Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 18, 2013

Some questions for the Higher Ed elite

What's got into the University of Arkansas' trustees? They're starting to act like trustees, people who've been entrusted with a responsibility to oversee something that belongs to someone else-in this case to the people of Arkansas.

It's a refreshing sight, and an all too rare one. In an unprecedented move, the board of trustees' Fiscal Affairs Committee called in the chancellors of four different campuses of the state university system to explain why they're asking for tuition increases of 4.9 to 10 percent next year.

Inquiring minds on the board wanted to know, and the questioning went on for almost four hours. It's about time the university's board got curious about these tuition hikes, just as students and parents and taxpayers across Arkansas have been for some time.

Can you believe it? There are signs of life, even of curiosity, on the University of Arkansas' board. For years it's been a dead zone where any real check on the state's universities has been concerned. For flagrant example, the board paid minimal attention to the recent scandal that rocked the University of Arkansas' "advancement" division up in Fayetteville, which is still reverberating.

But these hard-to-swallow tuition raises across the state seem to have served as a wake-up call.

The best and perhaps most relevant question asked Tuesday came from good old Jim von Gremp of Rogers, a trustee who seems to be connected with fiscal reality in a way too many bureaucrats in the university system aren't. "What do I say," he wanted to know, "to a parent whose wages haven't gone up this much in a year?" The percentage of tuition increases for these four schools ranged from 4.9 percent (UALR and UAPB) to 10 percent at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, which led this hungry pack.

The board may not have got any satisfactory answers to its questions, but it did come away with a full quota of rationales, lectures, excuses and an occasional euphemism. To quote the chancellor of the UofA's Fort Smith campus, Paul Beran, tuition increases should be seen "as an investment, not just an expense." Sound familiar? Investments. Isn't that what the Obama administration calls its pork projects and stipends for green energy companies that go belly-up?

UALR's chancellor, not to be outdone when it comes to lecturing/hectoring the board, told the trustees: "If you starve higher education, you are eating your seed corn. You aren't investing in activities that could help you get ahead faster." It may be an old metaphor, but there are some, like UAPB Chancellor Joel Anderson, who can be counted on to roll it out of the closet whenever they're asked to economize.

Starve higher education? Would the chancellor consider his own salary ($219,406 a year) starvation wages? Does he think raising poor students' tuition at UALR almost 5 percent a year is a good way to save our seed corn?

More questions to follow, let's hope. Because they very much need asking. These chancellors have some 'splainin' to do, and they've only just started.

The state's whole university system seems to be packed with high-paid administrators-the Shane Broadways seem everywhere-while most faculty that actually teach, train and supervise students lag behind when it comes to salaries.

Politicians in the guise of educators-call it the Lu Hardin Syndrome-proliferate while teachers tend to be last in line when it comes to pay. UALR, for example, just killed its German program and now its chancellor delivers jejune lectures to the university's board of trustees about saving our seed corn. The ironies never cease.

If you want to know what's wrong with the priorities of higher education in America, this state provides all kinds of examples. Examples to beware rather than emulate.

But at least and at last one part of the state's educational establishment has awakened and started asking questions, pertinent questions. Good morning, trustees. It's good to have you with us at last-and being good stewards of your trust. Keep up the good work, and the good questions.

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Southewest Times Record, May 19, 2013

Independent Foundations Strengthen Teachers, Improve Education

When we send our children to school, we hope they will find people there who will care for them as we would ourselves. That's understandable; our children are precious to us.

But the responsibilities we ask our teachers to bear are enormous and often unrelated to the things they learned in school.

We expect them to prevent bullying, instill order and maintain discipline. We ask them to teach the values of citizenship and patriotism. We ask them to keep an eye out for dreadful things like abuse and hunger and inadequate shelter and to take action when they suspect something is wrong. We ask them to build esteem without inflating grades and to explain to parents why not every effort deserves an A. We ask them to reinforce habits of nutrition and exercise that may be counter to the child's home life. We ask them to diagnose physical illness and learning disabilities. Often we ask them to do these things in inappropriate shelter or with inadequate resources. Then, periodically, wherever the teachers are in their careers, we ask them to scrap what they've been doing and undertake a new curriculum as we rethink education one more time.

When they can find the time, they are supposed to teach students enough facts and develop in them enough ability to think that they can pass always-new tests that represent an ever-receding finish line. And that's despite the fact that students are the only American consumers who consistently want the least they can get for their buck.

With due respect to the excellent administrators in our local districts, we suspect a teacher was the anonymous author of this sentiment that is posted in many work spaces: We, the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

And in spite of all that, we learned again this week that local teachers are bursting with creative ideas to enhance learning, restore discipline and nurture creativity.

The Fort Smith Public Schools Foundation board on Thursday distributed $57,000 in graduate study awards and classroom mini-grants at a luncheon for educators at the MovieLounge. The sit-down meal was a step up from last year's make-your-own sandwich bar, many teachers said. It was sponsored this year by the Fort Smith Regional Council of CEOs, led by First National Bank President Sam T. Sicard.

This year's $57,000 is the most awarded in a single year since the foundation board was formed in 1996. Since that time, it has awarded just more than $375,000. The foundation has an endowment of $1 million.

Thursday's event highlighted some of last year's projects, including an after-school art club that inspired creativity not only in club members but, through them, in all the school's students, and a special monthly lunch cafe that rewarded students who met certain benchmarks of good behavior.

Foundation board member Cathy Williams said the board met for five hours to consider the 155 grant applications. "I stand amazed at the creativity, passion and NEEDS of the teachers," she wrote about the meeting. All the board members agreed that it was only money that prevented them from making more awards.

To make the money go further, some grants were partially funded — one field trip instead of two, for instance, Ms. Williams said, adding there were "lots of kindergarten and first-grade field trips and SO many tech requests.

"But then (there were) some really unique requests. One of my favorites was a parental activity with parents of soon-to-be kindergartners who are going to be invited to school before the children come. They will be given the book 'The Night Before Kindergarten' to read to their children the night before they go to school for the first time," she stated.

The Van Buren Education Foundation also awards grants for special projects. This year it made early grants to the district's Career Center and Hope Campus in March and followed up with its annual prize patrol in April.

These grants bring money into area classrooms that would not otherwise be there, but they also encourage teachers to dream big and reward them for their hard work. As many people observed Thursday, the awards are important to the students and to the teachers.

Teachers' jobs are so hard and so important and sometimes so tied up in red tape. But the applications show teachers bursting to do more. It seems that they, and thus our children, are flourishing.

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El Dorado News-Times, May 19, 2013

Seeing shades of 'Big Brother'

Before "Big Brother" became a popular CBS reality series, the entity was best known as a character in the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell.

In this acclaimed work of literature, "Big Brother" is the dictator of a totalitarian state known as Oceania in which the ruling party wields total control over the state's inhabitants. In Oceania, everyone is under surveillance by the authorities at all times, and people are constantly reminded of this unfortunate truth through the use of the well-known phrase "Big Brother is watching you."

Since the publication of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" way back in 1949, the term "Big Brother" has become synonymous with the abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties, and often specifically related to mass surveillance.

Thank goodness it's all a work of fiction, right? We would like to think so, but the U.S. Justice Department's recent seizure of the phone records of more than 20 Associated Press reporters via the use of secret subpoenas has us wondering if "Big Brother" is rearing his ugly head once again.

The seized records included office, cell phone and home phone lines, the general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.

The government has not said exactly why it sought the phone records, but federal officials have previously said there is an ongoing investigation into who may have leaked information related to a May 2012 AP story about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen. In an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder referred to the story on this foiled plot and called the story the result of "a very serious leak, a very grave leak."

But regardless of why this action was taken, the outcry against the Department of Justice, Holder and the government at large has been vocal among journalists and on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt called the action "a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news," and Republicans blasted the Department of Justice, saying that the invasion of privacy of a news outlet was just the latest example of an administration replete with problems.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called the seizure of the phone records "inexcusable" and said there is no way to justify a broad seizure of private phone records. "I have trouble defending what the Justice Department did in going out and looking at the AP," Reid said. "I really believe in the First Amendment, I think it's one of the great things we have as a country. I don't know who did it and why it was done but it's inexcusable ... there's no way to justify this."

Being in the newspaper business, we really believe in the First Amendment as well with its prohibition against "infringing on the freedom of the press," and agree with all the voices condemning this act of intrusion into how news organizations gather the news in an effort to keep the people informed.

But more than this, we condemn what appears to be a flagrant abuse of power by the government and yet another example of a prevailing attitude on the part of that government that we the people are somehow inferior to the leaders that WE have placed into office.

The great State of Arkansas has one of the finest mottos in the land, in our opinion - Regnat Populus (The People Rule) - a motto which the federal government would do well to remember. Government officials work for us ... we don't work for them. Directly or indirectly, we placed them into office, and we pay their salaries. No one placed in a position of power by the people has the right to covertly intrude upon any individual or organization involved in the due course of their daily work, be they journalists, attorneys, doctors or small business owners.

We agree with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department's budget, who said the department's move reminds him of the wiretapping authorized by former President Richard Nixon's administration back in the 1970s.

"It's unbelievable," said Wolf. "It is the arrogance of power and paranoia ... if they can do it to the AP, they can do to any news service in the country."

Or to anyone else.

So be careful ... "Big Brother is watching you."