The reasoning behind the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's refusal to release certain admissions data to one of its own professors has no recognized legal foundation, the educator's attorney states in response to the school's motion to dismiss his Freedom of Information lawsuit.
Besides having no legal grounds, the school's arguments against disclosure also should be rejected in light of the fact that the school has twice before released the data to Robert Steinbuch, attorney Matt Campbell argued in court filings this week.
Since Steinbuch's lawsuit was filed, Campbell added, the law school dean has circulated some of the information the school claims should be kept secret among some alumni and faculty members.
Steinbuch, a professor at the W.H. Bowen School of Law who is a recognized authority on the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, requested admissions data in October that included test scores, grade-point averages, race and gender.
His interest was piqued by a September presentation to faculty members about the number of students who pass the bar exam, but he's had an academic interest in how minority-group students are treated by the school.
He has written on the matter before, including an August article, "Law Schools Should Stop Misleading Prospective Students in Pursuit of their Desperately Sought Tuition Dollars," for The Arkansas Journal of Social Change and Public Service, court filings show.
The university had twice before provided the data he sought, but he sued in November, citing the Freedom of Information Act, after the administrators withheld the information about ethnicity, test scores and grades, citing federal privacy protections for students.
Officials stated that because the school has so few minority-group students, Steinbuch could use the data to identify individual students, which would violate the federal law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (or FERPA).
Since the professor sued, school officials have said they accidentally violated that law when they released the data to him for a second time in 2013.
In recent court filings, administrators suggested that the accidental release occurred because they rushed to release the data to comply with time constraints mandated by the state open-records law.
The school has petitioned Circuit Judge Tim Fox to recognize that administrators, using federally endorsed techniques, acted appropriately out of a duty to protect student privacy and dismiss the lawsuit as baseless.
In urging the judge not to dismiss the suit, Campbell argued that an email sent by law school Dean Michael Schwartz in December shows how inconsistent the school can be about releasing purportedly protected information.
According to Campbell's Monday pleading, the email describes how minority-group students have an 80 percent first-time bar-passage rate and white students 75 percent, running counter to the university's argument that all racial data are barred from release by federal law.
Additionally, administrators continued to redact the ethnicity data, even for white students, when they delivered the supporting documentation for Schwartz's email to Steinbuch, according to the filing.
Campbell also argued that the judge should not defer to the school's argument that it has acted appropriately to accommodate both the Freedom of Information Act and the federal privacy laws.
There's no legal basis in Arkansas to support that claim, and the state Supreme Court has rejected similar arguments before, he stated.
"Defendants' assertion that they are entitled to deference in their interpretation of an FOIA exemption is not just wholly without merit, it is literally contrary to existing case law. In this argument, defendants could not be more incorrect if they tried," Campbell wrote.
"Only if this court agrees that defendants -- and no one else, not even the court -- are the sole and ultimate arbiter of what can be released under the [two laws] would defendants' arguments about deference to their interpretation and scope of redactions make sense."
Metro on 04/07/2016