MORE NEWS FROM ARKANSAS: Professor Affirmed.

The myriad travails of late at the University of Arkansas’ Bowen School of Law were justified after a university committee found Professor Rob Steinbuch was correct in having invited guests lead his classes during the Jewish high holidays.

Using guest lecturers was something Steinbuch had legitimately done without question for nearly 20 years.

After he again used a respected Arkansas federal judge last semester to cover his class during the two highest Jewish Holy Days, Bowen Dean Theresa M. Beiner wrote to say he could no longer use such temporary fill-ins, he said.

However, a three-person university committee found Beiner apparently acted against law school rules by restricting Steinbuch’s future absentee scheduling.

Widely considered the state’s pre-eminent authority on our Freedom of Information Act, Steinbuch said the committee specifically advised that not allowing Steinbuch to use guest lecturers would constitute religious discrimination, should Beiner refuse him in 2022.

Based on Bowen’s own rules, I believe I (or any first-year law student) could have reached that same conclusion. . . .

Steinbuch said his conflict with the Beiner administration actually preceded these events, when last summer he reported that a named professorship at Bowen had been quietly and improperly labeled as the “William J. Clinton Professorship in Constitutional Law,” even though Clinton had previously withdrawn his name for the position.

That professorship had been held since its founding by Bowen professor and dean emeritus John DiPippa, who also was involved in the renaming, according to Steinbuch.

Steinbuch and others on the faculty refused to drop that issue, and eventually UALR’s chancellor and a state Senate hearing into the matter vindicated Steinbuch’s concerns over the Clinton professorship title.

I’ll say one thing for this silver-haired firebrand of a professor, righteous thorn in the administration’s side and transparency authority: He’ll never be accused of being shy or retiring when it comes to expressing strong views about right and wrong.

And now he’s been twice proven right.

This seems pretty clearly to have been petty retaliation on the part of the Dean.