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Follow the Charts and Graphs

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By Peter Onear

I recently heard a university president say that somehow she had become the de facto leader of economic development in the region around her university. "Businesses are all looking at me," she complained, "to tell them what to do."

My own university president has had a distinguished academic and professional career, but he would be the first to say that he never took a single course about economic development. Nor did he ever have much interest in taking a course in the subject.

That's when he looks me in the eye and says: "It's all your fault."

Well, it's not all my fault. Politicians share some of the blame.

On many campuses, government-relations officers like me have become the leading proponents of getting higher education more deeply involved in city, regional, and state economic development. Why? Because politicians on every level want us involved.

In the old days (meaning as recently as last month in some cases), colleges were passive economic monoliths. Probably 99 percent of American colleges and universities in the past five years have commissioned one of their own faculty members or an outside consultant to do an economic impact study. Those studies invariably demonstrate that the university means billions (or at least hundreds of millions) of dollars to the state and local economies.

Universities always understood their role to be passive economic engines. We just sat as one big lump on a log and employed a lot of people and built a lot of buildings and bought a lot of services. We helped out local and state economies simply by being. In effect, we subscribed to Sartre's being and nothingness: If you don't give us money and let us be, we said to politicians, you'll get nothing.

But our economic-impact studies have used pie charts and fancy graphs to demonstrate how higher-education dollars turn over and over in the local economy. I bet there isn't a single Rotary Club in a university town that hasn't seen a very nice PowerPoint presentation from the university president about economic impact.

Meanwhile, university government-relations officers like myself dutifully carried the spiral-bound, economic-impact reports to city council members, county commissioners, state legislators, and members of Congress. We solemnly declared that the statistics proved how valuable our universities were and therefore we needed more public financing. (Don't quiz me about the logic of begging for more money while touting how much money we are worth.)

Truthfully, I never saw one of my area legislators stand up in chambers and wave my university's impact study in the face of intractable fellow legislators and demand that they appropriate more funds for higher education. Why not? Well, politicians, being smarter than we in higher education give them credit for, figured out that maybe more citizens of the state should be getting a lot more for their tax dollars.

Maybe, the politicians reasoned, universities should be actively, not just passively, involved in helping their communities. Sure, the building trades and the local Coca-Cola distributor were already profiting from the university (read the impact study), but a lot of other industries and businesses could also be helped if universities would offer free professorial expertise, vacant land, foundation support, and the services of their government-relation officers.

That's where I come in:

• I arrange meetings that would never have taken place before, such as between my president and a wacky entrepreneur who has invented a new type of glue.

• I serve as a tour guide for visiting Asian officials looking to build an unspecified manufacturing plant that for some mysterious reason has to be "next to a university."

• I provide lunch for development bureaucrats in their early 20's who suddenly have tens of millions of "development" dollars to spend (but are afraid to actually dole any of it out).

Those efforts seldom lead to any positive results. Therefore, educating politicians on what universities can realistically do for economic development is crucial. Unfortunately, much of what universities contribute in that realm is not very sexy: A business that partners with a faculty member to serve as a consultant in human-resource development for three months doesn't make the headlines.

So economic development stumbles forward. Politicians continue to ask me why my university can't develop something similar to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. I will hem and haw and say that we're making an effort but maybe a little start-up money would be helpful. At that point eyes will glaze over. Mine. And theirs.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the faculty senate will telephone my president and ask, "Just what does economic development have to do with educating college students?"