The name games continue. Consider just one example: Arkansas Works, which is what Governor Asa Hutchinson calls his plan to switch more Arkansans to Medicaid. The state was hooked when the Feds agreed to pay the full cost of expanding Medicaid--but only until next year. Then the state's taxpayers will have to pay first 5 percent, then 10 percent of the cost over the next five years. It turns out that the much ballyhooed Private Option was always a public one--and not optional at all. The cost to Arkansas taxpayers will mount every year. Just as skeptics warned when Arkansas accepted this sucker's deal.
There's got to be a more accurate name for this game than Arkansas Works, for it's just the old bait-and-switch. Changing the name of a program doesn't change its substance. Any more than putting lipstick on a pig makes it a fair maiden. If the Fair Labeling laws applied to state government, a more accurate and honest name for this tricky approach would be Arkansas Doesn't Work--because putting off the day of reckoning doesn't mean it won't come someday. Like today.
Then there are the games being played at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where academic deans are being turned into glorified fundraisers. To quote Laura Jacobs, chief of staff for Chancellor Joe Steinmetz, who's deep into planning his next high-powered campaign to raise more money for the school: "A big part of the campaign fundraising will fall on the shoulders of the deans. We want to ensure that they are closely aligned to the development officers." As for education, that becomes just optional.
How defend this indefensible new arrangement? By pointing out that it's really an old one--as if that justified the offense instead of aggravating it. Or as the dean of the university's J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, Todd Shields, put it, "The offices for the development officers in Fulbright College are located just down the hall and we work closely on a daily basis--making travel plans, meeting with prospective donors, setting goals, etc." How chummy. Substituting money-grubbing for educating students doesn't become any less shameful because it's given a fancy new name.
Wasn't there a time when academic deans concerned themselves with academics? If so, it passed some time ago at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, which now has succeeded in at least one unintended way: It's made Arkansas' small liberal-arts colleges like Hendrix and Lyon look better and better. While the University of Arkansas looks worse and worse. Putting a rug on the floor and a title on the door does not a real university make. A real farce, maybe.
Instead of defending this offensive arrangement, Mr. Shields has only aggravated it by admitting it's not a new offense but a continuing one. And he seems proud of it when he should be ashamed of it. If that's supposed to make some of us feel better, it doesn't. It only makes us feel worse as higher education sinks lower and lower in Arkansas. While its cost, at least at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, goes higher and higher. Stay tuned for the next hike in tuition and fees.
------------v------------
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 07/27/2016