MICHIGAN’S URC PARTNERS BRINGING TOGETHER MIDWESTERN BIG TEN/CIC UNIVERSITIES

By Joe Serwach
News Service

Working as partners rather than rivals is central to Michigan’s University Research Corridor as well as efforts to more closely tie together Big Ten universities across the Midwest.

“Through its buying consortium, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation has saved UM a lot of money and we hope the URC is another example of what’s possible when we work together,” said University of Michigan Provost Teresa Sullivan. “The new Big Ten Network is a success and now we’re seeing what else in possible, sharing a lot of ideas for economic development.”

Twelve provosts, the chief academic officers of the CIC (the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago, a former Big Ten member) this summer pledged to work together on efforts to make the Midwest’s economy more competitive and are calling on governors to join them in this effort. Discussions for next steps are ongoing.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) reported that the 12 CIC universities received over $3.1 billion in federal science and engineering support in FY2005, 12.4 percent of the total federal science and engineering dollars — some $25.4 billion — awarded in the United States. CIC universities have been awarded 18 percent of the total NSF science and engineering dollars, and nearly 16 percent of the total U.S. Department of Agriculture dollars.

Two of the three members of the URC, U-M and Michigan State University, are part of the Big Ten and Sullivan brought top Wayne State University officials as well as area economic leaders with her to the first CIC-organized gathering in Minneapolis. Future such meetings are expected.

She noted the Midwestern states are all are major centers of agriculture as well as manufacturing, making them major consumers of energy and working together could help reduce costs and make the region more competitive. Too often, she said, Midwestern states expend energy and dollars competing with each other such as a recent $110 million investment by St. Paul, Minn. to get a Minneapolis business to move across the river.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon, speaking on “The Imperative of Regional Cooperation,” closed a two-day summit by describing how long-time rivals MSU and U-M teamed up with Wayne State in 2006 as part of an alliance focused on leveraging their combined assets to aid Michigan’s economy.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon, speaking on “The Imperative for Regional Cooperation,” closed the two-day summit with a discussion about the attitudes, assets, and alignment necessary to develop a regional economic strategy for the Midwest.

Simon suggested that working together to get more CIC universities represented on the panels and committees that shape the research funding stream, as opposed to competing with one another for individual seats at the table, could help the region drive a research agenda that maximizes the collective assets in the Midwest.

Simon noted, “By aligning our assets we can make a bigger difference for people, prosperity, and hope in our region than we can as individual entities working separately on the same set of challenges.”

Richard Longworth, a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote “Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism” said much of the Midwest is too worried about neighboring states when it should be joining forces with them to challenge global rivals.

Longworth described a unique region where most of the major cities (including Detroit) are on state or international borders, major trading ports, yet noted most of the residents of each state have little idea what is happening on the other side of the border while state governments “have guarded their turf and their prerogatives jealously, long after this made any sense.”

“Throughout the region, new industries like bioscience and nanotech ought to be a slam dunk,” Longworth said. “Bio, after all, is plant and animal science, and nano means the manipulation of subatomic particles to alter materials to create new ones. If there’s anything we in the Midwest ought to know, it’s plants and animals and materials. But even in these areas, the Midwest as a region runs behind, both n research and in creating new industries.”

In his book, released this year, he notes, “The Midwest is not only rich, it’s smart. As we’ve seen, it is home to the greatest concentration of brainpower in the world: it has the huge research universities in the Big Ten, plus other titans like the University of Chicago and Washington University, and research labs like Argonne and Fermi... plus urban universities like Drake, Butler, Macalester and Wayne State... These schools could be the kindling for an intellectual fire that could light the region... In building a Midwestern future, cooperation on biosciences and on the investment to finance it is a good way to start. In fact, some tentative starts already exist.”

The CIC provosts signed a resolution agreeing to “actively explore ways to work collaboratively on solutions, bringing our best from business and industry, public policy and higher education, to contribute to a stronger economic future for the region.”

The resolution capped an economic summit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. University leaders, leaders of regional banks, chief executive officers, government leaders, economists, researchers and professors participated in the summit in an effort to find ways to break down barriers that prevent them from effectively working together to build a Midwestern economy.

Presentations:

The Case For a Regional View: How Can Our States Cooperate in Order to Gain Competitive Advantage?
(390 KB PDF, 12 pages)

The Private Returns to Human Capital
(449 KB PDF, 40 pages)

Income Differences and Interstate Human Capital Mobility
(78 KB PDF, 16 pages)

Valuing the Public Benefits of the Education Provided by Public Universities
(52KB PDF, 30 pages)

Big Ten leaders commit to action at 2008 economic summit