Laurie Roberts

opinion columnist

Arizona State University has nearly doubled its tuition over the last decade. Its trustees recently took out a full page ad bemoaning the dilapidated state of state funding to Arizona's universities. Next year, it's attaching a $320 surcharge to its already exorbitant tuition.

Meanwhile, the school was flush enough to hand over half a million dollars last year to the Clinton Foundation.

ASU says the $500,000 wasn't a donation but a payment for the privilege of hosting the Clintons at ASU.

Somehow, that makes it sooooo much better.

"ASU played host to the CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) University in March 2014, which featured former President Bill Clinton and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a program aimed at bringing together college students to find practical, innovative solutions to global challenges," ASU spokesman Mark Johnson told The Republic's Dan Nowicki.

Johnson went on to explain that ASU "co-invested in this educational and promotional opportunity, which was co-produced for our students, and for students from around the world. No state funds were used for this purpose."

Me? I'm thinking we'd be better off co-investing in something other than a chance to underwrite the Clintons spring vacation in Arizona. By my calculation, the school spent $455 per student for the 1,100 students around the world who tuned in to CGIU.

I always knew that ASU President Michael Crow had delusions of academic grandeur, but now we're educating students around the world? Shouldn't we first focus on the zillions who attend the joint?

ASU acts as if the expense should be no big deal because it claims the money didn't come out of its pot of state funding.

It really doesn't matter if state funds were used to boost the Clintons' bottom line. Surely, the funds that were used could have been put to better use than this "educational and promotional opportunity".

Like, maybe, providing scholarships to students who can't afford college without taking on loans that burden them with heavy debt upon graduation.

Like maybe ditching the $320 surcharge that students will pay next year in the wake of the state's $99 millionCQ cut to universities.

If the universities are hurting as badly as their leaders have claimed, surely they could have come up with a better use for $500,000 than further enriching the Clintons.

ASU should disclose where the money came from for this boondoggle.

And it should explain just how many "practical, innovative solutions to global challenges" the student attendees devised as a result of ASU's $500,000 "investment" in the Clintons.



