In 1992, the champion economics student in Arkansas bore the demographically unlikely surname of Díaz. Competing in his second language, this Nicaraguan citizen placed first in a statewide contest for collegians and even went on to a fourth-place showing at the national finals. His accomplishment was trumpeted in a nationally syndicated column by Christian radio personality Paul Harvey. Noting that the young man’s education at a small evangelical college in the Ozarks had been funded by the Wal-Mart family’s philanthropic foundation, Harvey proclaimed him a “Sam Walton success.”1 Indeed, the Christian campus was only a short drive from Wal-Mart’s low-key headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. The scholarship program that took Mr. Díaz from Nicaragua to Northwest Arkansas was born in the Reagan era as a private-sector effort to fight communism in the region that Jeane Kirkpatrick proclaimed “the most important place on earth.” For its Central American participants who had come of age in the 1980s, the intervention could encompass multiple historical ironies. Mr. Díaz himself had passed his teenaged years in the leftist Sandinista army, fighting the U.S.-backed contras and translating CNN broadcasts for the Sandinista intelligence service. A nominal Catholic, he was born again during his military service, when his relationship to Christ was forced into high relief by the constant threat of violent death. But he attributes his real spiritual growth to his experiences in Arkansas, where his professors nurtured the small student body personally and placed their studies in the context of their Christian purpose. “Praying at the beginning of every class,” he recalls, was “unforgettable.”2
