UCA ‘gifts’ demand disclosure
Posted on Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Maybe I could scrape up a couple
of thousand bucks if I tried real
hard, but life would be a whole lot easier if my alma mater would cough up one of those discretionary presidential scholarships. You see, it’s been a long time since I quit school to take a job in the field of my academic endeavors, and I’ve been trying to make room in my life to get back ever since. How long has it been ? Well, let me put it this way. Remember those purpleand-white bumper stickers proclaiming that “SCA has earned university status” ? I think they made their first appearance the semester after I left. But forget all that. Even if such a gift (for gift it is ) were offered, I couldn’t accept it because it’s not something readily available to the general public. Besides, scholarship has nothing to it. Come to think of it, neither does need. There are no criteria for receiving discretionary presidential scholarships from the University of Central Arkansas. Well, there might have been one until recently: knowledge of their existence. Like you, perhaps, I was surprised to learn a week or so back that over the years UCA has spent untold hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on students who did not have to meet any academic or financial standards. Just going back to the fall of 2006, our reporter Debra Hale-Shelton found $ 1, 571, 156. 85 in such expenditures.
I say expenditures because calling them scholarships is ludicrous. Even Tom Courtway, sometimes UCA general counsel and current interim UCA president, has been quoted referring to them as “waivers” and “awards.” But more about that later.
Courtway contends that there’s nothing illegal about these so-called presidential scholarships, and I don’t dispute that, but just because something’s legal doesn’t make it right. Not only have there been no standards for recipients, there has been no accountability, no oversight and, thanks to a very broad interpretation of federal law on the part of state officials, no disclosure about who got how much (except for Courtway, who said his two sons got more than $ 7, 000 in toto during a semester when he was not employed by UCA but his old legislative colleague Lu Hardin was—as president and sole distributor of discretionary scholarships ).
All of this is unfortunate because knowledge of it comes on the heels of our learning that UCA is having such serious financial problems—multimillion-dollar debt problems—that it is relying on a $ 6 million line of credit and a $ 3. 5 million advance on state funds to bail itself out.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not good. The average per-person expenditure on the 176 recipients this semester has been $ 2, 100, but whether that has been the norm is unknown. Nor do we know all the recipients of UCA presidential beneficence (which Courtway says even predates Hardin, who became president in September 2002 ). That’s because of the way that state officials, including, we’re told, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, have interpreted the language of the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. They contend that the act requires minor students or their parents to give written consent prior to the release of such information. Of course, that’s not how the feds see it.
Funny thing, when Hale-Shelton was gathering information for her initial news story about the UCA presidential scholarships, Courtway seemed very concerned about the lack of standards for the “awards.”
“Clearly, it seems to me, the better course is to have some criteria both for the award and the maintenance of the scholarship,” he was quoted saying last week.
Did you catch that ? He said “award.”
But a few days later, when Hale-Shelton tried to find out the names of recipients other than his sons, the word “award” had taken on a whole new meaning for Courtway. Conceding that he had discussed the federal law’s disclosure provisions with an attorney for the U. S. Department of Education, Courtway told Hale-Shelton on Monday, “I do not agree with his opinion,” which is, he went on to explain, “that a scholarship is an award.” In other words, subject to disclosure without prior consent. The federal law specifically permits free disclosure of “honors and awards.” Can you spell stench, boys and girls ? Look, whether you call them scholarships, awards, tuition waivers or gifts, they still seem to have been granted arbitrarily, without the review, advice or consent of any state board or committee, and the citizens of this state have a right to know the details of these transactions so that they can determine whether their best interests have been served. Of course, that would not be the case if the largesse in question has been distributed not arbitrarily but as the result of favoritism. I believe that, as taxpayers, we have a right to know that. A word to the wise should be sufficient: Continuing to cloak these expenditures of public funds in secrecy serves no useful purpose. Besides, it’s likely to prove futile.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
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