University is now key to a state’s economy

The traditional if quaint vision of the American university was an ivy-covered refuge in which scholars could purse their academic inquiries to broaden the world’s store of knowledge.

That has devolved to the more modern, more cynical view of the American university today: a football team with a trade school attached.

By BILL VIRGIN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/virgin/183058_virgin22.html

The task of university presidents these days is to find some tenable ground between those two extremes upon which the modern university can be based, and from which to deal with all the internal and external pressures, issues, missions, complaints, headaches, societal trends and fights.

Consider the typical agenda for a college prexy: trying to keep the athletic department out of trouble and squeezing more money out of the Legislature and trying to defuse the latest athletic department scandal and finding classroom slots for students and, whoops, there goes the athletic department again.

(Lest you think I am piling on to the well-documented travails of the University of Washington, I’m not — that’s the Go 2 Guy’s job. Besides, I live in a glass house when it comes to this issue. My own alma mater, Ohio State, has compiled a long and ignominious résumé of athletic department misbehavior.)

To that full plate has now been added one more task: Bail out the state’s economy.

Universities have long been part of economic development, anyway, because of the research they produce that is commercialized by startups and existing companies, and because of the graduates and faculty members who become entrepreneurs.

But that was more by happenstance than design.

Today, though, governors and economic development authorities are deliberately and specifically designating universities as a key component in generating new economic activity, not just through training and education but as centers for creating new technologies and commercial ventures.

Read through the speeches and press releases from the governors, and you’ll see repeated references to using state-supported universi- ties as engines of economic revival.

Read through releases from universities themselves, public and private, and you’ll see just how broad the effort is.

A sampling: Colgate University has started a Partnership for Com- munity Development to boost the economy of the upstate New York community of Hamilton. The Uni- versity of Dayton in Ohio is part of what’s called the Genesis Project to revive a neighborhood in that city.

Michigan Tech in Houghton has helped organize a state SmartZone to help diversify the economy as the region’s core industry, mining, declines. Allegheny College has a Center for Economic and Environmental Development to help revitalize northwestern Pennsylvania.

Purdue and Indiana universities offer such programs as funding for faculty entrepreneurs, research parks and an agency to help companies develop commercially viable technology. Cleveland State has helped launch a new business development center. North Dakota State has a new research and technology park in Fargo.

That barely skims the surface, but it does so enough to raise some interesting questions. Given all the other things they’re dealing with, should universities be involved in the economic development business? Do they even want to be? Are they equipped to be? If not, how are they going to have to change to be significant contributors to economic development?

The answer to a couple of those questions — should they be and do they want to be — is yes, said Carol Harter, president of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. "Universities see themselves as central to these efforts," she said.

While there will always be entrepreneurs who succeed without a college degree — a certain local software mogul comes to mind — the world’s increasing technological complexity suggests that the concentration of research power at colleges is more likely to spin out next-generation ideas and companies.

Does an emphasis on economic development crowd out the university’s traditional mission? Harter doesn’t believe so. "I’m an English professor, a Faulkner scholar," she said. The liberal-arts core is critical to turning out students who can read, write, speak and do math. "I don’t see any conflict at all."

How difficult it is for a university to add the mission of economic development depends a lot on its culture. UNLV being only 47 years old, Harter said she doesn’t have decades of ingrained tradition to overcome. And because the university is growing, it can hire new faculty members attuned to the vision of the school as a major research center.

And that’s what the school is working toward, in pursuing such niches as hazardous-waste trans- formation and alternative energy, aimed toward providing some diversification to Nevada’s tourism- and gambling-dependent economy.

The model Harter and UNLV are pursuing is what has been accomplished already in Washington, with the federal research dollars that have poured into the state, and with the strengths of the UW in biomedical research and Washington State in agriculture that have supported private enterprise.

But that was the last chapter, and it doesn’t have much bearing on the next few volumes. The UW has a new president. The state will get a new governor in January.

The higher-education system is under greater financial pressure to find spots for undergraduate students.

The competition for federal research money is even more intense, and the feds are expecting states to pitch in more. Other states are doing so.

The higher ed system is asking the state both for more support and for more freedom in controlling its finances. The Legislature is trying to balance those requests with all the other demands on the state budget as well as the touchy issue of tax structure. And the universities have to figure out which areas of research are most promising for generating economic-development return on those dollars.

Is resolving those issues a lot to ask of both government and higher ed? Not really. That’s what both ought to be doing — unknotting the tangled issues of our times.

And whatever the commitment of time, effort and money involved, the payoff is almost certain to be far greater for students, faculty, the schools themselves, researchers, companies, our state, our state’s economy and the residents of Washington than whatever time is spent rescuing the athletic department from its latest episode.

P-I reporter Bill Virgin can be reached at 206-448-8319 or [email protected].