UA System Hails Its Empire Builder. Students Got the Bill.

Former University of Arkansas System President B. Alan Sugg died Saturday in Houston at 86, and the system he built wasted no time memorializing the man who ran it for two decades. What the press releases celebrate as growth, working Americans should recognize as the blueprint for the student debt crisis.

Sugg presided over the UA System from 1990 to 2011 — the longest tenure in university history, according to Arkansas Online. By the time he retired, the system had swelled from roughly 30,000 students on five campuses to more than 70,000 students across 17 campuses, divisions, and units, with 18,000 employees. He oversaw $2 billion in facility expansion. Campuses awarded more than 150,000 degrees. The system added five community colleges, the Criminal Justice Institute, the Clinton School of Public Service, and more.

Read the press release and it sounds like a triumph. Read the numbers and it sounds like a bureaucracy that nearly tripled its headcount and quadrupled its footprint while the cost of attending college in America exploded. The University of Arkansas wasn't unique — it was following the same playbook every state system used: expand, build, borrow, and pass the tab to families who now carry an average of nearly $30,000 in student loan debt nationwide.

Current UA System President Jay B. Silveria praised Sugg's "outstanding leadership" in the release. Former trustee Tommy May called him "one of the hardest working and most conscientious leaders I've ever known" and insisted Sugg "always kept an eye on becoming better and more efficient for students and families." Sugg himself said upon retiring, "I have loved every minute serving as system president over the past 20 years."

They named the system administration building after him.

Here is what the press release does not mention: tuition data, student debt figures, or the administrative-to-student ratio that defined Sugg's era. By 2011, the system employed roughly one person for every four students. That is not a university — that is an employment program with a curriculum attached. The $2 billion building boom didn't come free. State appropriations covered some, bonds covered more, and tuition covered the rest. Every new campus, every new institute, every new administrator with a title and a salary got funded before a single dollar went to reducing what students paid at the door.

The pattern is bipartisan and national. Republican and Democratic legislatures alike greenlit this expansion for decades. The University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service — founded on the grounds of the Clinton Presidential Center in 2004 — is a monument to the political class training the next generation of the political class, on the public dime.

Sugg served in the Army, earned his doctorate, worked 22 years in Texas higher education before Arkansas. He was by all accounts a decent man who worked hard. That is not the question. The question is whether the empire he built served the students who paid for it, or the administrators who staffed it.

The system remembers its president. The students still carry the receipts.