The Kentucky Lantern is suing the University of Kentucky after it refused to release records related to a $375,000 settlement with a faculty leader who had challenged the administration’s decision to disband the University Senate.
The Lantern filed the lawsuit on Nov. 26 after Attorney General Russell Coleman’s office rejected the nonprofit news outlet’s appeal of UK’s decision. Under Kentucky’s open records law, parties can appeal the attorney general’s decisions in a local circuit court.
Earlier this year, the Lantern sought records of email exchanges that preceded the university signing a $375,000 separation agreement with DeShana Collett, who had been a tenured professor in physician assistant studies. A provision in the agreement between UK and Collett required her to withdraw her request for emails among UK administrators that mentioned her. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) had earlier ruled that under state law Collett was entitled to the records.
Collett played a prominent role last year in opposing a change to UK’s internal governance and presided over a vote of no confidence in UK President Eli Capilouto. After the vote, Collett warned faculty that the administration was taking steps that she thought could lead to retaliation against the president’s critics. Collett entered the separation agreement in June 2025.
Filed in Fayette Circuit Court, the Lantern’s complaint says that while “the University’s denial and the OAG’s rubber-stamping of the denial based on a dangerous interpretation of the preliminary records exemption should concern” Kentuckians, the “bigger picture is the University’s attempt to buy its way out of the Open Records Act.”
“This Case calls upon Kentucky’s courts to yet again tell its largest state university that the Open Records Act means what it says: disclosure is in the public interest, and the law’s exemptions must be narrowly construed,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit has been assigned to Fayette Circuit Judge Lucy Ferguson VanMeter.
Michael Abate, who is representing the Lantern along with Jeremy Lister-Perlman, said in a statement that the case is important “for anyone that cares about transparency or the governance of the state’s flagship university.”
“UK paid almost $400,000 to a professor that had won an open records appeal against it and made the payment contingent on her dropping her request for records. The public has a right to know what the University was willing to pay so dearly to hide,” Abate said.
“On top of that, the Attorney General’s decision attempts to re-write the narrow exemption for ‘preliminary’ records to include virtually any email or other ‘non-final’ document possessed by an agency,” he continued.” That interpretation, if accepted, would gut the Open Records Act and render most of the documents now accessible to the public off-limits.”
UK spokesman Jay Blanton defended UK’s denial of the records and pointed to the attorney general’s decision in favor of the university.
“The University believes the Attorney General’s decision is correct,” Blanton said in an email Friday. “Indeed, the Attorney General’s decision is fully consistent with all Attorney General’s decisions since 2021.”
The Lantern’s records request mirrored a request for records from Collett that asked for emails with her name sent by Eric Monday, UK’s executive vice president for finance and administration and co-executive vice president for health affairs, between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. UK denied the request in early September.
That time frame spans campus discussions around shared governance at UK. In April 2024, the UK Board of Trustees voted 19-1 to change the University Senate to a faculty senate — a move that faculty members warned would limit their decision-making power over academic decisions.
The aftermath of the no-confidence vote was the subject of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that reported Collett had written to faculty members warning of acts of retaliation by the UK administration after the vote.
In an Aug. 20, 2024, email, Collett forwarded a message that she had shared with faculty members to Lisa Tannock, a former associate provost for faculty advancement, saying that provost office employees were assuming control of the University Senate’s voting system, a PollEverywhere account, which had access to all Senate-recorded votes.
Collett added in her email to Tannock that the University Senate did not keep records of individual members’ votes and was not required to.
Tannock said in a response that “this matter is under serious investigation with the possibility of becoming a criminal investigation.” Collett’s attorney told the Lantern that UK’s general counsel later said there was no investigation. Tannock no longer works at the university.
Collett’s attorney, Joe Childers, told the Lantern that she decided to leave the university because she was “not comfortable in the environment that she was subjected to” after the controversy over the governance change.
In response to Collett’s open records request, the attorney general’s office issued an opinion partially in her favor in February.
However in the Lantern’s appeal, the attorney general’s office sided with UK, arguing that state law exempts public agencies from disclosing “preliminary” documents in response to open records requests.
“Describing the contents of emails created during its ‘decision-making process,’ the University explains that the emails contain ‘(1) early drafts of documents; (2) communications between various university officials; and (3) communications between the University’s attorneys and other university officials, including requests for advice and providing information necessary for the University attorneys to formulate legal advice,” the attorney general opinion says.
In recent years, UK has gone to court with Kentucky news outlets over denied open records requests, including the student-run newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel.
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Written by McKenna Horsley. Cross-posted from the Kentucky Lantern.
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