The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville could aspire to be Vanderbilt.
It could emphasize and invest in elite academic performance. It also could choose to enjoy the branding and economic benefits of participating in, but not so much winning in, intercollegiate football at the highest level.
It could turn out really good baseball teams.
It could play in a large but non-fancy football stadium, something less than state of the art. Such an arena, suitable but simple, would emerge as an especially joyous place on those rare occasions when the home team actually beat one of those visiting juggernauts like Tennessee or Auburn or Florida or Georgia or LSU, but not ever, I’m thinking, Alabama.
Or the University of Arkansas could aspire to be the University of Alabama. That is to say a professional football franchise playing in a sparkling behemoth of a stadium with as many luxuries and video boards as Jerry’s World in Dallas.
’Bama’s vaunted football enterprise only happens by quaint necessity to operate in remote association with a higher-education institution, one that is nothing special but perfectly competent to educate good Alabama boys and girls and propel them to better lifetime opportunities.
Or the University of Arkansas could aspire to be increments of both, less than Vanderbilt academically, less than Alabama in football, more than Vanderbilt in football and more than Alabama academically.
That last one seems to be the operative design.
The University of Arkansas reaps enough big Walton money for a national reputation in the colleges of education and business. It is growing enrollment-wise, luring young people from the Dallas area who can’t get into SMU. It’s no Harvard of the South. But it’s easily a University of Iowa of the South.
Meantime its football team is almost always quite a bit better than Vanderbilt’s and quite a bit worse than Alabama’s. But it can beat LSU from time to time. And it can go to a bowl game, even win one. Or, actually, two consecutively.
So Razorback football needs a stadium falling somewhere on the palatial continuum between Vanderbilt’s and Alabama’s, better than SMU’s but no Jerry’s World.
For that reason, the UA athletic department has prevailed on the pliant Board of Trustees, excepting the non-compliant former governor and U.S. senator, David Pryor, to spend $160 million or more in on-hand and borrowed money.
It’s not to add many seats, because they’re not needed. We’re a small state.
It’s to add luxury boxes for vital big-money boosters, along with a new concourse and a second big television screen, more than at Vanderbilt but not nearly as many as at Alabama, which features big TV screens in every nook and cranny.
Critics call this Fayetteville project two things, both of which I’d love to agree with, because I like and admire the critics and lament the crazed emphasis on football, but just can’t.
One of the criticisms is that the athletic director, Jeff Long, is an empire-builder and a preening tail wagging the dog up there on the hill.
What he is doing is trying to keep the UA football program relevant in the neighborhood into which it has chosen to reside. It’s not living in the biggest mansion on the street. That’s Alabama’s. It’s not in the most modest, either. That’s Vanderbilt’s. But if the ones on the higher end sport remodeled kitchens and baths, then there are Joneses to be kept up with. Otherwise you wind up in a perfectly acceptable house more like Vanderbilt’s than Alabama’s, but without the kids scoring highest on the SATs.
To survive as a worthy increment in that upscale neighborhood requires that Long take actions that appear in the local context to make him an empire-builder and the preening tail wagging the dog.
College football in the southeastern United States is not for the meek or faint of heart.
The second criticism is that this high-dollar stadium expansion represents foolishly misapplied priorities, emphasizing a football program over the supposed real purpose of a university, which is to educate tuition-paying students.
Of course it’s a misapplied priority. So is watching American Idol instead of taking piano lessons. But it certainly isn’t a misapplication of priority existing in a Fayetteville-centric vacuum. It’s the culture of our region. The states of the Southeastern Conference aren’t so much states as tailgate parties.
This issue poses yet another of those dreaded false choices.
Not keeping up with the neighborhood Joneses in football would not mean more money for laboratories and classrooms. It’s not a zero-sum equation — college football versus college classrooms. These endeavors are not connected except nominally for the purpose of official pretense.
It’s kind of like a newspaper. The sports section is not the part of the product doing the most noble and vital service to the First Amendment. It’s just the part luring subscribers.
That a newspaper spends more on travel for sportswriters than political columnists doesn’t mean the political columnists aren’t any good. Necessarily.
If it’s the actual diversion of general funds to athletics that bothers you, then your fight is not with Razorback Inc., but with some of the smaller, wannabe colleges in the state.
I’ve managed over a long lifetime immersed in the Arkansas experience to find my happy place in this debate.
I can assail our over-emphasis on football as vigorously as anybody, though it’s easier when the team is bad or a coach has taken a girlfriend and gone off a cliff with her on a motorcycle.
But I can start jumping and hollering and hugging and spilling beverages with the best of them when Hunter Henry flails a football desperately backward and Alex Collins picks it up and takes off running with it.
So I say let us proceed apace with our concurrent, parallel and incremental ambitions. One will land us in the Texas Bowl or Liberty Bowl, maybe even the Cotton Bowl. The other can educate kids well enough, if they’ll apply themselves, which is always the key.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.