Editor's note: This is a revised and updated version of a column first published online-only Wednesday.
The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville could aspire to be Vanderbilt.
It could go all-in for elite academic performance. It could choose to enjoy the branding benefits of participating in, but not so much winning in, intercollegiate football at the highest level.
It could play in a stadium adequate but less than state-of-the-art. Such an arena would be an especially joyous place on those rare occasions when the perennial underdog home team of smart kids actually beat one of those visiting juggernauts like Tennessee or Auburn or Florida or George or LSU, but not ever, I'm thinking, Alabama.
Or the University of Arkansas could aspire to be the University of Alabama. That is to say a professional football franchise playing in a sparking behemoth of a stadium with as many luxuries as Jerry's World in Dallas.
Or the University of Arkansas could aspire to be increments of both, a hybrid, less than Vanderbilt academically, less than Alabama in football, more than Vanderbilt in football and more than Alabama academically.
That seems to be the operative aim.
The University of Arkansas reaps enough big Walton money for a national reputation in the colleges of education and business. It is growing by luring young people from the Dallas area who can't get into SMU.
Meantime its football team is almost always quite a bit better than Vanderbilt's and quite a bit worse than Alabama's. But it can beat LSU from time to time. And it can go to a bowl game, even win one. Or, actually, two consecutively.
So Razorback football needs a stadium falling somewhere on the palatial continuum between Vanderbilt's and Alabama's.
For that reason, the UA athletic department has prevailed on the Board of Trustees to approve spending $160 million or more in mostly borrowed money based on ticket-sale revenue--in the form of a bond issue guaranteed by the school.
It's not to add many seats, because they're not needed. We're a small state.
It's to add luxury boxes for vital big-money boosters, along with a new concourse and a second jumbo television screen.
Some office and utility space in the attached Broyles Athletic Complex will need to be ripped up and redone--more nicely, of course--to accommodate this new configuration. But there is no new underground parking for athletic department employees, as has been inaccurately asserted.
Critics say two things, both of which I'd love to agree with, because I admire the critics and lament the crazed emphasis on football, but simply can't.
One is that the athletic director, Jeff Long, is an empire-builder and a preening tail wagging the dog.
What he is doing is trying to keep the UA football program vibrant in the swank neighborhood in which it has chosen to reside. That requires him to take initiatives that, in a strictly local context, make him appear to be a preening empire-builder. The same was always said of the venerated Frank Broyles.
The second criticism is that this high-dollar stadium expansion represents foolishly misapplied priorities, emphasizing a football program over the supposed real purpose of a university, which is to educate tuition-paying students.
Of course it's a misapplied priority. But it isn't a misapplication of priority existing in a Fayetteville-centric vacuum. It's the culture of our region. The Southeastern Athletic Conference is mainly a giant tailgate party.
Declining to keep up with the Jones-es in Old Confederacy college football would not mean more money for laboratories and classrooms. It's not a zero-sum equation--college football versus college academics.
"That $160 million would not exist" without the stadium and football program, a UA athletic official said.
The counter-argument is that the private Razorback Foundation would not exist as a tax-exempt moneymaking machine without its nominal affiliation with a public academic institution.
I asked if the stadium project could be scaled back and a sum of millions from the bond proceeds sent to the university, perhaps to seed a fund to move toward a no-loan policy emerging elsewhere in the country in which tuition is means-tested and lower-income students subsidized.
The answer is that the purpose and use of bonded debt must be strictly and narrowly defined. And it's that the Razorback Foundation, beyond contributing vitally to a self-sufficient athletic program, already sends self-generated millions to the university for academic-related purposes.
In the end, the people who are telling me with great passion that the stadium project reveals a tragedy of misplaced priorities cannot explain to me one thing: How would it generate a penny for academics if we abandoned the stadium project?
These critics say they're talking about political capital and mindsets.
All right, then. Fine. Agreed.
But I'm talking about actual capital and a university that can walk in academics and chew gum in football at the same time.
Now there's a worthy aspiration.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/26/2016