressed to donors, Ms. Plummer airbrushes the character of Heiko Oberman's work. This is how Oberman's mature scholarship was described by the historian Thomas Brady in a previous issue of the Division's own newsletter: "[T]he writings of Oberman's third phase [argue that] the sufferings of sixteenth-century (Protestant) exiles recapitulate the sufferings of the ancient Hebrews and anticipate those of the modern Jews and other victims of Nazism. The linkage on the other side, the foes of freedom, ran [...] to medieval realist scholasticism and really to the papacy. He saw in the Reformation movement a grand alliance of Luther, the refugee Protestants, and the heads of the infant nations against the yoke of the Roman papacy [and believed this historical struggle was a reflection of] the cosmic struggle between God and the Devil..." Mr. Brady goes on to explain how one of the questions inspiring Oberman's research had been how the papacy, which he seems to have understood to be an "evil" institution, could possibly have survived the Reformation. (DLMRS Newsletter Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 3, 6.) All DLMRS newsletters have been requested through MuckRock and links to them are posted at the bottom of the web page linked here:
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/arizona-78/dlmrs-newsletters-which-make-dlmrs-history-and-heiko-obermans-views-on-catholicism-clear-111940/

In short, there is a reason why all Oberman's academic appointments prior to his arrival at the University of Arizona were in privately funded, Protestant-affiliated institutions. Even 30 years ago, recognition was growing in the field of history more broadly that claims like Oberman's were confessionally influenced perspectives more appropriate to Protestant "historical theology," the discipline Oberman trained in, than to history departments in secular social science colleges. For those unfamiliar with the development of "Reformation Studies" and "early modern history," the evolution of stances toward "The" Reformation is discussed by Constantin Fasolt, a medieval and early modern historian and former head of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago in the essay “Hegel’s Ghost.” (http://home.uchicago.edu/~icon/written2/hegelsghost.pdf, published elsewhere as ​the final chapter of Past Sense: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern European History (Brill, 2014))

3.

"A Espinosa" is not a pseudonym chosen to refer to "A[lonso] Espinosa, the Jesuit who oversaw the building of the first church structure at the mission at San Xavier del Bac,” as Ms. Plummer falsely asserts. (Is this an example of the kind of “research” methods Ms. Plummer has to offer? In the absence of sources which she can use to document her claims, she makes up and publicly distributes stories which bear no relation to the facts? Not unheard of in the social sciences these days, unfortunately, but it does not inspire confidence.)

The public records requests which Ms. Plummer disparages were placed after administrators in the history department and College of Social and Behavioral Sciences refused repeatedly, over the course of more than a year, to hold a meeting to respond to well-informed, respectfully presented concerns. The concerns grew from those of one individual who had taken graduate courses in the history department to include other community members, and at this point they have been brought to the attention of people in state-level and national networks who take an interest in public institutions, first amendment freedoms, and the administrative state.

Regarding the use of "A Espinosa": The Spanish word “espinosa” (thorny) was chosen as a submission name for records requests of interest to multiple individuals. Insofar as the requests are legally required responses whose results are being publicly posted, it was hoped they would be an effective transparency "thorn" in the side of a public administration whose representatives had stonewalled constituents, refused dialogue, and treated legitimate public concerns with contempt.

Here is one sample of the quality of responses received from University of Arizona administrators within SBS: "I spoke with Professors [...] about the complaints raised... I can assure you that there is no [...] bias on the part of any of these faculty. Hence I consider the matter closed."

End of story. Hard to imagine THAT being the response to any other kind of diversity concern, coming from any other quarter, raised in this university.
___________________________________

When public administrators refuse to respond to concerns and refuse to provide information through dialogue, Arizona law provides redress through transparency laws requiring the production of public records. In this case, it is not Ms. Plummer’s editorializing to her donors in the division newsletter — or her smear job, mischaracterizing and denigrating members of the public requesting documents through legally established public processes -- that will matter. It is the actual production of the public records which will make clear the extent to which “sectarian” interests are or are not disproportionately involved in, and disproportionately benefiting from, the operations of this publicly subsidized academic division.

Ms. Plummer asserts: "Past and present, we have included Catholic, Protestant, non-Christian, non-religious, religious, non-theists among our members."

In what proportions? Recruiting and accepting how many students from which institutions, specifically? Educating scholars to serve in which institutions? Funded by whom, affiliated with whom? “Entrenched” in the local community, as Ms. Plummer writes, but in which portions of the community, specifically? Provide the requested documentation to make it clear. Tossing the occasional outsider a bone does not constitute a uniform commitment to serving a religiously diverse public, nor does picking up the occasional Catholic undergraduate and sending them off to graduate school to study with dissident Catholic scholars in secular institutions. The character of the institutional origins and institutional destinations of students in the division and their proportions matter: public institutions are to serve the public, not just the donors whom directors of this academic division have cultivated “through the Town and Gown Lectures, the Summer Lecture Series [at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church], and other community lectures [including lectures at other Protestant churches], where they found a receptive audience.”

The division's own newsletter gives the impression that its support base is overwhelmingly Protestant, but perhaps the records produced in response to this request will reveal that just as many churches of other denominations (and non-churches) have been "receptive" patrons, audiences, and sponsors for the Division's work as Protestant churches have been. If not, the question is why. Is the overall character of the Division's work as evenly balanced and confessionally neutral as Ms. Plummer seems to want to represent it to be? Are audiences of all denominations (or no affiliation), for example, equally interested in research titled “From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation,” or in the contention that the Irish “could have been Protestant” if British administrators had handled their responsibilities in Ireland differently? How about uniform public receptivity to a publicly sponsored celebration of the “500 year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation” presented together with encomiums on Luther? “There is something we recognize about him, no matter what our religious perspective might be,” the former director of the division opined in the public forum the university provided to her. "It demands that we go back and look at him and try to understand him.” ( https://news.arizona.edu/story/lecture-luther-kicks-years-reformation-series ) Is it appropriate to attempt to ventriloquize that sentiment (there is something WE recognize which DEMANDS WE try to understand him, no matter what OUR religious perspective might be) into a secular university community? Is it possible for these people to imagine that some find the term “priest’s whore” offensive; that some ask why so many English became Protestant, not why so many Irish did not; that some would prefer that Erasmus be foregrounded and his decision not to foster schism be celebrated?

The astounding tone deafness of the leaders of this division, whose scholarly lives seem to have been lived in such a “Reformation Studies” echo chamber that they are largely unable to envision the way their language and their enthusiasms may come across to some on the other side of a 500 year old, often bitter, often violent confessional divide, is one of the many poisonous fruits of the now 30 year old institutional privileging of their confessionally influenced perspectives, and of the 30 year old institutional failure to provide an appropriate diversity of perspectives on these topics in this public university's history department.

There are important issues here, not just within their “division,” but in the broader history department as well. Is the donor-influenced balance of research and teaching topics available in this history department appropriate to this university's public constituency? Are there, for example, as many opportunities and resources -- and as much funding -- for students at the University of Arizona to study the early modern history of Spain and Mexico as there are for graduate students, many of them imported from out of state, to study and teach the "Reformation" history of Northern Europe? Was the use of development professionals paid with public funds to produce this emergent structure in the history department appropriate in a public institution that properly supports "diversity" both in theory and in practice? How about in a "Hispanic serving university" that qualifies for certain kinds of funding supplements based on the ethnic composition of its student population?

All of these are questions worthy of public discussion, and important not only to the quality of public history resources available in the local community, but to the state-wide community for which this history department trains primary and secondary educators. But representatives of the University of Arizona have refused to discuss them. Hence the records request, which any scholar or administrator who actually understands and supports the "diversity" mission of a public institution of education should applaud, not oppose -- and certainly not denigrate, as Ms. Plummer has done.

Ms. Plummer seems to feel that it is an argument in the Division’s favor that a previous Bishop of Tucson wrote “two lovely letters” offering Oberman support.

Those will be interesting to read, but they are of no real import to the issues discussed here. Catholic bishops are not experts in the responsibilities of public institutions, and surely a scholar as learned as Ms. Plummer knows that throughout history, some Catholic administrators have endorsed or excused things they should not have endorsed or excused. Past public relations (or donor relations) decisions regarding matters like this within a Diocese do not in any way determine how other Catholics using this university — or, at the national level, other Catholics taking an interest in first amendment issues and public accountability — must or should respond. On the public institution side, public universities do not have license to selectively serve only "the right kind of Catholics" -- those who dissent from their own Church's orthodoxy on key issues, or those more tolerant of Protestant triumphalism, or those more amenable to ecumenical bridge-building -- any more than they have license to exclude Catholics as a class.

One of the legal scholars consulted who has written on how the concept of the "separation of church and state" has been deployed in this country penned this editorial in the Wall Street Journal not too long after reviewing this case, which is no doubt one among many cases of this kind he has been asked to review:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/public-school-system-constitutional-private-mcauliffe-free-speech-11634928722?

To date, the track record of this University in addressing legitimate concerns on this issue includes the very kind of public administrative behavior that fuels the movement to defund and privatize public education, which the above editorial makes eminently clear. Ms. Plummer’s disparagement of the records requests in her newsletter is just the latest unprofessional chapter in a two year long story whose recurring themes would seem to be a strange combination of ineptitude and contempt. Would it be too much to expect that the story can now draw to a close with the actual delivery of the legally required public documents?

It remains to be seen.

In any case, who in this matter actually supports genuine "religious diversity and tolerance" -- which in an academic institution has to include a willingness to hear concerns and a willingness to invest in the resources necessary to sponsor a suitable range of perspectives on the material under study -- should already be quite evident from the materials publicly posted here. Those materials now include Ms. Plummer's unprofessional and inaccurate mischaracterization of this records request.

To University of Arizona Office of Public Records:

The following documents have been made publicly accessible through the “files” tab of this records order:

DLMRS Budgets 8.17.21 - Redacted.pdf
DLMRS Budgets 1991 and Prior - Redacted.pdf
DLMRS Budgets 1991-1992 - Redacted.pdf
DLMRS Budgets 1993-1994 - Redacted.pdf
Copy of Historyfinancialrpt2010-2011.pdf
Finan Rep 00-01.pdf
Finan Rep 01-02.pdf
Finan Rep 07-08.pdf
Finan Rep 08-09.pdf
Finan Rep 09-10.pdf
Finan Rep 79-80.pdf
Finan Rep 80-81.pdf
Finan Rep 81-82.pdf
Finan Rep 83-84.pdf
Finan Rep 84-85.pdf
Finan Rep 85-86.pdf
Finan Rep 87-88.pdf
Finan Rep 92-98 aggreg.pdf
Finan Rep 97-98.pdf
Finan Rep 98-99.pdf
FY09 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY10 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY11 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY12 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY13 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY14 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY15 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY16 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY17 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY18 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY19 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY20 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
FY21 - Income and Expense Overview_Redacted.pdf
some highlights 97-98.pdf

Thank you.

In view of the delays to date in posting materials in response to this request, and in response to specific assertions made by the acting director of the DLMRS in the Vol. 29, No. 2 DLMRS newsletter, we are for the time being narrowing the request to focus on the decision making processes surrounding:

1. "voices...raised calling for [the] dissolution" of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 1994
2. the 2017 University of Arizona “500 year celebration of the Protestant Reformation” (https://news.arizona.edu/story/ua-mark-500th-anniversary-reformation)
3. the faculty hire the division made in 2017, which installed a second expert in the Northern European Protestant Reformation on a history faculty at the University of Arizona which had at the time and continues to have conspicuous gaps in its ability to cover the full range of topics relevant to the competent teaching of the state’s history curricula, and in its ability to cover the full range of topics relevant to the interpretation of local public history

First, a question regarding some of the materials requested previously:
Is it the case that the acting director of the DLMRS was, as her newsletter piece seems to imply, asked by the University of Arizona to review and produce records from the files of the department that endowed her chair and employs her? Was there any oversight or external review provided in that departmental self-review and document production process, and if so, what was it?

Second, please be so kind as to put a temporary hold on all materials requested in this order other than:

A) Documents (e-mails, paper correspondence, meeting minutes, petitions, policy statements) relating to "voices...raised calling for [the] dissolution" of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 1994
B) Minutes of History Department Faculty Meetings and Minutes of meetings for the Advisory Board and Fundraising Committee for the DLMRS for the years 2015 - 2018
C) Documents relating to the 2011 and 2018 Academic Program Review Self Studies & Reports for the history department: self-studies, reports, and correspondence between the department and provost’s office regarding those reports

Thank you again for your attention to this matter and for your work in producing responsive documents. As pointed out in the above correspondence, it seems likely that holding the meeting repeatedly requested by constituents in 2020 and 2021 would have been considerably less burdensome to the University of Arizona as an institution -- and to the constituents requesting dialogue -- than the public records work that became necessary when the meeting was denied.

Hi,

Please see the following request for records. The links received have expired. Thank you for your help with this request.

Best,
MuckRock

Subject: RE: Arizona Public Records Law Request #2021-0180

I wanted to follow up on the following Arizona Public Records Law request, copied below, originally submitted on April 2, 2021 and modified on February 6, 2022. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response.

A) Documents (e-mails, paper correspondence, meeting minutes, petitions, policy statements) relating to "voices...raised calling for [the] dissolution" of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 1994
B) Minutes of History Department Faculty Meetings and Minutes of meetings for the Advisory Board and Fundraising Committee for the DLMRS for the years 2015 - 2018
C) Documents relating to the 2011 and 2018 Academic Program Review Self Studies & Reports for the history department: self-studies, reports, and correspondence between the department and provost’s office regarding those reports