Things worked out well for me on that third Thursday of September 2004. For more than three decades, my fall hobby has been handling the play-by-play of Ouachita Baptist University football games on the radio. I was scheduled to be in Georgia for a game on Sept. 18, 2004, but the contest was called off due to Hurricane Ivan. That allowed me to attend the inaugural lecture of the Clinton School of Public Service. The school's dean, David Pryor, had decided to invite a former colleague from the U.S. Senate, Bob Dole, to deliver the lecture.
Dole had been the unsuccessful Republican opponent in Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, and both Clinton and Pryor felt that inviting Dole to speak would send a message that the school would be bipartisan. I attended a reception at the new school, located in the freshly renovated 1899 Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad depot. That was followed by Dole's 3 p.m. lecture at the Statehouse Convention Center, which ended in plenty of time for me to attend that evening's 49-20 University of Arkansas football victory at War Memorial Stadium over the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
The Clinton School lectures are free. They're one of the great amenities of living in central Arkansas.
The impact goes much deeper than lectures. Clinton School students, who come to Little Rock from around the world, provide youthful energy and an intellectual boost to the capital city's downtown renaissance. Skip Rutherford, the Clinton School dean, likes to say that the River Market is their cafeteria and the main branch of the Central Arkansas Library System is their library.
When Clinton chose Little Rock as the site of his presidential library, he made it clear that he wanted an educational component. The folks at the University of Arkansas System offices began scrambling to find a way to bring his vision to reality. I was back at the renovated depot last week as Tom Bruce, Dianne Kelly, Pat Torvestad and Nikolai DiPippa discussed those early years. Torvestad is a former planning director for the UA System, Kelly is the Clinton School's administrative director, Bruce was associate dean at the start, and DiPippa began work at the Clinton School as an intern while an undergraduate at Hendrix College.
Classes began in August 2005. Pryor had joined the Clinton School in June 2004 after having worked for a time as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Then-UA President B. Alan Sugg convinced Pryor to return home to Arkansas, and Pryor agreed to be dean on the condition that he would do the job for no more than two years. In January 2006, Pryor announced that he would resign as dean the following month. In April 2006, Rutherford, who was chairman of the Clinton Foundation and an executive vice president at Little Rock advertising agency Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods, was hired to succeed Pryor.
Sugg and Rutherford had been part of a group that visited presidential libraries in Atlanta, Austin and College Station in 1997 to get a sense of what Little Rock should do. Clinton announced in February 1997 that Little Rock would be the site of his presidential library and in November of that year chose a 26-acre site along the Arkansas River. As far as the educational component, Torvestad said it was unusual for an academic program to be developed by the system offices rather than one of the UA campuses. She bravely navigated the sometimes vicious inter-campus politics while veteran system lobbyist Joyce Wroten obtained a planning grant from the Arkansas Legislature.
Bruce had served for 11 years as the dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He left UAMS in 1985 and traveled the world for the next dozen years as a program director at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. After Arkansas voters decided in November 2000 to devote part of the funds from tobacco lawsuit settlements to the establishment of a College of Public Health at UAMS, Bruce came out of retirement to serve as the school's first dean. A few years later, he was called on to help plan the Clinton School.
"Our idea was that this would be a hands-on school," Bruce said. "We wanted it to be different from the public policy schools found elsewhere across the country." It was decided that the graduate school would offer the nation's first master of public service degree.
Kelly recalls that once the depot was ready, there was no need for a moving van because "we didn't have much of anything to move." She used her husband's pickup truck to transfer 14 folding tables that had been loaned by UAMS. Kelly and Bruce unloaded the tables in the rain. Kelly had spent part of her first day of work outside because "Dr. Bruce hired me and then forgot I was coming. The door was locked, he was gone to a meeting at UAMS and I couldn't get in."
As far as the lecture series, the original plan was to hold six to eight events a year like most college lecture programs. Under DiPippa's leadership, there are now more than 100 lectures each year. Rutherford explained, "We were a school with a student body of 16 at the start, and no one in the community knew what we were doing. This was a way to reach out to the public while also bringing in interesting people to interact with our students." The school will host its 1,000th public event in the next year. More than 150,000 people have attended events, and another 150,000 have watched online.
"This school has major national and international influence in the area of public service," Bruce said. "We didn't want to be just a little program next to a presidential library. Our goal was to become a respected institution."
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas' Independent Colleges and Universities. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 11/19/2014