IP: more on -- educational grant has strings attached?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: <jadams01 () sprynet com>
Reply-To: jadams01 () sprynet com
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 21:53:41 -0400
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Re: IP: Microsoft's grant has strings attached?

Hi, Dave,

I can, perhaps, top this. From the Arkansas Times:

Editorials

Money has its privileges
 
August 9, 2002

We went to court the other day to see whether Big Money has to obey the same
laws that others do. Evidently not.

After long and unproductive negotiations with University of Arkansas
officials
and lawyers, the Arkansas Times sued to make the U of A comply with the
state
Freedom of Information law governing public records and public institutions.
We wanted to inspect documents pertaining to a $300 million gift from the
Walton family foundation at Bentonville to the U of A. These are the Waltons
of Wal-Mart, the world's biggest corporation and a noted driver of hard
bargains.

Do strings come attached to this sort of money, we wondered, especially
curious after a leaked e-mail revealed that faculty in the arts, humanities
and social sciences were worried - and with good cause - that their
departments would not share in the bounty.

The U of A refused to provide documents sought by the Times, though the FOI
commanded their production. Between long intervals of silence, the
University
argued variously that the documents did not exist, or if they did exist they
could not be found, or if they did exist and could with mighty effort be
located, they were covered by a "competitive exemption" within the FOI. The
"competitive exemption" was intended to protect private companies in
competition for government business. The courts had never held that it
applied
to public universities accepting gifts.

After the Times made its FOI request, the chancellor of UA-Fayetteville,
John
A. White, confessed in an interview with another newspaper that he had made
a
commitment, by letter, to the Walton foundation to stay as chancellor
another
five years if the gift were made. This was just the sort of information the
Times had asked for. But the Times didn't get a copy of that letter until 70
days after the first FOI request, 38 days after the existence of the letter
was revealed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 22 days after the Times asked
specifically for the letter, one day after the Times filed suit. The
University repeatedly failed to identify the custodians of documents, though
such identification is required by the FOI. Clearly, the U of A hoped to run
up the Times' legal costs and exhaust its comparatively meager resources.
Incidentally, the Times had one lawyer on the case. The U of A had its
general
counsel, Fred Harrison (salary $130,000), and three other fulltime
University
lawyers, plus three private lawyers hired with still more taxpayers' money
to
keep information from taxpayers.

On Monday, Circuit Judge Chris Piazza heard White testify that obeying the
law
would be a considerable inconvenience, then granted the University its
"competitive exemption." The judge conceded that the U of A had been
"overzealous" in hiding records, but said the harm was only piddling. Hey,
nobody takes these things seriously.

There is a great and growing danger that wealthy private interests will set
the policies of public universities. This is not a piddling concern.

copyright 2002 Arkansas Times Inc.

There's also an item, I'll See Your Two Million Dollars, And Raise You Three
Hundred Million, on my weblog at
http://www.jzip.org/jzip/archives/000055.html

All the best,

             John (adamsj) A


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