LITTLE ROCK — Some institutions of higher learning in Arkansas may find themselves on the horns of a moral dilemma with the lottery’s advent.

Some of the questions that arise: When is gambling not gambling? Or rather, where does gambling begin and end? If gambling is bad, why is accepting students who have gambling proceeds to thank for their presence in the classroom OK?

According to The Associated Press, at least one “church school” that forbids its students to gamble on or off campus, the Church of Christ-affiliated Harding University at Searcy, has decided to make an exception for those instantwin (or lose) scratch-off tickets.

“We’re not encouraging participation in the lottery, but we’re not disciplining students who do play,” a spokesman said.

Another school, the non-denominational John Brown University at Clarksville, also will continue to “discourage” students from gambling, but won’t be inclined to punish them for scratching off their lottery tickets while on campus. Scratching off lottery tickets in the chapel might be frowned on, but that’s just a guess on my part.

Major public universities in Arkansas that prohibit gambling on campus don’t seem inclined to crack the whip, either, viewing it as a matter of logistics. They rationalize, or so the AP news account suggests, that any gambling on the lottery occurs the moment at which a scratch-off ticket is bought, not when it is scratched off. Since all lottery tickets are sold off-campus, if a student opts to bringone back to the dorm or the student union before scratching it off, he’s not gambling on campus.

“That would be like if you went to the races at Hot Springs and bet on the horses, you left, but your roommate brings you the money from cashing in your ticket,” reasoned Allen Meadors, the new president of the University of Central Arkansas at Conway who was among the first-day scratch-off gamers. “You’re not gambling on campus. You gambled in Hot Springs.”

It wouldn’t be such a stretch, by that reasoning, to argue that anyone who goes to Tunica and plays the slots on someone else’s dime as opposed to his own isn’t gambling at all; the person who provided the money is.

The other question posed is a little trickier, which may be why the AP reporter didn’t get into it while sampling administrative sentiment about scratch-off tickets at Arkansas colleges and universities. However, it was noted that no religious school has said it will refuse the scholarships that lottery money will finance.

Jerry Cox of the Arkansas Family Council, which last year tried without success to kill the amendment that permitted the Legislature to establish lotteries, told the AP that it’s inconsistent to ban some forms of gamblingbut not the lottery. He warned that Harding’s exception could prove a slippery slope for the school depending on what games the lottery adds because “[w]hat if the lottery begins to look like all these other forms of gambling?”

I think I know what he was getting at; keno-style lottery tickets are coming soon to a betting outlet near you. (Keno, for the uninformed, involves paying money for the privilege of choosing numbers and hoping that the Random Number Generator at Lottery Central selects them. In the lottery world, it’s known by names such as Powerball and Mega Millions.) However, many people, gamblers and non-gamblers alike, believe that gambling is gambling whatever its form and no amount of rationalizing could alter that fact.

Where do I come down? On the side of personal choice. If the choice made is all right with the folks who make the rules, it’s all right with me, but spare me this “all gambling is evil but some forms of gambling are less evil than others” business.

By the way, state Sen. Sue Madison’s notion about repealing the legislation that established the lottery was not discussed at a joint meeting of two legislative committees last week as initially planned. It was pulled from the agenda after lawmakers, including Madison, agreed to postpone the matter until December. December of which year is anybody’s guess.-

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Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.

Editorial, Pages 85 on 10/11/2009

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