Arkansas' severe image problem

Back when I was in law school at the University of Arkansas, I lived next door to three Palestinians.

They were all engineering students and one of them, Sam, was raised in a Catholic, English-speaking part of his country. One of the most popular shows there was The Beverly Hillbillies.

Sam and his family watched the Beverly Hillbillies for years. When he told his parents he had chosen to attend the University of Arkansas, his mother started crying and was afraid her son was heading off to Hicksville, U.S.A.

Yes, she assumed that the people poor Sam would deal with would be like the unrefined rubes on the Beverly Hillbillies and she was afraid for her son. Even among some people in the United States, Arkansas is regarded as an area crawling with gun-wielding hicks who are racist, violent, lacking even in the most rudimentary social skills and dumb as posts.

Now, Sam's mother and father came to Fayetteville to visit their son and see how he was holding up in college. They were pleasantly surprised, as are most people who bother to spend any time here.

I'll put it this way. The very reason I lived next door to three Palestinians is that all of them were engineering students at the University of Arkansas. I met a ton of international students while in Fayetteville and most of them were earning their degrees in engineering.

Why? Because we've got one of the best engineering programs anywhere and it represents a phenomenal value -- reputation and price bring a lot of international students to the UA. That engineering school, see, is something that people not familiar with Arkansas simply wouldn't expect to find here.

They probably wouldn't expect to discover that the University of Arkansas has the top creative writing program in the nation and the only masters in agricultural law in the nation. I earned my bachelor's degree at Hendrix College in Conway, a school that manages to fly under the radar in spite of the fact that it has a great academic reputation (the fact that it's located in the middle of Arkansas causes a lot of people not to give it a second look, sadly).

That's pretty typical, really. There are a lot of great things about Arkansas that can be regarded as well kept secrets. People who have spent some time here know what the state is all about, and the rest of them can keep looking down their noses at us for all I care. I enjoy our low cost of living, an economy that tends to expand even when other parts of the nation are in financial chaos, a relatively sparse population, the citizens' almost universal distrust of the government and the charming habit of people to keep their noses out of others' business.