In September I delivered the Constitution Day address at Lyon College in Batesville. The invitation came from a professor who sits to my left, as do most faculty there, I suspect. The offer was extended because that professor wants students to hear different perspectives. That used to be the ordinary business of a college. Today, on a good day, many campuses count that as a risk not worth taking. On a bad day, academics view conservatives as not worth listening to.

Lyon is a small liberal arts college in a small Arkansas town, and the received wisdom says schools like that for the most part are going extinct--squeezed between sizeable universities (one of which I teach at) and online-degree providers (where I thankfully don't teach). That's not the case with Lyon.

After the talk, I met with Lyon's president, Melissa Taverner. I came away impressed. Taverner has been doing something different. Lyon opened Arkansas' first dental school. It sits in Little Rock and enrolled its inaugural class last year. Almost half of its students are Arkansans! And that's at a private school. (Hey, public schools, I expect a higher ratio from you. I'm talking to you, UA-Fayetteville, amongst others.)

Arkansas needed a dental school very badly. We rank at the bottom nationally in oral health and dentists per resident. And the average Arkansas dentist is over 50 years old.

For generations, our answer was to help Arkansans study dentistry somewhere else.........

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