LITTLE ROCK — ACOMMITTEE of legislators had some questions Friday for G. David Gearhart, chancellor of the University of Arkansas’ campus at Fayetteville. His appearance before the committee gave him a chance to explain that $3.1 million shortfall (at last estimate) in the university’s Advancement Division. And he’s got a lot of ’splainin’ to do, as Desi Arnaz used to tell Lucille Ball on the old I Love Lucy show. So the chancellor explained away Friday before the Legislative Council’s subcommittee on higher education, which tends to grow lower and lower in this post-classical age.

The chancellor and some of the other higher-ups on campus have been trying to straighten out this fiscal mess since it was first sighted bearing down on the university’s Advancement Division like that iceberg headed for theRMS Titanic.

We don’t pretend to understand all the loans, advances, one-time grants and other money-shifting stratagems needed to keep that fiscally beleaguered division afloat. To explain all that would take a whole team of accountants, bookkeepers, auditors and other such specialists who, unlike your average inky wretch, can add and subtract.

Luckily, the chancellor has another whole division of the university, the department of finance and administration, to help him rectify matters, or at least help him figure out this fiscal puzzle. The millions seem to have been spent in anticipation of income thatwasn’t there, at least not when it should have been. Which is not a recommended practice for any institution, or just anybody trying to balance a budget.

THIS (not so) little adventure in fiscal mismanagement would naturally attract the attention of legislators, among others. Inquiring minds all over the state want an explanation of this snafu, and it was good to see the Ledge join them. To quote a state senator from Crossett, the always colorful Jimmy Jeffress: “I believe there’s more talk about this going around this legislative body than there is about football coaches.” Which is saying a lot about the dimensions of this story in a football-obsessed Southern state.

Among the things the chancellor explained to the committee were various steps he’s taken to deal with this unfolding embarrassment. Among them, his firing-excuse us, his not renewing the appointment-of the head of the Advancement Division. But the director of advancement, Brad Choate, will be keeping his title, and his $350,000-a-year salary, till the end of the fiscal year next June. Which raises the obvious question: Why? To quote Senator Jeffress again:“Out in the real world, this kind of activity would get you fired yesterday.”

The chancellor had an explanation for that, too: The vice-chancellor for advancement “has direct contact with some of our biggest donors.” And to fire him now “would hurt the University of Arkansas greatly.”

To translate that explanation from the bureaucratese, it’s more important to keep the big givers giving than to act with dispatch to uphold the standards of fiscal probity that should mark any university. If for no other reason than to set the right example for the next generation whose standards the school issupposed to be shaping.

But the time when heads of our universities were expected to be educators rather than fund-raisers has been fading for at least a century now. Great educators like Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia and Robert Hutchins at Chicago are long gone, and a thinking university president like the late John Silber at Boston U. is more the exception than rule, more’s the pity.

Chancellor Gearhart himself came to the fore at UA-F after an impressive run in fund-raising for the university, and now is running the Advancement Division once again while Brad Choate winds up his high-paid duties there.

The chancellor says the responsibility for this mess falls to Mr. Choate, and Mr. Choate in turn has blamed his budget director, Joy Sharp, for this $3.1-million screw-up. She’s the one figure in allthis who hasn’t been heard from, at least not publicly. She, too, is being allowed to stay in the university’s employ till the end of the fiscal year. The chancellor explained that, too:

“To throw her out on the street after 40 years of service to the university and the state would have not been the right thing to do.” So he’s going to wait till the end of June to throw her out in the street. This must be what passes for solomonic judgment at today’s universities, or at least in its higher echelons. And the higher one goes, it seems, the stranger the reasoning.

So till the end of the fiscal year, Joy Sharp gets to twist in the wind, blamedfor the shortfall but allowed to stick around in another department at a reduced salary. Which raises a question the legislators did not go into Friday: Is she just being used as a scapegoat by her bosses, or can one lady be to blame for this whole, super-sized embarrassment? Inquiring minds still want to know some things about this mess, and maybe our legislators will yet get around to asking that question.

AS FOR going beyond the byzantine world of modern university administration and all its creative accounting, and getting back to first things, like the very purpose of higher education, an inquiring mind could do worse than consult Thorstein Veblen’s classic study a century ago titled The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men.That’s the treatise in which the professor declared: “Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, [the university] is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals.”

Gentle Reader may judge for himself how close the University of Arkansas’ operation at Fayetteville, which styles itself the system’s “flagship” campus, has come to fulfilling that role-or whether it has forgotten that high ideal in its absorption with getting and spending. Meanwhile, like some long forgotten athletic trophy from 1918 that has grown tarnished in its dusty showcase, that ideal languishes, unnoticed, unhonored, unmentioned.

Herr Professor Veblen could see this day coming. He told friends he’d really wanted to sub-title his little book about the higher learning in America A Study in Total Depravity. And a century later we’re about to get there.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 12/19/2012