The man helping to write a book on the state Freedom of Information Act says the dean of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock law school is not complying with the open-records law in a lawsuit filed against the university Tuesday.
Law professor Robert Steinbuch sued both the university and Michael Schwartz, dean of the William H. Bowen School of Law, in a Pulaski County court, stating Schwartz failed to turn over public records that Steinbuch is seeking to research student admissions.
The records are a spreadsheet showing individual test scores, college grade-point average, law school grade-point average, race, gender and age for all students who graduated from the law school and took the bar exam over a seven-year period.
To comply with both the Freedom of Information Act and federal student privacy laws, Steinbuch said he wanted student names redacted from the report, which already had been compiled to be used for a September faculty meeting.
According to the lawsuit, the school has twice before given Steinbuch the same records, with Schwartz himself approving their release in 2013.
But Schwartz declined to release all the information this year, instead releasing a version with the ethnicity, Law School Admission Test score and law-school GPA redacted.
The reason Schwartz, a 10-year Bowen faculty member, provided for withholding the information is that Steinbuch, as a former member of the law school’s admissions committee who had access to students’ scores and personal information, could use the information to glean the identities of minority students, the lawsuit states.
“It is therefore reasonably likely that, if we were to provide the redacted information, you would be able to infer identity and therefore the data is data that could reasonably be expected to lead to personally identifiable information,” Schwartz wrote in an email quoted in the lawsuit.
“A small law school like Bowen … has only a very small number of students of color; the ethnicity data needed to be redacted in any event because providing even the ethnicity data alone would reasonably be expected to lead to personally identifiable information.”
Accusations that he could have memorized a combination of test scores and grades from his time on the admissions committee that would allow him to be able to identify specific students from the data are “absurd,” Steinbuch said Tuesday.
He said he is using the information to research admissions at the school, where black students fail at twice the rate of white students.
The school applies lower admission standards to “cherry pick” minority students to increase their representation on the student body, he said. Minority students are being misled into believing they’re getting an equal chance to succeed, he said.
“They’re doing that for a feel-good political reason,” he said. “It’s not an issue of race. It’s an issue of different admission standards.”
Schwartz said Tuesday that the most he could say is that the law school’s research “does not substantiate” Steinbuch’s allegations about minority students.
But he said he’s not familiar with Steinbuch’s research and has not seen the lawsuit, so he cannot comment on them. He referred further questions to the office of general counsel for the University of Arkansas System.
A 2012 attorney general opinion, which is nonbinding, was conducted after the school balked at giving Steinbuch the data when he first asked in 2011. The law school relented and released the information after the opinion.
Steinbuch, co-author of a pending update to the leading treatise on the Freedom of Information Act, is asking Circuit Judge Tim Fox to force the school to hand over the documents and order the state to pay his expenses.
Steinbuch is represented by attorney Matt Campbell of Little Rock. Campbell recently won a Freedom of Information suit in Hot Springs, where he sued the Hot Springs Police Department to force authorities to turn over 911 recordings made regarding a circuit judge whose infant son died.
Campbell, a Democratic-leaning blogger who operates the Blue Hog Report, has used the open-records law —sometimes through litigation to enforce the law — to obtain public information he’s used to challenge the hiring practices at the secretary of state’s office, uncover improper campaign spending by former Lt. Gov. Mark Darr and disclose that ex-Little Rock School Superintendent Dexter Suggs plagiarized portions of his 2009 doctoral dissertation.