Brummett evaluates Sen. Bob Johnson’s outburst at a media conference last week and finds some good — not leaving two-year-college students out of the lottery funding formula (which nobody has proposed to do) — and some bad, specifically that zoo nonsense. In advocating the end of the LR Zoo as we know it, Johnson is merely carrying water for UAMS’ manifest parking destiny.
By the by: My reading of the D-G’s legislative advance story this morning on lotteries indicates the House leadership is back to the idea of making some students more valuable than others in providing lottery-financed scholarship aid. It’s the Walton theory of education — only certain courses of study, particularly those that aid their business, have high worth at the University of Arkansas. Poets and French teachers are worthy, too. What Arkansas needs to do is get more people in college and more people successfully through a course of study. Goodness will flow from that, whether they graduate in culinary arts at Pulaski Tech or philosophy at UALR.