Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Campus Reform, Arkansas Law School Dean Worried About ‘Harm’ From Professor’s FOIA Suit:

Without waiting for the courts to rule in a pending FOIA lawsuit from a professor seeking access to admissions data, a law school dean recently sent a cryptic email to the school’s attorneys warning of potential reputational harm from the professor’s “inaccurate” statements.

Prof. Robert Steinbuch filed suit against the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s (UA) Bowen School of Law in November, alleging that the administration had refused to provide him with data sets he had requested for his research into the effects of race-based admissions policies, despite having turned the same data over on two previous occasions.

In December, Steinbuch wrote an op-ed about the case in National Jurist, a trade publication, outlining his case, arguing that when he first requested the admissions data in 2012, the Arkansas Attorney General “issued an opinion confirming my right to receive the public records I sought,” but that the very dean who approved the original request, Michael Schwartz, is now refusing to release the exact same data on the grounds that it would violate student privacy.

Steinbuch, however, believes that the administration’s reluctance to share the data with him is actually based on fears that his research will reveal that lower admissions standards for minority applicants have caused those students to drop out of school and fail the bar examination at higher rates than other students.

“My research conflicts with certain political viewpoints, so when people with those viewpoints are presented with that conflict, they see it as a challenge, and perhaps we’re seeing some of the results of that conflict,” he told Campus Reform. ... Steinbuch explains that his research, as outlined in a recent article in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, is not concerned with the inherent abilities of minority students, but rather with documenting the effects of enrolling students with lower GPA’s and test scores than are traditionally required.

Robert Steinbuch (Arkansas-Little Rock) & Kim Love (Georgia), Color-Blind-Spot: The Intersection of Freedom of Information Law and Affirmative Action in Law School Admissions, 20 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 1 (2015):

This third article, in an unexpected trilogy, documents the difficulties that a tenured, now-former member of the admissions committee had in obtaining public data from a state law school in Arkansas in which he is faculty. The story contains both the success of ultimately obtaining some—but not all the requested—public data about affirmative action, and the analysis of the ensuing unique information. The former is a tale of ongoing roadblocks presented to getting public information. The ultimate success in obtaining the key documents led to the largest contemporary longitudinal case study of race admissions at any law school. And the results are dramatic: Ethnicity has been significantly related to success in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law, as measured by probability of passing the bar exam and law school GPA, because African-Americans as a cohort had been admitted with significantly lower objective metrics than Whites. Consequently, African-Americans have performed significantly poorer in law school and on the bar exam than Whites at UALR Law School. The affirmative action program at UALR Law School often harmed the very individuals it was designed to help.

Prior TaxProf Blog posts:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/03/arkansas-law-school-dean-worried-about-harm-from-professors-foia-suit.html