Universities find subtle and not so subtle ways to thwart Maclean's requests for info

Universities across Canada employed a range of strategems to thwart Maclean's magazine's request for data under freedom of information legislation, according to a story carried by CanWest News Services. This is latest chapter in the struggle between Maclean's and the universities who complain about the methodology in the long-running "universities issue". See previous posts here and here. About half the universities in the country, including big schools like McGill, voluntarily submitted the requested data.

• The University of Toronto agreed to provide the data, but only if Maclean's coughed up $45,000.
• Carleton University, from which Maclean's apparently demanded copies of all communications referring to the Magazine, expunged the word Maclean's from its database, referring to it (in a reference to Macbeth) as "the Scottish magazine".
  
• U of T, the University of Western Ontario and Queen's University attempted to pre-empt Maclean's's publication by posting the data on their own websites.
• Others, like Carleton, Lethbridge and Dalhousie stalled past the Maclean's deadline by asking for extensions under provisions of the freedom of information legislation. The legislation compels universities to respond to the requests within 30 days. But it allows them more time to comply if the information is not readily available.
• Some universities were going to force Maclean's to appeal to a provincial commissioner in an attempt to get the data.
  

The obduracy of the various universities apparently forced Maclean's to publish year-old data for many schools. Tony Keller, Maclean's managing editor of special projects says the rankings are based on solid methodology because the information fluctuates little from year to year. "They are the best publicly available data, so I have every confidence anybody using our ranking will find it to be a very useful package.''