EDITORIALS

Now showing at UA-F

Starring Celebrities Galore and $170,000

IT’S GROWN hard if not impossible to comment on the campus and carnival known as the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville without getting mired in irony.

Even simple terms like “advancement” and “flagship” acquire a double meaning once you enter that little Land of Oz tucked away in the Administration Building behind the football stadium, which remains one place on campus where things are taken seriously. If not far too seriously.

But over at headquarters, where the Wonderful Wizard reigns, advancement has come to mean its opposite when used as the name of the school’s fund-raising arm. As for the campus that once billed itself as the Flagship of the fleet, if only to distinguish itself from the mere rowboats in the rest of the state’s university system, that designation no longer carries the same panache. Now, if the nickname is uttered at all, it is used with a certain hesitation or even-can it be?-a certain shame. As it becomes harder and harder to ignore where the school’s “leaders” have led it.

What would the in-state news in the paper be without the almost daily outrage produced-at great expense-by the teeming crew of high-priced and over-indulged administrators at UA-F? Their misplaced priorities are no longer a scandal but a habit. See the news story on Page 2B of the Arkansas section last Thursday about Condoleezza Rice’s appearance at Fayetteville as part of the school’s Distinguished Lecture Series, and note this little nugget packed away in the body of the story:

The former secretary of state collected a fee of (gulp) $170,000 for her hour of strutting and fretting on the stage like Hamlet’s poor player. Except that Dr. Rice is anything but poor, and now her coffers have been replenished by the university’s students. At a time when they-and junior members of the faculty-may be struggling to make ends meet.

In case you’re wondering where the 170 Gs came from, the lecture series is paid for out of student fees. Is it possible even to record that not so little detail without a wince? Whether these huge sums are being paid to Condoleezza Rice or Robert Redford or some other star of the lecture circuit, you’d think any university administrator or other presumed adult helping the students make such decisions would point out the waste and extravagance on display, and suggest that students would be better served by lower fees and a greater emphasis on real education rather than all this glitz and glamour.

The Higher Learning in America, to use the sardonic title Thorstein Veblen gave it in another century, seems to have replaced the search for awe and discovery in the lecture hall and lab, whether the subject be Shakespeare or nuclear physics, by a craving for celebrity.

In that sense, the university’s priorities only reflect those of the larger society, where a dedicated public servant like Robert Gates stands out as a lone exception in a presidential cabinet dominated by prima donnas and glibsters in this era of Joe Bidens.

APRESTIGIOUS speaker gets a prestigious fee, but the size of this latest tab raises at least a couple of questions that ought to be asked whenever the university’s high potentates and low wheedlers appear before the Legislature to ask for an even bigger appropriation for their maladministered part of the university system. Or tell us how devoted they are to promoting and protecting the interests and welfare of their students and faculty. Questions like these:

How does Condi Rice’s $170,000 fee compare to the pay of say, an adjunct professor teaching a whole course? Or that of graduate assistants, the slave labor of any number of American universities these degraded days? How possibly justify this largesse at the students’ expense when so many are sacrificing just to be there? The responses might be enlightening, if embarrassing.

As for this latest show at UA-F, how classify it-as tragedy or travesty? And why not both?

Editorial, Pages 14 on 03/11/2014

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