Invitation to abuse

LITTLE ROCK — ". . . tell truth and shame the devil."

-Hotspur to the boastful Glendower in Henry IV, Part 1 AS ANY LAW student knows, or will soon find out, the way a legal question is asked can determine the answer.

So if you're trying to justify keeping the names of scholarship winners secret at the University of Central Arkansas, ask the state's attorney general if you should risk federal penalties by releasing the names. Prudent counsel will advise against it. And you get the answer you may have wanted all along. And nothing makes unjustified secrecy more respectable than the stamp of law.

The lawyer with the attorney general's office just answered the question that was put to him. The art-and low craft-was in framing the question. After all, he wasn't asked if UCA should just tell the truth.

The truth? That becomes a secondary consideration. Tell the truth and shame the devil? Too simple, too straightforward, too quick, and just too responsible a course. Also too honest for UCA. It prefers not to tell the taxpayers of Arkansas just how their money has been spent and on whom. Better to make a federal case out of it instead, and keep this list of scholarship winners under wraps.

To avoid any course so reckless as simply leveling with the public, just consult counsel. Nothing excuses a basic lack of candor like legal cover. It helps if you have an official, certified, authoritative sounding advisory from somebody at the U.S. Department of Education who's got access to its letterhead. UCA obtained just such a letter last May, saying the names of those who got these scholarships for undisclosed reasons should not be released "in situations where the basis for the scholarship is undefined . . . ." And what could be more undefined than a university president's whims? Or political pull behind the scenes?

THE CONCLUSION from the bureaucrat at the Dep. of Ed. was that one of the federal government's privacy laws-FERPA, to cite its initials-precludes the release of these names. How convenient for university administrators who never did want the public prying around in public business anyway.

It's not easy to keep up with all the federal statutes that foster secrecy and generally complicate life in the vast Nanny State now under construction. FERPA is not to be confused with HIPAA, which is the one that has reduced hospital visitors to prowling through the corridors looking for a patient because the staff is no longer allowed to tell them where an old friend is being treated/held. All such laws seem to have at least one requirement in common: a long name inevitably reduced to a mysterious abbreviation.

In all these cases, the reason for the secrecy is For Your Own Good, but somehow it always tends to work out in favor of the bureaucracy's own good. For how question a college president's decision to hand out scholarships arbitrarily if you don't know just who got them? Result: The public is kept in the dark and the university's bureaucracy insulated from criticism except by the most dogged of public watchdogs. And all they can do is howl, not expose.

We do know that among those who recommended students for these scholarships were a son of former GovernorMike Huckabee; state Senator Steve Faris; former Speaker of the Arkansas House Benny Petrus; and various former and current UCA trustees.

Can you see a pattern here? Were these scholarships handed out on the basis of what the student knew or just whom the student knew? As things now stand, the public will never be told how many of these grants were athletic scholarships rather than academic ones, or which ones were awarded on no basis except pull with the president, or how many were awarded on no basis other than the recipients' being related to big givers to the school.

Such questions will go unanswered so long as UCA keeps mum. And it will, aided and abetted by a letter from some paper-pusher in the bowels of the Department of Education and an advisory opinion from the state's attorney general saying the school ought to do the safe thing and follow the feds' directive.

One can scarcely blame the attorney general's office for advising a state agency to do the prudent thing and not take the slightest risk of endangering its federal aid, rather than the right thing and level with the public. Not that UCA ever showed any great interest in doing the right thing. On the contrary, it seems to have gone looking for an excuse to keep these names secret. And found one. To quote Rick Peltz, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, it wouldn't be advisable to ignore the letter from feds. Which may have been precisely why UCA sought such a letter.

THE MESSAGE for other state universities is now clear: If they want to hand out scholarships to favorites on campus without letting the public know just who got them and what for, they're free to do just what UCA has done. It's a perfectly legal dodge.

But a perfectly legal dodge is still a dodge, and unworthy of any public institution that believes its first obligation is to the people who support it by their tax money, not the administrators who don't want the people to know just where that money has gone.

It's true that the U.S. Department of Education could theoretically withhold funding from a school if it released the names of these scholarship winners, but we don't know of a single instance in which it's ever done so in its 35-year history.

To quote a lawyer with the Student Press Law Center in Virginia, "The kicker, of course, is that schools often have a reason to say No, like the information is humiliating or it reveals wrongdoing."

Which was it in UCA's case?

Would the list of recipients have embarrassed the university's higher-ups? Or some big shots who served on the board of trustees?

So long as the university doesn't release the names, the public won't know for sure, though it will surely suspect a lot. For nothing breeds suspicion like secrecy.

UCA may have changed presidents, but it's still keeping secrets. Which may have been the object of this legal game all along.

Whoever has won this latest round of the never-ending fight against secrecy at a public university, it's clear who lost: the taxpaying public. And in the end, UCA itself. For a public university that invites suspicion is scarcely serving its own best interests.