However, it hasn’t done nearly enough to promote itself – at least within the state. I’ve run into development people and even state legislators who have only the haziest idea of its existence.
Possibly Michigan is doing a better job letting the outside world know about it. I certainly hope so. Wayne State President Jay Noren told me last summer that there isn’t any other place in the country that has three huge and hugely diverse universities within such an easy drive of each other. Think about it: The University of Michigan, one of the best public universities in the nation.
Michigan State, the nation’s pioneer land-grant school, a place established in 1855 to conduct practical research for the benefit of the state’s citizens. And finally, Wayne State, where I teach. A top-ranked, Carnegie One university in its own right, centered in the middle of a huge urban laboratory.
That’s a lot of firepower in a very small space, in an area surrounded by manufacturing and engineering talent.
That should make for fertile ground for growing the economy of the future. Except for one thing. You don’t have to be a botanist to know that you have to water plants if you want them to grow.
And if Michigan is to have a future, we need to invest, and invest heavily, in higher education, and in programs that will help build bridges connecting would-be entrepreneurs and things like the University Research Corridor.
I am saying this because we are headed into an economic hurricane that is going to mean some very hard choices for those putting together state budgets for the next few years.
Everything we know now suggests that this recession may be with us for awhile, and that the worst is yet to come. Projections are that next year’s state budget may have a shortfall of $1.5 billion or more, and that recovery may take as long as five years.
When state budgets have come up short in recent years, our legislators have too often found higher education a tempting target.
Politically, it has been much harder to cut prisons or social services. Almost nobody is willing to discuss raising taxes to cover the money we need to run a modern state.
So, the temptation to take an ax to the money the state pays for its universities may be almost irresistible next year. But that’s probably the worst possible thing we could do.
Jim Epolito, the outgoing head of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation told some hard truths yesterday. We have to invest in universities and schools, he said. In nearly four years at the MEDC, he said he had never run into a business that had refused to come to Michigan or failed to expand here because of high taxes.
You get, in other words, what you pay for. And if we don’t invest in a better future, we aren’t likely to get one.
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