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Opening this section's examination of current information policy is Patrice McDermott's analysis of Obama administration transparency initiatives, executive power, and continuing problems with federal agency Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compliance. Of note is McDermott's discussion of the ambiguous Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) classification marking, which “is often defined differently from agency to agency, and agencies may impose different handling requirements. Some of these marking and handling procedures are not only inconsistent, but are contradictory.”¹

On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government (White House, 2009a) committing his Administration to create an unprecedented level of openness in government and indicating his belief that government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This chapter examines the Obama Administration through June 2010, and looks at how closely the administration is hewing to its promises, in the context of the legacy of secrecy it inherited.

More than 10 years after its founding, the STEM Women of Color Conclave® has emerged as the largest safe brave space in the United States for women faculty of color in the academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Originally intended to be a national assembly, the Conclave® has evolved into a safe brave space that serves as a refuge for STEM women faculty of color who are regularly taxed with the struggle of having to navigate the unwelcoming, and often hostile, environments of the ivory tower in very unique ways. This chapter narrates how the Conclave's founding members journeyed toward creating and sustaining this safe brave space. The reader is awakened to deeper awareness of and sensitivities for the ways in which safe brave spaces must address both the complexities related to struggle – and liberation from that struggle – for both occupiers and observers of safe brave spaces. However, just as the quantum observer can disturb the system just by observing it and, ultimately, change or even nullify the results, we recognize that merely observing the Conclave® would nullify its intended purpose and, in the end, render it unsafe. Therefore, the reader can anticipate an absence of direct observations, reports of outcomes, or specific accounts of progress related to the occupiers of our safe brave space. Rather, the chapter offers an invitation to the reader to explore the authors' lived experiences as occupiers who designed a safe brave space. We invite the reader, particularly those who are also observers of safe brave spaces, to join us in protecting these valuable spaces.

This chapter introduces the purpose and structure of this edited volume, including why safe spaces are needed in educational settings, how to think about what makes a space safe for different individuals or groups, and aspects to consider in creating and maintaining safe spaces. It describes the two broad sections, the first of which comprises chapters that introduce the problem, context, need for safe spaces (Chapter 2), the broad conceptual frames supporting them (Chapter 3), and detail and deconstruct examples of various safe spaces created in diverse educational settings (Chapter 4). Chapters in Section II include aspects of the conceptual foundations and details about the purpose, development, and implementation processes, and outcomes of various efforts to create and/or maintain a safe space for education.

Government secrecy is often portrayed as antithetical to transparency¹ as well as an affront to the general right to know, citizen participation, administrative oversight, and democracy itself.² Furthermore, government secrecy is connected to “much broader questions regarding the structure and performance of democratic systems” (Galnoor, 1977, p. 278), and in instances, is “more dangerous to democracy than the practices they conceal” (Fulbright, 1971).³ This condition has led to what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1987) describes as a secrecy state, whichhas extended the secrecy system far beyond its legitimate bounds. In doing so, the target is far less to prevent the disclosure of information to enemy governments than to prevent the disclosure of information to the American Congress, press and people. For governments have discovered that secrecy is a source of power and an efficient way of covering up the embarrassments, blunders, follies and crimes of the ruling regime. (p. 5)