There was a bit of a buzz around town after the news came out that Laurence Alexander, chancellor at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, had applied for a job elsewhere.
One of the crankier bits was: Well, if he’s not happy here, then he should just go.
We suppose it’s human nature to go there, but it’s not necessarily the right place to take this.
First of all, Alexander has been here for a good, long while, having arrived for work back in 2013. On that point, we don’t recall him, when he came to town, saying anything about wanting to retire here.
And second, looking for jobs that are challenging and provide growth opportunities is what many professionals do. There are just a handful of people at his level in the entire state and not that many places to go in terms of moving up the ranks.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
We can certainly understand the sentiment of feeling like yesterday’s leftovers. Alexander has that outsize personality that draws people to him, and then he inspires them to make things happen. For a person who shines that brightly to suddenly look toward his own future causes a shudder in a community.
The analogy is not perfect, but this reminds us of the college basketball coach who was asked about the junior on his team who was skipping his senior year and was turning pro. The coach said that really, at his school’s level of play, coaches want players who are so good that most of them have moved to the pros by the time they would be seniors.
In that sense, we would actually expect Alexander to be looking for a higher platform from which to use the educational tools and experience he has honed over the decades.
The downside for him is that, because most positions he would seek are in the public arena, they fall under freedom of information laws, meaning the names of everyone who applies for the jobs become public. That’s what happened when he applied for the job at the University of Louisville, a position that he was not selected for. The average person, on the other hand, gets to look and apply for jobs all day long without anyone being the wiser.
Jobs come and go. Maybe one catches his fancy; maybe it doesn’t. He stays or goes. There are a lot of unknowables here, but that’s life. The university is in a better place now than when he arrived going on eight years ago, and he’ll continue to do a good job, we expect, until the day he does leave. That’s all you can ask of the man. That’s all you can ask of anyone.