“Friday’s hearing wasn’t the first whitewash attempted in this long-running scandal. This one may have worked. For now. But the truth has a way of outing, if not now, then surely later.”
- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette December 16, 2013
BOY, THAT didn’t take long. That coat of whitewash a legislative committee slapped over the mess at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is already cracked and peeling. What started as a scandal seems to have become a long-running serial that may go on as long as The Perils of Pauline, though it isn’t nearly as entertaining. Indeed, it’s the opposite: depressing. And it gets more depressing with every attempt to hush it up. Which is what happens when a scandal isn’t treated as a scandal but only a Public Relations problem. This one still calls for a thorough housecleaning and some well-deserved dismissals-and not just of the whistle-blowers.
But if there’s a neglected art in this country’s public life, whether we’re talking about Kathleen Sebelius at Health or Human Services in Washington or Mark Darr still in the lieutenant governor’s office right here in Arkansas, it’s the art of resignation. It used to be that, when rot at the top was revealed, the top had the grace to accept responsibility for it and resign. It was just the decent thing to do. Not any more. The chiefs hold on to their offices forever; it’s only the little Indians who have to go. Rank has its privileges, however rank its record.
But there comes a time when the smell just can’t be ignored any longer. Despite the best efforts of the university’s board of trustees, the kind of tame legislators who can always be counted on to support the status sorry quo, and the rest of the state’s too long entrenched establishment.
Even a seasoned mouthpiece like John Goodson, who represented the university’s board of trustees at the latest legislative hearing, can succeed in changing the subject for only so long.
In his day job, Counselor Goodson is a big class-action lawyer, so it won’t surprise to discover after all this foofaraw is over that the limited class his sleek presentation at the Ledge benefited most was himself. He did succeed in putting off the hounds earlier this month, but not for long. It seems a whole crew of Sherlocks-in the press and out-is still sifting through the clues, and they’re usually in the email files subject to public inspection.
One week the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee votes to accept the audit of the university’s ironically named Advancement Division and so, wittingly or unwittingly, denies a couple of much sought witnesses their chance to testify before the committee in person. And be cross-examined about it, too.
The next week, the auditors are asking another prosecuting attorney, this one in the state’s capital, to look into the conflicting testimony given the Legislature at an earlier hearing. No one should be surprised, since the first prosecutor, the one in Washington County, noted that the controversial testimony had been given in Pulaski County, and doubts about it should be referred to that county’s prosecutor.
The legal repercussions of how UAF’s top brass mishandled its fiscal affairs can be safely and properly left to a couple of the state’s most experienced and conscientious prosecuting attorneys and their hard-working staffs. But the state’s taxpayers, not to mention alumni and supporters of the university, still deserve some answers about just what th’ heck has been going at the top level of the university for more than a year now. For not only do questions linger, they multiply. And some in the Ledge are still determined to get at the truth.
THE BOOKS are scarcely closed on this scandal. Just as the public was being told there’s no more to see here and to move on, a band of legislators who refuse to shut up and do as they’re told have scheduled new hearings come next month and their next chance to get some questions answered.
What a change from the bad old days before the state’s Freedom of Information Act (thank you, Winthrop Rockefeller and company) when a compliant Legislature could be relied on to follow the establishment’s orders.
With the coming of the two-party system to this part of the South at last, a whole new era of accountability has come to Arkansas-as much as it irritates the powers that once were and would love to be again. Now the state no longer has a well-trained legislature that can be shut up with just a slick parliamentary procedure or two. At this point, the only thing that can be said with assurance about this story is that it is To Be Continued.
Meanwhile, back at the Ledge, a dozen or more legislators are straining at the leash, demanding that the investigation into the university’s tangled fiscal affairs continue. And it just might, since now another legislative body, the Joint Performance Review Committee, is to hold hearings on this long-running mess at the university, which shows every sign of running longer. And both the witnesses denied their chance to be heard earlier are scheduled to appear at last. This story threatens never to end. Yet its moral remains the same as at the beginning: The truth will out.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 12/26/2013