Hunley illustrates why S.C. remains poor, behind

IN A SMALL, POOR state with 33 public colleges spread out over 79 campuses — that’s 1.7 per county — one university decides, pretty much on its own, to build a whole new campus all the way on the other side of the state. Without any real public debate. Just because the university wanted to.

In a state that needs to focus every ounce of intellectual and political energy and leadership that it can muster on making us healthier, wealthier and better educated, the most powerful man in the government, and one of its most intelligent and creative, spends his time fixating over a tiny footnote of history.

This is the short version of why South Carolina remains first on so many lists on which we want to be last and last on so many lists on which we want to be first: We don’t prioritize our needs and coordinate our limited resources to address those needs.

The example at hand is how the Confederate submarine Hunley, the bizarre obsession of Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, became an excuse for Clemson University to erect an entire new campus.

We are taken aback by the total amount of spending, recently calculated by The State’s John Monk, that has been envisioned for preserving, studying and enshrining the Hunley: Although the $6 million or so the state has spent so far isn’t out of line with the millions we spend on other museums or pouring sand on eroding beaches or building soccer fields and football stadiums, most of those things are of much greater public interest. And all of them are pork — money that could have been better spent. And we simply do not believe officials can justify spending another dime, either to help finance a museum whose financial viability has not yet been established ($7 million from the state envisioned), or to help underwrite Clemson’s $35 million campus by the sea.

But we’re equally disturbed by Clemson’s effort to take advantage of Mr. McConnell’s preoccupation to get what it wants, and what he’s not doing because of that preoccupation. The Hunley isn’t just an after-hours obsession: Every moment the Senate’s leader spends chairing a Hunley oversight committee and making Hunley presentations and finagling with state agencies to get free favors for it is a moment he isn’t spending on issues that matter to our state’s future.

South Carolina has a lot of needs: We need to improve our public education system so all our kids are learning enough to become productive, taxpaying citizens. We need to repair our crumbling highways and improve our dangerous back roads and better police all our roadways. We need to overhaul our tax system so it’s more stable and fair and so it encourages behaviors we want to encourage and discourages behaviors we want to discourage. We need to reorganize our government so the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, and they’re working together, and there’s someone the public can look to for change when it’s needed and hold accountable when things go wrong. (And this is a reminder of how essential it is to include our colleges in that accountability overhaul.)

And somewhere way, way, way down on the list of things we need is a another campus for Clemson, and another shrine to the most divisive and disastrous moment in our state’s history isn’t on the list at all. Until we realize that, it’s hard to see how we accomplish any of those things at the top of the list.