Something's rotten in Appalachian higher education, and it smells like discrimination

University of Pikeville President Paul Patton and his pal Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo recently pushed the legislature hard to turn UPike into a public institution like any other state school. The hope was to lower the school's almost outrageous tuition so that more kids would have the opportunity to attend.

They would receive money from the legislature, and as you can imagine, this highly pissed off the administrations of every other state school. If some other school is thrown into the funding pool, it's highly likely every school will receive a smaller piece of the pie. As is the case in Kentucky state politics, the idea that makes the most sense for Appalachian counties was murdered by childish bickering and bull-headedness when it came time for a vote.

However, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Blue-Dog Democracy, Patton emerged with a plan. He would lobby the legislature to set aside more than $6 million in coal-severance money to fund scholarships for kids to attend schools in the mountains.

What a great plan! I love it when coal-severance money can be spent on something other than construction of justice centers or building of unnecessary roads so coal companies can have access to coal in the mountains around those roads (*cough* Route 7 from Jeff to Viper *cough*), and I love it when more kids are afforded the chance at higher education who maybe wouldn't have been able to do so without some financial help.

But then, I read more about this little plan of Patton's, which has since been approved by the highest and mightiest Friend of Coal, Gov. Steve Beshear. As the Lexington Herald-Leader's Linda Blackford reported a couple of weeks ago, the scholarship money provided through coal-severance dollars will only go to kids in nine of 25 eastern coal-producing counties: Bell, Harlan, Letcher, Pike, Floyd, Johnson, Martin, Knott and Magoffin. It will also only be available to kids who go to UPike, Alice Lloyd College or the University of Morehead's extension campuses.

So, let me get this straight: Paul Patton, a Democrat, is going to use coal-severance money to fund scholarships for kids in coal-producing counties, but is not allowing kids from certain coal-producing counties to receive those scholarships. The scholarships will only pay for kids to go to UPike, Alice Lloyd or Morehead extension campuses, excluding kids who go to Union College or University of the Cumberlands, which are both located in districts represented by Republicans in the state legislature.

I believe - if memory serves - that that's called bias. Furthermore, it's pretty low-down dirty to deny kids from any coal-producing county the ability to receive any kind of help they can get to go to college for what are obviously political reasons.

Patton claims that he excluded Perry and Leslie Counties - two of the biggest coal-producing counties in the state - from his list because they are served by the University of the Mountains consortium, which is operated by the Kentucky Community and Technical College system. So, all kids that live in Perry and Leslie Counties only go a KCTCS college? None of them want to go to UPike or Alice Lloyd? This little brilliant plan of Patton's will limit the choices of the kids in Perry and Leslie Counties, and any other county not deemed worthy enough to be included on his list, and he knows it. What utter nonsense.

One other piece to this ridiculous puzzle is that UPike is going to create extension campuses in those nine counties, probably using some of the severance money it's now getting from the state for it's exclusionary scholarships. That seems awfully shady to me. I don't think UPike officials would have decided to put these extension campuses in those counties without A LOT of prior negotiation between county and city officials in those counties.

I'm also quite certain that Patton's hope in all this is that most of the kids receiving these scholarships will attend the University of Pikeville. Not that there's anything wrong with that. UPike is a good school and lots of great kids get a fine education there. But it does seem wrong to create a future UPike-student machine by targeting kids in counties closest to Pikeville - six of which do not contain higher education facilities - with a load of scholarship money and telling them they can only use it if they go to UPike, Alice Lloyd or Morehead extension campuses. Since the Morehead campus is in Floyd County and Alice Lloyd is in Knott, I'm pretty sure that kids from the other counties would chose UPike - not certain, but pretty sure.

It took a week or so, but some folks around the region are speaking out against this plan, calling it "bias" and "discriminatory." Perry County Judge-Executive Denny Ray Noble even said that Patton promised him Perry County would be included on the list of nine, but as it turns out, it wasn't.

I had such hope for this whole deal. I had hoped that there could never be opposition to creating a state school in the mountains, because after all, who would object to Appalachian kids being able to obtain a quality higher education close to home? When that failed, and this severance tax idea came up, I thought it would be awesome if that money could actually help coal-county kids for once.

As it turns out, the politics of academia are the most competitive, the most dirty and the most rotten of all.