Brummett Online

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Phoenix deal scorched


It went the way it should have gone. It's good when that happens. So, let's celebrate.

Score one for five members of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees. They cast decisive "no" votes Monday against UA System President Don Bobbitt's proposal falling somewhere between bold and reckless. It was to make the UA a party to a three-entity affiliation including the University of Phoenix, the online higher-education pioneer with the checkered history.

The idea was to propel the UA system into the vanguard of online education and in the use of digital data to forge partnerships to meet new needs and find enhanced opportunities in the modern world when fewer people will go to college traditionally.

Morril Harriman, Mike Beebe's gubernatorial chief of staff and the board chairman, felt the UA system did not have any control in a deal in which a third-party middle man would borrow the needed half-billion or so and buy and oversee Phoenix.

Sheffield Nelson, veteran lawyer, businessman and politico, and the vice chairman, said it simply was an unsupportable deal offering no enhancement in reputation, but the opposite. He rather bluntly said the deal had been advanced too secretly by the administration.

Stephen Cox, businessman and former Hog punter, had said previously the whole thing was moving too fast.

Tommy Boyer, former Hog basketball great and an award-winning entrepreneur, spoke his "no" by voting it.

Let's score two, actually, for Kevin Crass, the lawyer in Little Rock who seems to be the best thing--if not the only good thing--about the Sarah Sanders administration. She recently appointed him to the board. He chose "no" because, he said by way of the best explanation of the day, the proposal was asking the board to take a too-large leap of faith. He said there was insufficiently defined recourse for the university if the affiliation went sour or proved a bust.

Tell Sarah thanks for a solid appointment the next time you see her. Then tell her that doesn't make up for the rest.

And, yes, let's grant a point to Kelly Eichler, Sanders' gubernatorial aide who sits on the board as an Asa Hutchinson appointee. In the end, she disqualified herself from what would have been a still-alive 5-5 stalemate had she voted the way she'd indicated she'd vote.

She had a conflict of interest, or at least the equally problematic appearance of one. Her husband heads a division at Stephens Inc. that is separate from the division that stood to make millions potentially if the deal went through. But Stephens is Stephens is Stephens, certainly in the public eye, and the credibility of the process especially in such a vast deal is paramount.

Four board members--Ted Dickey, Ed Fryar, Jeremy Wilson and Nate Todd -- would have plunged full-speed. Maybe they truly believe in the urgent need for a major online boost. Maybe they truly believe a great opportunity is being squandered. Maybe they are the kinds of board members who go along with whatever the executive wants, because that's easy or they've come to respect or befriend that executive.

As for the executive himself, Bobbitt apparently could do this deal without board approval because he has latitude in affiliations. But surely he wouldn't do that. He has no current position of strength, having lost the last two big board issues--the selection of a chancellor at Fayetteville and now the Phoenix affiliation.

You have to wonder if that inevitable moment isn't lurking or looming--meaning the one when a higher education official realizes he's not going to stay in his position forever.

Finally I must correct my sentence Sunday saying the flagship campus' Faculty Senate opposed this proposal in part because it opposed online education generally. It does not. This deal was one thing; online educating another. I was wholly wrong and neglectful in fact-checking. I apologize.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.


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