Our Right to Know: Alex Walters

By Savannah Rude

It’s not easy to sue your own university, but Alex Walters and his colleagues at the Michigan State University campus newspaper found it paid off.

Walters, a 21-year-old student at Michigan State, showed that tenacity in acquiring public records can inform his fellow students. He and two other staffers at The State News, Theo Scheer and Owen McCarthy, sued the university successfully for records, and even created a tool to help other students request records from the university.

Over two years, they filed hundreds of FOIA requests, tackling issues ranging from campus surveillance practices, sexual assault by campus physician Larry Nassar and faculty, hate crimes and internal communications between administrators and board members.

Their work earned them major national journalism awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists Pulliam First Amendment Award and the FOI Award given by the Student Press Law Center and Brechner Freedom of Information Project.

It all started for Walters when he was in high school.

“Nobody inside the administration wanted to unpack serious issues with this kid who had never done this before,” Walters said. “FOIA was a natural way where I’d say, well, if people don’t want to talk to me, I can look at their emails, and it just came about that out of necessity, and it’s just stuck with me ever since.”

Requesting records did not initially interest Walters; it was one of the only tools he had at his disposal for his reporting, he said.

He credits the Student Press Law Center’s letter generator for aiding in his requests at such a young age.

“The idea that I could just plug in the information about my school district and then what I wanted, and it would spit out this fancy-looking letter that I could then just send them,” Walters said. “It flattened out the learning curve a little bit and at least removed the first big obstacle.”

Since starting as a student at MSU, Walters has now filed hundreds of FOIA requests with other student journalists at MSU’s publication, The State News.

One of the main reasons Walter continues to request records and write stories is that, once he receives a record, he often wants to request more, he said.

“I think it’s very rare at this point for the records that I’m writing good stories about to be the first thing that I requested,” Walters said. “Usually, it’s a very slow and often frustrating process of asking for one thing and then, based on that, being able to craft a good request for another thing.”

Walters said that every time he receives a record, he learns about a whole new set of records, and he can carry that expertise and experience into different contexts.

Often, Walters gets inspiration from reading another school’s publication and requests similar records from MSU.

“I think a lot of these places are more similar than they are different,” Walters said. “I think being a consumer of news and being a consumer of the records that we get back just is always inspiring us to ask for other stuff.”

The FOIA process is slow. Walters said some of the records he has requested have taken years to receive, which can lead to missed stories. There is very little in Michigan laws that would allow Walters and The State News to contest timeliness issues, he said.

“I think that creates the biggest and maybe most important tension with this kind of reporting,” Walters said. “The news is something that often happens and develops very quickly, and there’s a shelf life on any given story when it is most impactful and interesting.”

Walters said he has struggled over the years to balance the news cycle and the FOIA process.

“There are things we get through the FOIA process, and by the time we get them, even though they are interesting, especially to people like us who are so nerdy about all this, it’s not even worth it to write about anymore,” Walters said. “The situation has changed, and it’s just not the time.”

While Walters and The State News are unable to sue for records over timeliness issues, they can sue for records that have been denied, which they did when they sued MSU for wrongfully redacted records.

“What led to that was that we were able to find this rare and very lucky overlap where there were records that we wanted that MSU was saying we couldn’t get,” Walters said. “We were not just challenging MSU’s interpretation of one specific circumstance, but we were trying to expand the class of records available under Michigan law at any institution.”

The proposal to change a precedent in Michigan law was appealing to the lawyers who worked on the case, Walters said.

Walters and The State News prevailed in trial court, and after MSU appealed, the court reached the same conclusion. Walters said that MSU decided not to take the case to the Supreme Court in Michigan but let the appellate court decision stand.

Walters said that before his team and he decided to go through with the lawsuit, there were many doubts and questions about whether it was the right decision.

“In the end, what I’ve come to believe is that there’s nothing that we have done as a newsroom that has created a better and more productive relationship between us and the university we cover than suing them,” Walters said.

The lawsuit made it clear to MSU that the team at The State News is serious about its reporting and the work it produces.

These experiences have inspired Walters and his team at The State News to continue strengthening their records request process. While they have a template, inspired by SPLC’s, that anyone can use, Walters said they have started keeping all of their administrative appeals in a collection for easy reference.

“We have sort of a bank of good precedent and arguments from past appeals, and then when we need to write one, we can fall back on that,” Walters said. “Over time, that’ll only grow.”

Walters hopes that other student reporters never shy away from using FOIA in their reporting. Walters will graduate from MSU this May and is seeking a full-time newsroom job where he can continue to use FOIA in his reporting.

“I think a lot of the ways that we talk about FOIA is in this coded kind of legal language that makes it seem intimidating,” Walters said. “But it’s not. It’s easy, and it’s simple, and it’s fun. It’s a good time, and I would hate to see a student journalist be intimidated out of using it.”