A new UCA?

LITTLE ROCK — WAS IT Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein who called Watergate the gift that keeps on giving? Doesn't really matter. The two were pretty much one-and-the-same. They were dubbed Woodstein back in the long-ago days when the identity of Deep Throat was still a mystery and we still had Richard M. Nixon to kick around.

For a newspaperman, a Watergate is a gift-a bottomless cup of a story that keeps producing one exhilarating draught after another. Sort of like the Clinton Scandals. In Arkansas these past couple of years-where, let's face it, politics has been kind of dull after Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee left the headlines-those searching for Good Copy have had to rely on academia to fill the gap. And, boy, has it. Revelations flowed every time the letters U, C, and A appeared above still another story under the byline of the Democrat-Gazette's own Woodstein, Debra Hale-Shelton. Her bottomless cup continues to runneth over.

Wednesday, Ms. Shelton had a story about UCA's new president, Allen C. Meadors, who follows in the turbulent wake of Lu Hardin and his reign of error. This time, the front-page story wasn't a bombshell, thank goodness, like Lu's shady bonus or shadier memo, but a backgrounder about the new fella who'll take on the Herculean task of cleaning up the University of Central Arkansas at Conway. Which, lest we forget, is really an institution of higher education in addition to being an almost endless source of copy.

Here's what struck us: The new president of UCA will make some $238,000 a year. He currently makes $236,000 as chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where he's been for a decade.

UCA is bigger than Pembroke, yes.

Mr. Meadors is a native of Arkansas, yes. He's a Van Buren boy and a graduate of UCA.

But still. It's not every day you see the longtime chancellor of a university uproot his family for a job halfway across country for a $2,000 raise. We read on.

It turns out the new president will receive one unusual perk from his new university: UCA will pick up the tab for his elderly parents to stay in a house the college owns and has renovated. (Note: Allen Meadors offered to pay the rent himself.)

Nice extra. On top of the more typical extras like country-club membership, housing, housekeeper, car allowance, travel . . . goodness, you'd think a college president was somebody really important, like a college football coach. But still. It's not comparable to, say, the man's being offered a $100,000 bump in salary like some new lottery directors we know.

So what was the attraction, do you suppose? The Arkansas connection? Coming home and all? We can certainly understand that. Some of us have taken cuts in pay to come back to Arkansas, if not on the grand scale of a university president.

Or was it the chance to lead a slightly bigger school? Maybe again.

Or was it the nothing-to-lose opportunity of following a Lu Hardin? Yes, maybeit was the thought of arriving on the heels of a university president whom just about everybody was relieved to see go a year ago, leaving behind a mess that's still not all cleaned up.

While it's never a good idea to be the man who follows The Man, it's always a good idea to be the man who follows the man who really messed up. Even if you turn out to be just barely acceptable, you'll be acclaimed a vast improvement. Was that it?

We don't think so. Here's our theory: President-soon-to-be Meadors isn't taking on Lu Hardin's job. He's taking over UCA.And the University of Central Arkansas has a lot going for it-both despite Lu Hardin and, yes, because of him. He did some good things, especially when it came to promoting the school as well as himself. The school has grown. More students. More buildings. More life in general. The honors college has done its share to slow down Arkansas' brain drain. The campus is home to two nationally known if eccentric literary pubs-the Oxford American and Exquisite Corpse. And the athletic program has achieved the kind of success that invites envy-and some healthy cynicism. Because that program owes the state's taxpayers a full accounting of every dime it gets.

And the faculty? Why, the chairman of UCA's board of trustees, Rush Harding III, paid it the highest compliment. He called some of the faculty vociferous. (As in "crying out noisily; clamorous."-Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary.) Professors, you vociferous rascals, we're envious. That's what any editorial page worthy of the name aspires to.

ABOUT a month before Lu Hardin crashed, UCA played host to the announcement by Hewlett Packard that the computer giant would locate a plant in Conway. It was big news. Arkansas had landed HP largely because of Conway. And Conway had landed HP largely because of UCA. We remember hearing stories about HP's suits being shown the town and marveling at the UCA campus, and how they almost salivated at the prospect of working with UCA in ways that would benefit both the university and the computer company. That symbiosis still awaits, and Allen Meadors may be just the man to preside over it.

Until the hard, hard fall of Lu Hardin, followed by the even harder fall of his reputation, UCA was acknowledged by pretty much everybody in the acknowledgement business as being one of Arkansas' success stories. It still can be.

Yes, it turns out that some of that success was only a smoke-and-mirrors job orchestrated by Lu Hardin, magician extraordinaire, especially when it came to the school's shaky finances. But there's no denying the promise UCA represents. Maybe that's what sold Allen Meadors on the job. Keep the good thought. It'll be a nice change from the usual thoughts when you see the letters U, C and A on the front page.