Commentary: Can UA's FOIA Move Change Perception, Reality?

That old saw about perception being reality must be ringing in someone's ears over on the University of Arkansas campus.

While some there might argue nothing is wrong with the way the UA releases information to the public and the press, the perception is definitely otherwise.

Recent controversy on the Fayetteville campus and in related legislative hearings made an historic situation worse.

So the UA is trying to change the perception, if not more.

Not only has the UA System adopted a new policy for all campuses, the Fayetteville campus is theoretically going a step further to promote transparency. Chancellor David Gearhart last week named a task force of UA employees to explore the issue.

Laura Jacobs, the still-new head of University Relations, will chair the task force he has charged with making access to public documents easier. She has invited more than 200 journalists to an hour-long meeting Feb. 28 in Fayetteville for what she describes as a "conversation" to get the work started. A second Little Rock meeting will follow.

"We hope you will be doing the talking and we will be doing the listening," she wrote to media representatives who receive the UA's regular releases.

It's hard to imagine much can come of an hour-long talk among so many people, but it is a start.

The catalyst for any change, of course, is the long-running inquiry into a serious budget deficit on the local campus. The Division of University Advancement hired more people than its budget would support but didn't recognize the problem until it had overspent $4.2 million. People lost their jobs and the UA is using money from elsewhere to cover the embarrassing deficit.

The mess has left some trust issues among UA alumni and others, including some state lawmakers as well as media representatives and some in the general public. It took a long time for details of that story to get out and part of the problem was access to records that ought to be public.

So, the UA board of trustees not long ago adopted its new policy for compliance with the state's open meetings and open records law. The action came in direct response to questions about how those audit records were or were not released.

The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act governs public access to both meetings and records of government, but this recent conflict was over records important to both criminal investigations and legislative inquiries.

While under all that scrutiny, much of it brought by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the university stalled release of some documents, including an internal investigation of the deficit. The newspaper sued and the UA eventually released the report that acknowledged administrators' early discovery of the overspending.

Additionally, a former spokesman for the Fayetteville campus accused Chancellor Gearhart of ordering that related records be destroyed. The chancellor has insisted that he never ordered destruction of documents that were subject to an FOI request.

The Pulaski County prosecutor is still reviewing the conflicting sworn statements of Gearhart and John Diamond, the former spokesman, before a legislative panel.

Again, the resulting perception isn't pretty.

The board-adopted policy, set for all of the UA System campuses, intends for each to comply with "the letter and the spirit" of the Arkansas FOI Act.

To that end, the presidents, chancellors and heads of divisions and other units must designate someone to coordinate requests made for public records . Mark Rushing, director of strategic communications in University Relations, will be the designated coordinator for the Fayetteville campus.

The policy shift, in and of itself, doesn't amount to much. The campuses have long had compliance coordinators -- in the form of attorneys. Requests for potentially controversial records have routinely gone through attorneys' hands.

Historically, UA attorneys have been accused of advising how not to comply with the FOI law, often at the behest of administrators. The law was adopted in 1967 and such conflicts over compliance started way back then.

One of the earliest Supreme Court tests of the law's open-meetings provision came when UA trustees, who then represented only the Fayetteville campus, closed committee meetings to an Arkansas Gazette reporter.

The recent Democrat-Gazette lawsuit over denial of audit records is just the latest challenge of UA practices.

In both instances, UA lawyers were representing what administrators or trustees saw as university interests.

Will this new policy and a pledge from Gearhart for "transparency in all we do" change anything? Will public information flow more freely from the university? Or is this all window-dressing aimed at altering perceptions?

BRENDA BLAGG IS A FREELANCE COLUMNIST AND LONGTIME JOURNALIST IN NORTHWEST ARKANSAS.

Commentary on 02/23/2014

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