Emails, texts and calls trickled in Monday. People wanted me to know that Ken Warden, whom Sarah Huckabee Sanders had just appointed commissioner of higher education, was someone they had grown up with, or gone to school with, or worked with, and knew firsthand to be solid, stellar and fully qualified and professional.
That was news, you see, with news defined as something significantly out of the ordinary.
Sanders' choice to lead higher education is from west Arkansas. He has a doctorate in workforce education. He is a veteran of decades in relevant work in the state, most recently at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. He appears for all the world to be all about the administration of higher education in Arkansas, not national conservative talking points.
It struck me that this is an appointment that could have been made by the moderate Arkansas-centric pragmatist, Mike Beebe, or the center-right Arkansas-centric pragmatist, Asa Hutchinson, or even the current governor's dad before he lost his bearings to pitching for herb products that supposedly help you sleep.
My main objection to the Sanders' governorship is that she represents a complete redefinition of the job, which heretofore had been separated from national politics, with all its polarizing ideology, and allowed to operate with much less partisan and philosophical baggage.
Importing out-of-state talent is to be desired in a governor's administration. Importing flamethrowers out of Ted Cruz's campaign or anti-public-education agents off Ron DeSantis' cabinet is not.
Warden has been UA-Fort Smith's associate vice chancellor for compliance and legislative relations. There is nothing more relevant to higher education administration--at the campus level or state oversight level--than management of federal statutory and regulatory compliance needs as well as relations with a state legislature that is not going to give colleges and universities much new money anymore, but might be finessed into state help in other ways.
Does this mean that Sanders might be settling into a less combative governorship now that the opening salvo of extremist executive orders and liberal-owning legislation has been fired?
I will confidently answer "no" to that. Most likely, it's simply that higher education administration is not ripe for fighting the culture war. It's hard to make a case for protecting college students from matters they shouldn't have to confront when the very purpose of higher education is to for young adults to learn to confront those things.
The main "reform" Sanders is known to be interested in at the higher-education level is not so much a reform as a longtime concept and practice that probably needs, as she apparently believes, some acceleration for the modern world and economy. It is to customize some elements of our higher-education system to provide focused employment paths.
Some decry the dumbing-down of a de-emphasis on traditional liberal arts education simply to train people for jobs. But it does not threaten traditional liberal arts education for a four-year college, community college or technical college to serve, say, a specific education need of the kind described to me the other night at an annual UA-Little Rock fundraiser.
Let's say a young woman working as a bank teller has performed well in that job and wants to move up to loan officer. Her employers find her worthy in terms of personal potential but not in educational qualification, the standard for which is a bachelor's degree.
Is it fair to demand that the young woman go get a four-year college education, presumably while trying to do the teller job she needs and maybe while trying to raise a child? Or might it enhance her quality of life and that of countless others if our system of higher education could provide her with targeted learning with a few course credits in banking and bank lending, perhaps in online or night courses and perhaps with an employer partnership? It would net her, upon passing-grade completion, an accredited "certificate of loan-officer readiness," or something with a better name, even without courses in general sciences or Shakespeare.
Not that we have anything against general sciences or Shakespeare. We're all for them. But we also would have the highest hopes for enhancing opportunities for good and capable employees.
For that matter, a required component of the young woman's path to loan-officer certification could be a few credits from introductions to general sciences, Shakespeare and other basic academic pursuits. She might learn almost as much as more traditionally educated students have forgotten.
If highly regarded Ken Warden will be permitted to work on compliance, legislative relations and new and better employment-specific instruction, and not forced into the culture war, he might do worthy work in the name of the Sanders administration.
Someday someone might reflect, "You know, for all the horrible rest of it, Sarah Sanders was good for colleges and work-training with that old boy from Fort Smith."
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.