Opinions: Playing it by ear

 published on Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Imagine, if you will, Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-AZ, as a down-on-his-luck magician performing at a birthday party for little kids.

Next, imagine that one of the little kids partying the day away is President Michael Crow and — how fortunate is this? — Crow is the lucky assistant for Mitchell's next trick.

Houdini (Mitchell) asks Little Mikey to come up front, where he reaches behind Mikey's wee little ears. And what does he pull out? A shiny new quarter.

And now — oh golly gee, how exciting — he hands that shiny new quarter to Little Mikey to keep.

But what is Little Mikey to do? Accept the quarter ecstatically or reject the handout?

Well, when The New York Times reported Monday on the past year's record-setting amount of Congressional earmarks for colleges and universities, we assumed Little Mikey would accept the quarter and we, as one of the nation's largest universities, had likely gotten our fair share of that record-setting pie.

But when a look at the numbers told us otherwise, we thought it was a shame for two reasons: First, we like money and second, we like pie.

Out of a record 2,306 earmarks worth $2.3 billion, ASU garnered just under $1.7 million, which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, will be shared with other agencies and schools. Comparatively, NAU got about $4.6 million alone and UA got about $4.9 million (not to mention an additional $3.5 million they get to share in). Even crazier is Mississippi State University's $43 million and the University of Mississippi's $37 million.

We wondered, what was the deal with that? Does Mitchell not love us? Are we just not special enough?

Actually, it's none of the above reasons — ASU just didn't apply for them. Or, as it fits into the perverse and overly complicated BS metaphorical story that starts this editorial, Little Mikey didn't take the quarter. And while we like money a lot, it's quite an impressive statement by our administration.

It seems that our university is above going for congressional handouts and being reckless with taxpayer money—a novel idea that, when you think about it, is actually kind of cool.

What isn't cool is that while ASU is being at least semi-admirable and noble money-wise, our higher-education competitors are still eating up billions of federal dollars. And for what? According to the list from The Chronicle, projects such as "asparagus technology and production research" and the "Shrimp Farming Consortium."

How is this allowed to continue? Well, we would answer that, but it appears this sham's long-overdue exit from this world is not all that far away. That's because thankfully — miraculously — all three presidential candidates agree that earmarks are out of control. They all favor putting a moratorium on such pork barrel spending. After today, we still might not believe in magic, but we do believe in the impossible — namely, the fact that we could be proud of our university and the entire crop of presidential candidates on the same day for the same thing.