Professor's lawsuit against UALR stays

Plaintiff wants data on law students

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox on Friday rejected a motion by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to dismiss a lawsuit against it brought by one of its professors, who is trying to obtain admissions and grading data the school says must be kept secret to protect student privacy.

Citing the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, professor Robert Steinbuch sued the school in November to get seven years of test scores, grades and bar exam scores with a breakdown on graduates of the university's W.H. Bowen School of Law by gender and race.

Steinbuch has been studying law school admission policies and has questioned whether the university law school has been accepting adequately prepared students.

Administrators who had released the information to Steinbuch twice before balked the third time he asked for it, saying that the school has so few minority-group students that if it gave Steinbuch what he wanted, the school would be violating federal privacy protections for students. School officials said he could use his position as a professor to figure out the identities of minority students.

According to the school's filings, out of a graduating class of 139 students in 2013, there were 29 minority students, 12 of them black, nine Hispanic, four American Indian and four Asian/Pacific Islander.

"It does not take much effort for reasonable persons within a small school community such as UALR Bowen Law School to deduce the identity of the particular student who corresponds to a specific row of data," school officials state in court files.

Officials said that they accidentally violated the federal law, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, with the last release of data to Steinbuch in 2013.

In court filings, administrators have suggested that the 2013 release was made in error because they were rushed to comply with time restraints mandated by the Freedom of Information law.

They have compared the school's position in trying to satisfy both the federal privacy law and the open-records law to the act of sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, the mythical Greek sea hazards that were said to guard an ocean channel.

With his two-sentence order denying the school's dismissal motion Friday, Fox also released a five-page order codifying his January decision that the school's admission of wrongdoing meant Bowen graduates concerned that their privacy could be violated if the school releases the data must be added as defendants to the litigation.

Fox also ordered Steinbuch to hire a lawyer for the students, saying he did not have sufficient grounds to force the university, a government agency, to pay.

The judge said the students' interest in the outcome of the litigation requires that they have independent legal representation. So far, no graduates have come forward, but school officials said as many as 100 could have an interest in the litigation. Steinbuch's attorney, Matt Campbell, said he will appeal the ruling to the Arkansas Supreme Court.

To argue that the lawsuit should be dismissed, university attorney David Curran was allowed by the judge to submit a redacted brief that shields from the public disclosures how many minority graduates passed the bar exam in 2013.

In response, Campbell questioned the necessity of redacting information the school had previously released publicly in its entirety and that Steinbuch had used in a 2013 article in the Loyola of Los Angeles Review of Law, "Four Easy Pieces to Balance Privacy and Accountability in Public Higher Education: A Response to Wrongdoing Ranging from Petty Corruption to the Sandusky and Penn State Tragedy."

He most recently has published a co-written work, "Color-blind-spot: The intersection of Freedom of Information Law and affirmative action in law school admissions" in the the Texas Review of Law and Politics.

Metro on 04/09/2016

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