Arizona’s Supreme Court on September 18 issued a long-awaited ruling in the case of Matthew Abraham, Ph.D. v. Arizona Board of Regents, finding that government agencies do not have the ultimate power to decide whether to grant requests for access to official records, and that such decisions are the purview of courts. The ruling is a resounding victory for the plaintiff Abraham, an English professor who had made requests for records concerning admissions and hiring practices at the University of Arizona only to meet with repeated stonewalling and rebuffs.

From the point of view of Abraham and his supporters, the ruling is all the more significant because the highest court’s Justice Clint Bolick stated explicitly in his opinion – which the rest of the court endorsed, with nary a dissent – that a government body may not destroy records after a party has made a lawful request for them. That puts the university, which reportedly erased a recording of a 2019 committee hearing that Abraham had asked to hear, in a bad light indeed.

A Long-Running Case

Nearly a decade ago, Abraham began making inquiries into his employer’s practices, seeking to ascertain whether the school had violated Proposition 107, an amendment to the state constitution that prohibits the state from granting preferential treatment to or discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, education or contracting.

In 2017, as the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling details, Abraham was a member of a body called the Committee of Eleven, tasked with evaluating the university’s practices. He applied for leadership posts within various programs, but met with rejection.

Seeking to understand why his applications failed, Abraham submitted requests for information between November 2018 and September 2020. The university granted some of his requests, but also provided him with records containing heavy redactions and, in other instances, refused to hand over anything at all. Of particular concern was the denial of a request for an audio recording of a Committee of Eleven meeting in October 2019 that might have cast light on internal dynamics at the school and the fairness and legality of its practices.

Curiously, representatives of the institution told Abraham he could listen to a recording of that meeting but could not have a copy of it, which he declined to do. The university also offered to make a transcript before deleting the audio, which raises the question of why the school wanted to prepare its own version and what it might have tried to alter or redact before handing over the transcript.

Then, on November 18, 2020, the University of Arizona’s general counsel told Abraham’s lawyer that the requested recording was “no longer available.” At that point, a reasonable person would infer that the school had consigned the audio to the memory hole, and that the only truth available would be a version that the institution and its counsel had vetted and approved.

But Abraham bravely kept up the fight, pursuing further legal steps including a special action complaint under Arizona’s Public Records Law alleging ten separate violations. Still, the university continued to withhold or redact some records.

“It was not until November 29, 2021, that the University produced more than 1,700 pages of additional documents, including the Qualtrics Survey results and search committee results for the Interim and permanent Writing Program Director positions,” the ruling states. “Many of the newly disclosed documents were duplicates of each other.”

Abraham’s legal efforts met with repeated setbacks, but he refused to give up, appealing adverse rulings from trial and appellate courts until the state’s highest court finally granted review of the matter. The Arizona Supreme Court’s unanimous September 18 decision overturns the lower bodies’ conclusions and sends the case back to the trial court, which, according to a statement from the Supreme Court, must now conduct an independent review of the defendants’ rationale for withholding and redacting records. A final decision is also pending on whether to reimburse the plaintiff for attorney fees.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of disclosure and transparency stands out all the more in the context of the University of Arizona’s historical record of mismanagement, incompetence, misuse of public funds, and punishing of dissenters. As Douglas D. Martin detailed in The Lamp in the Desert: The Story of the University of Arizona, dissatisfaction among the faculty has run high at a school where politics has kept getting in the way of its ostensible mission. In the last years of the 19^th century, disproportionate amounts of the paltry allocations from the state legislature went to pay interest on the school’s debts. Annual reports from department heads left no doubt as to how they viewed the state of affairs. Some of them “made such brief statements that it was evident they were merely going through the motions required of them,” Martin wrote. “Others with more iron in their makeup wrote comprehensive reports and spiked them with poorly concealed resentment.”

For daring to question the use of funds meant for agricultural research for other purposes, Professor William L. Devol lost his job at the direct behest of Governor Myron H. McCord. “No one stepped forward to back Devol up, and he was summarily dismissed,” Martin wrote. Devol’s case is instructive. Today, one wonders whether others in the academic community will have the moral courage to stand up for someone who has blown the whistle on a different form of corruption at the University of Arizona.

ASU DEI

One might like to think that the above matter is the only recent case in which a public university in the state has treated a good-faith inquiry in a heavy-handed manner. But Abraham’s challenge to the denial of records has happened to coincide with a case at Arizona State University involving one of the more insidious forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Here, as in the case discussed above, the defendant is the Board of Regents. On September 1, Owen Anderson, a professor of philosophy and religious studies, asked the Arizona Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s ruling in December 2025 and allow him to move ahead with a legal case, launched in 2024, against the board over DEI training he had to undergo.

There was nothing optional about the scheduling of the “training,” as Anderson detailed in an email to Arizona Globe. “The training said ‘required’ in red letters with no explanation or other options,” he detailed.

As soon as the training got underway, Anderson knew that ASU had infringed on his rights and forced woke ideology on him. “Arizona Law 41-1494 prohibits state institutions from requiring training that engages in race blame,” he said. The training he had to submit to engaged in that very thing “by assigning moral guilt based on skin color.” That will sound familiar to anyone who has caught even a whiff of the antiracism training that has become de rigueur at many schools and corporations.

Although still at an early stage, there are signs that Anderson may get somewhere in his challenge to ASU’s policies. “We are waiting to hear what the Arizona Supreme Court decides about this question: do I have standing under the law to bring a case against ASU?” he shared. “The questions asked by the justices during the recent hearing certainly seemed to support my side. They were skeptical of the claim that the people whom the law protects can’t do anything about it when they are victims,” he continued.

Action against the excesses of DEI and in favor of the rights of good-faith dissenters are drawing notice in the current political climate, Anderson said: “The federal government also has cases opened against ASU for illegal racism in DEI that could affect ASU’s ability to get federal money, such as in student loans and grants.”

The Board of Regents did not reply by press time to a request for comment.