By John Brummett
Apparently there was an ironic moment this week at the state Capitol.
The usually alert state representative from Fort Smith, Democrat Tracy Pennartz, wondered aloud in a legislative committee meeting if maybe we had too many four-year colleges in Arkansas.
You see, our most recently added four-year state college is the University of Arkansas … at Fort Smith, Pennartz’s city.
Once it was a community college called Westark. Then it added a so-called University Center by which limited four-year instruction was made available. Then it made its move to full four-year status, though the University of Arkansas flagship campus is but 60 minutes or so north and Arkansas Tech is but 90 minutes or so east.
Now UAFS — You-fuss, they lovingly called it — is a bustling campus of spiraling enrollment, up to more than 7,000 students this fall. It turns out there were kids and adults in west-central Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma who wanted to go to college but weren’t going to Fayetteville or Russellville.
That is to say that Pennartz’s lapse — which I’ll choose to call it — reflects a big-picture arrogance that you might more usually expect from someone from Fayetteville or Little Rock.
Or maybe someone like me, going off on a columnizing tangent a few years ago about how we had too many colleges and branches and twigs thereof and were wasting our precious higher education dollars by provincialism and dilution.
You might have noticed earlier this week that I apologized for those arrogant absurdities to the chancellor of Phillips Community College in Helena.
What I have come to understand is that the old model of higher education — of the better-off kids driving off each fall to a big four-year school for partying and pledging and rushing and perhaps studying — no longer suffices.
It’s fine, but it’s but a component anymore.
The need for post-secondary education, be it vocational, technical or general, or a smart blend thereof, is near-universal. The need extends to adults with kids and jobs who need to better themselves for the changing economy.
They can’t take four years off to go live in a dorm at an established four-year institution.
What we need, then, is to provide a technical, vocational and beginning academic campus for them reasonably close to their kids and jobs at home, at the nearest community college, most likely. Then we need to let those so inclined get further instruction toward a bachelor’s degree via that old Westark “university center” model without having to leave that locally accessible campus.
Students could take classes from professors at the established four-year schools via distance learning or through in-person instruction by traveling professors from the big, prestigious universities.
The issue is not having too many places to get educated. It’s making sure each location is flexible to the needs of its constituency and can tap into the finest quality higher education instruction our state can offer.
It’s to quit thinking you must go away to college to get a real college education. Sometimes college needs to come to the people anymore.
But I must close with one qualifier: I was talking about this briefly Friday with Jim Purcell, director of the state Higher Education Department. He was saying that, yes, I had it about right from his point of view, except for this: We have enough colleges. While we don’t need fewer of them, we don’t need even one more, either.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
