Co-sponsored by the Student Press Law Center, which supports the First Amendment rights of student media and student journalists, the award spotlights stories that utilize open records laws and encourage public dialogue on campus. The award includes a $2,000 cash prize — $1,000 for Ares and $1,000 for the College Heights Herald, which published the story.
“I literally spent so many hours on this story that if you probably divided up all the money, I probably got paid like 10 cents an hour,” Ares tells USA TODAY College with a laugh. “So it wasn’t for the money.”
Ares first became interested in how universities handled faculty sexual misconduct cases in 2016, when the University of Kentucky sued its independent student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, over requests for documents involving a professor accused of sexual harassment.
Related: U Kentucky is suing its own student newspaper over a sexual assault investigation
As news editor of the Herald at the time, Ares was curious about what documents she could get if she asked for personnel records from universities across the state. In November, she requested Title IX investigation documents from eight public universities in Kentucky. Only two refused her request: Kentucky State and WKU.Ares decided to pursue WKU’s denial a “little more vigourously,” she says, and wrote an appeal to Kentucky’s attorney general, Andy Beshear. He ultimately sided with Ares and the Herald, stating that WKU was responsible for releasing Title IX records about the university’s final actions in sexual harassment investigations involving university employees.
As Ares pored over Title IX investigation documents she had received from other universities, WKU filed a lawsuit against the Herald and the Kentucky Kernel, UK’s student newspaper, in efforts to turn over the attorney general’s decision.
Ares took a backseat to the lawsuit to focus on her larger project. “I’m not going to see the records anytime soon, I’ve already graduated,” she says. “But I would be interested to see them eventually.”