Here’s your sign…

Hester’s reaction to one billboard overblown

You’ve got to hand it to Bart Hester, the laser-focused state senator from Bentonville who is so attuned to the state budget that he sees cost savings on Little Rock billboards while ignoring a blossoming sector of the economy in his hometown.

Hester raised a stink last week when he took to Twitter to claim a billboard promoting the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s degree in dance was proof the state spends too much money on higher education.

“Why higher ed does NOT need increase funding,” Hester’s tweet reads. “They lease a sign to encourage science degrees or math teachers? No they push for dance majors. Lots of hardworking Arkansans subsidizing this. Not ok.”

It seems, according to Hester, that government investment in education should only be about the business of business. Anything else — arts, literature, philosophy — is either a waste of precious resources or a luxury Arkansans simply can’t afford.

Hester apparently assumes educating students about dance, and by extension, any other discipline of performance and visual art, can’t possibly help Arkansas prosper in a financial sense. If that’s true, he better hurry down to City Hall in Bentonville, where an entire economy (along with the associated jobs, commercial investment and commerce) is being built around creative endeavors. From Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to the Bentonville Film Festival to the creation of the Momentary performance space, Bentonville is all in on the financial and social value of the arts.

Hester’s — how to put this nicely? — uncomplicated view of the role of the arts drew a swift rebuke from none other that Savvy Shields, a Fayetteville native and Miss America 2017, who pointed out the value of artistic expression shouldn’t be measured only in dollars and cents, but in what it contributes to a person and a community as a whole.

“I disagree with this on so many levels,” Shields replied. “As an artist and a dancer, I have seen the arts influence, inspire, challenge and transform society.”

The defense of Hester’s comment by a colleague landed like a middle-aged guy attempting a pirouette: with an ungainly thud.

“Really, how so?” state Rep. Bob Ballinger from Berryville tweeted. “How is art education crucial to the advancement of Arkansas?”

Ballinger, too, has missed something big happening in Bentonville.

Perhaps we can forgive Hester, the former Razorback baseball player, for not seeing the value of arts education. Maybe he was too busy learning to hit a slider in college to attend a concert, to take in an art exhibit or, you know, read a book.

OK, that was mean and unfair. Hester’s actually a pretty smart guy — smart enough to see the political advantage of making a fallacious connection between a college’s marketing strategy and the value of investing the state’s money in a Arkansas capacity for higher education.

The billboard in question is part of a marketing campaign for UALR in which a number of academic disciplines are promoted — including computer science and math. Dance is just one of many study areas highlighted. That seems like a legitimate expense for an educational institution competing for students with other similar organizations.

UALR, by the way, offers the only dance performance program in Arkansas, so promoting it makes even more sense.

None of that matters to Hester, who knew that tweeting out an outrageously incongruous criticism about wasteful spending would prompt someone to think, “That Bart Hester, he’s looking out for us.”

It’s interesting to ponder what Hester’s response might have been to a billboard that promoted the college’s offerings to teach a student to coach a sport like, say, baseball. Would that be a waste of money and resources, too?

Hester played ball at the UA’s Fayetteville campus, where intercollegiate athletics are self-funded. But at UALR, whose dance program drew Hester’s ire, state tax money and mandatory student fees are required to fund sports, including baseball. Does Hester think that’s a reason to cap higher education spending across the board, or is it just the dance program? How about vocal or instrumental music, or visual art? What about the largely academic pursuits of history, anthropology or archaeology?

Thanks to Miss Shields, Hester wasn’t able to two-step away from his cynical attempt at making political hay from a silly comment on social media. His tweet was a hanging curve ball, and Savvy hit out of the park.