The minute one of them even suggests shutting down athletics, he'll be on the carpet. But Hinckley has shown that there is another path - and reminds us that Idahoans are paying a price for not following it. Few events in a small city's life can outshine the founding of a university. Ricks College's transformation into Brigham Young University-Idaho is obviously enormous news for Rexburg. Its value to the rest of southern and eastern Idaho is less apparent but no less genuine.
Universities generate economic and cultural ripples that spread throughout a region.
Ricks and the surrounding area will benefit from faculty wages, institutional purchases and student expenditures on all kinds of goods and services. Money aside, a university's cultural effects are profound as well. A university raises a community's educational level and its focus on quality of life. BYU's arrival in Idaho automatically reshapes this state's higher education landscape. Idaho State University traditionally attracts a couple of hundred students each year who have completed Ricks' two-year program.