Hardin's Good Deed
Magazine's Salvation Worthy, Albeit Flawed
Last updated Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:29 PM CDT in Columns
By John Brummett
The Morning News
You could justifiably criticize even Lu Hardin's best deed as president of the University of Central Arkansas.
He took public money to bail out a bankrupt magazine that, as a business model, was fatally flawed. He did it to ingratiate himself with elitists and journalists who adored the magazine. His purpose was less to preserve the writing and reporting than to enhance his own legacy.
I'm told that he was hurt when, at the end of the year of this literary and journalistic nobility using our money, the Arkansas Times didn't name him its Arkansan of the Year.
I well remember the day he told me that, at his behest and via his leadership, UCA was about to absorb and make a nonprofit of the Oxford American. That is the Southern magazine of self-professed good writing that had started in Mississippi with John Grisham's money, but failed financially in a succession of attempts and incarnations after the author's endowment ran dry.
Lu said he needed journalistic and literary people to advise him and the magazine. He wondered if I'd serve on the advisory board.
The initial flattery of this rarefied opportunity kept me from turning down, for a few days, what was a brazen attempt at co-opting. I am ashamed to tell you that I worked hard at some kind of rationalization by which I could accept.
Lu knew what he was doing. He knew I liked the magazine, because I'd written as much. He had this fiefdom at UCA. He'd found a way to reel me into a corner of it.
I'd have been compromised when this recent outrage broke out over Hardin's pay and deceit. I would have been more specifically compromised when it came out that a woman in the magazine's offices had run off with $100,000 in already scant revenue and failed to pay that much or more in obligations.
Lu had to send the magazine another $150,000 from us, albeit as a loan that the magazine is supposed to repay by October. Alas, I don't think he's going to get Arkansan of the Year this time either.
But I began by calling this Hardin's best deed as UCA president.
Magazines of high literary standards simply don't make money. Some of the biggest and best have been turned into not-for-profits. Others have been salvaged by wealthy people or allowed to exist as parts of more vast publishing empires. Being merely regional in scope, and in a region hardly the nation's richest, the Oxford American never had a chance as a strictly private enterprise.
Even if for his own aggrandizement, Hardin's saving the magazine as a division of a public university was odd, innovative, positive, perhaps even a bit daring. Its importance will become evident late this month, magazine insiders predict, when the Oxford American comes out with its special issue on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. The issue reportedly will avail itself of talented and passionate New Orleans writers telling stories never before told and pursuing locally insightful angles never before pursued.
Then, in November, the magazine will present its traditional issue devoted to Southern music. It will enclose not merely the usual CD compilation of rare and influential Southern musical recordings, but a second CD, thanks to the $50,000 corporate sponsorship of CMT, the country music cable channel in Nashville.
Do not try to tell me it isn't vital and compelling to compile, chronicle, play loud, report on, write about and generally revel in celebration of Southern music. Nothing speaks more to our regional culture than our music, which rises from a heritage of poverty as people desperate to express themselves inevitably turned to music.
All distinctly American music either had its full genesis or an essential partial genesis in the South, be that blues, folk, gospel, rock, country, jazz, bluegrass, soul or hip-hop. Nowhere else do these kinds of music so overlap in mutual respect, even homage.
A now departed old boy from Mississippi by the name of Elvis Presley was the king of rock. But he started out in a country derivation called rockabilly. He appropriated the black blues. To the end he insisted on being allowed to record traditional church gospel.
Lucinda Williams, a poet's daughter with ties to Louisiana and Arkansas, came out with a song a few years ago that some critics called "hill-hop," because it blended country, or hillbilly, and hip-hop. And bear in mind that, when those British lads invaded us in the '60s with the latest musical craze, one that changed us forever, they did so with an adoring recycling of our own South's musical heritage.
When the Rolling Stones got detained in Fordyce that time, they were simply driving around looking for the Southern American blues, by which they were enthralled and to which they were thoroughly indebted.
So here's a raised glass to embattled Lu Hardin for saving the Oxford American. Long may the publication live, if, alas, never thrive.
John Brummett is a columnist and reporter for The Morning News in Little Rock.
About this columnist
John Brummett has been writing about Arkansas and national politics for three decades and as a regular columnist since 1986. Email Brummett at jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
Click here to read his blog.
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