#154, OTOH, Robert Steinbuch, professor at UA-Little Rock School of Law and government transparency advocate, Part 3, March 25, 2026

In this third & final part of our interview with Robert Steinbuch, law professor and government transparency advocate, Glen and April explore several key issues with Rob. He outlines the tension between FOIA's essential role in exposing government behavior and the equally legitimate need to protect private citizens' personal information — and candidly addresses why ordinary people struggle to enforce their own privacy and defamation rights when attorneys won't take the cases. Rob turns a critical eye on legal academia itself, describing what he sees as a pronounced left-of-center monoculture in law schools, and he recounts the controversy at UA - Fayetteville's Law School, where legislative pushback over a dean search put the tension between academic independence and government accountability on full public display. He reflects on his view of the proper — and improper — roles of government in institutional hiring at state-funded universities. The conversation broadens to Arkansas's societal divides, where Rob argues that while political polarization gets the headlines, economic and racial fault lines run just as deep. He closes with a personal story from a Republican Party meeting where he chose procedural fairness over possible strategic advantage, and he shares reflections from his experience moderating a conversation on Arkansas PBS TV among philosophical opponents on a controversial current issue.

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