LITTLE ROCK — The presidents of the University of Arkansas System, Henderson State University in Arkadelphia and Mid-South Community College in West Memphis told a Senate committee Tuesday that they oppose a proposed constitutional amendment that would create a board to control the state’s higher-education system.
Called the Arkansas System of Higher Education, the measure would make a nine member commission to be appointed by the governor “the governing board of control” for all state-supported institutions of higher education.
It’s Senate Joint Resolution 8 by Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, D-Crossett, and would become part of the state constitution if referred by the Legislature to the voters for the 2012 general election and approved by the voters.
Among the panel’s duties would be determining the functions and courses of study at each institution and recommending to lawmakers proposed tuition and fees and budget allocations.
The proposal also would change Amendment 33, which grants authority to the boards of trustees that currently are in charge of the institutions, to allow the powers vested in such boards to be transferred.
Jeffress, a legislator since 1997, said he bets a poll of the 135 lawmakers would indicate that “higher ed” is the No. 1 entity that they deal with on a daily basis “that has more of a problem seeing past their own needs.”
For example, he said, there was a proposal in a draft of the lottery legislation for the institutions to have “a compact of some sort to do a cost-containment thing on each campus” and the institutions agreed they would voluntarily find a way to do this after asking for the proposal to be withdrawn.
“To this day it hasn’t happened yet,” Jeffress said. “It’s an arrogance that I see coming from an institution from the top down and it’s abhorrent to me.”
But Sen. Robert Thompson, D-Paragould, said the proposed amendment would require lawmakers to vote on tuition increases rather than allowing the institutions’ boards to make those decisions and “that’s what scares me about this.”
Jeffress said the Legislature “would have yes or no approval” on the recommendations of the commission and the schools would adjust their tuition fees based on the Legislature’s decisions.
He later said that he faces “an uphill battle” getting the Legislature to refer his proposal to voters and has only a 10 percent chance of success.
B. Alan Sugg, president of the UA System, said it wouldn’t be in the best interest of higher education or the state for the amendment to be adopted by voters.
The state has 33 institutions of higher education that are governed by 140 board members who represent Arkansas and want to be sure that the money that comes to the colleges is spent in the best interest of students, he said.
The proposed amendment “would remove those 140 board members” and “turn it over to a board of nine people who would basically be making all the major decisions for the future of higher education in Arkansas,” Sugg said.
He said there has been “tremendous progress” at the institutions.
Sugg said UA’s Fayetteville campus received “$120 million-plus” in general revenue during 2007-2008, when it had 19,194 students and the same appropriation in 2009-2010, when it had about 21,000 students. That’s $6,291 per student in 2007-2008 and $5,650 per student in 2009-2010, he said.
“We have tried to do our best to keep tuition as low as possible,” he said.
Sugg said he has “never ever in 21 years that I have been coming to the Legislature said anything about Amendment 33.”
“We do respond to what you want us to do very, very quickly,” he said.
Charles Welch, president of Henderson, and Sugg said the state’s higher education institutions, including the UA System, Henderson and Arkansas State University at Jonesboro, have voluntarily imposed cost-containment measures.
The institutions’ trustees “take very seriously their role and responsibility and particularly when it comes to tuition and fees,” Welch said.
“One of the great fears that I have is that we move to a model of one size fits all because we are not a one-size fits-all state,” Welch said.
Glen Fenter, president of Mid-South Community College, said, “Sometimes bigger is not better.”
The community college has spent more than $75 million on its campus during the past two decades and less than $12 million has come from the state, he said.
It has obtained $55 million in federal funding for a consortium during the past five years, he said.
Jeffress said the institutions didn’t report to him that they had implemented cost containment measures.
“It’s been like a bed of red ants working against my proposal,” he said, referring to higher-education officials. “But I think right will prevail in the end, one way or the other.”
Front Section, Pages 9 on 02/23/2011