ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610180017
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
VIRGINIA Tech leaders vowed last week to work harder on the state's No. 1 pocketbook issue - jobs - but hinted they'll show no favoritism for the New River and Roanoke valleys.
In fact, university President Paul Torgersen said that while Western Virginia developers were questioning his interest in new industry, he helped to bring Motorola Inc.'s planned computer-chip factory to the state. The company said last year the project will provide 5,000 jobs paying an average of $35,000 when it is built near Richmond.
University administrators last Thursday named 19 business and economic development officials from Herndon to Lebanon, who have been recruited as the university's volunteer economic advisers. Tech wants to be advised how to contribute more to the state's economic growth, without tampering with teaching or research.
"We're prepared to continue what we've been doing, but do more," Torgersen said. "To some extent, it's our turn to step up to the plate."
Two months ago, Torgersen promoted administrator Dixon Hanna to a newly created upper-management economic-development post - vice provost for outreach. Hanna's appointment is on an interim basis.
Tech has been peppered for years with criticism for making outsiders find their own way to campus offices they need, an often frustrating task at an institution with 1,500 instructors, 900 laboratories and 85 research centers.
To remedy that, the university will name a full-time public liaison officer for economic development. That person will work in the Donaldson Brown Hotel and Conference Center in Blacksburg.
Tech's new advisers will suggest what services and projects ought to be part of the economic mission of the university - a mission beholden to realities of budgets. The current economic program of business assistance, facilities and training is limited in what it can accomplish by how much time faculty members have free after teaching and research. Nonetheless, there is pressure from across the state for the university to do more.
The university already considers itself a major economic force in the region, having been involved in development and operation of the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center, the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center, Blacksburg Electronic Village, WVTF radio station and the planned "smart" road.
Now, rather than focus regionally, the university will take cues from the 19-person group with just two members from the Roanoke region and two-thirds either with interests spread across the state or centered in Richmond or Northern Virginia.
To be sure, there are reasons Tech has vested interests beyond the Roanoke and New River valleys. It receives 34 percent of its $475 million annual budget from the General Assembly. It maintains a dozen agricultural research stations around the state and off-campus teaching centers in Falls Church, Abingdon and Virginia Beach. It maintains ties with corporate donors, the state-sponsored Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon and the federal government.
* * *
Tech, unlike many academic institutions, has an extra job to do in addition to teaching its 25,000 students and creating knowledge through research and scholarship. That jobs is public service.
It's been that way since its founding in 1872 as a land-grant college. The federal government underwrote the land-grant universities and colleges with gifts, usually land, to the states. The aid was on the condition that the institutions would teach agriculture and mechanical sciences.
In the beginning, at Tech and other schools, university agricultural extension agents became a resource for crop and livestock farmers. Today, the public wants more from land-grant universities than ever, and, increasingly, insists that it take the form of assistance to industry.
Ideally, Tech could respond by establishing industrial extension agents from the engineering school and other technical departments to go into plants and research labs. But administrators don't yet know how to pay for them.
It's written into the job description of many College of Agriculture faculty and staff members that they will provide free service to the public, such as when a beef specialist visits a cattle farm to investigate possible outbreak of disease. The university's budget includes money to compensate such professors for their time away from teaching and research.
Three other Virginia Tech colleges operate in the land-grant tradition: forestry and wildlife resources, human resources and education, and veterinary medicine.
However, the university isn't set up to pay for extension work by faculty and staff in the colleges of arts and sciences, engineering, architecture and urban studies, and business.
And that's the rub: With the long-term shift in industry toward high technology, it is those faculty members, especially engineers, who are collecting more requests for help from companies or public agencies.
Government and private research dollars do flow into these branches of the university to purchase special assistance. And there is a strong incentive to court those dollars. Faculty members receive half the royalties derived from their inventions.
Without outside funds, however, outreach is volunteer work. "I have to ask them to do it out of their good will," outreach Vice Provost Hanna said.
Some faculty are very active in outreach; some do none at all. Those who perform economic development work can earn points toward merit-based salary raises - if their peers place value on that work. The whole area is open to department-level interpretation, because strict guidelines do not exist.
Faculty awards can put a few thousand dollars into the pocket of an enterprising instructor on a one-time basis, but Hanna said that amount of money is considered only a small incentive to do extra work.
"This softly defined, ill-measured thing called outreach is the lower man on the totem pole in a lot of the parts of the university," Hanna said. "The struggle I have is to try to build a resource base for outreach. There's a very small resource base now," Hanna said.
Paul Metz, president of the Faculty Senate, had this advice: "The reward system has to change."
This isn't a problem unique to Tech. "They're wrestling with the evolution of the mission of the land-grant university," said Gordon Davies, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education.
The second of two land-grant schools in the state, Virginia State University in Chesterfield County, is a much smaller institution that lacks the statewide profile of Tech.
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Before health reasons forced James McComas to resign as Tech's president in 1993, he championed outreach, community-building and economic-development activities that went beyond cooperative extension programs. Serving since 1988, the late, former president reached out to the city of Roanoke, eager for ties with a four-year university.
McComas, with other Tech administrators, helped set in motion the project to renovate and expand Hotel Roanoke. He gave critical early support to the proposed smart road between Interstate 81 near Christiansburg and Blacksburg to reduce driving time between the two communities and to give Tech a test strip for intelligent-vehicle research. He co-founded the New Century Council process to chart a shared, common vision for the two valleys.
Torgersen, who replaced McComas as president, brought strong academic credentials as the former engineering school dean. He continues teaching a class. To be sure, Torgersen also has some ties to Roanoke Valley business. He is a director of Roanoke Electric Steel Corp. in Roanoke. That company's founder, John W. Hancock Jr., in 1988 endowed a $1 million engineering chair that Torgersen still occupies. He puts the extra money back into the university.
But some inside and outside the university have seen the emphasis on outreach drop under Torgersen.
Lawrence Hincker, director of university relations, called Torgersen "the resource president. This is the president who has engaged in the largest fund-raising program we've ever seen. This is a president that is working very closely with the state General Assembly to ensure that the resources are here so that we can accomplish the rest of the things that we want to do, whether it's economic development, whether it's high-quality instruction, whether it's research and scholarship."
At Tech in recent years, outreach "hasn't probably gotten as much attention" as teaching and research, "probably because society hasn't expected it out of us," Hincker said.
But pressure has built on the university to change. For some time, businesses and economic developers have groused about an access problem at Tech. Torgersen summed up their concern bluntly: "Who the hell do we get in touch with?" The problem, he said, was the university lacked a "front door."
Yet, in July 1995, the New Century Council barged in, almost without knocking. It looked to Tech for major new assistance in improving schools, government, safety, roads and other infrastructure, community leadership and general quality of life in Western Virginia. The council listed 150 strategies to accomplish its goals, and declared that Tech had the expertise to launch and even tackle a third of them.
State-level economic leaders called it a model blueprint for regional cooperation. State lawmakers had funded the three-year project's $600,000 cost.
The New Century Council realized it was asking a lot of Tech, so it narrowed the list to five strategies, which asked Tech to:
*Duplicate Blacksburg's community-based Internet network to the two valleys and the Alleghany Highlands, putting more citizens and businesses on line.
*Design new low-cost housing, architecturally suitable for urban renewal or new development.
*Share more university-held technology with businesses.
*Make the region a showplace for fiber optics and wireless communication.
*Hold a one-time summit on the best practices in elementary and secondary education.
Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr., the council's executive director, told Tech in September 1995 that this work could show the rest of the state what a land-grant university and a community could accomplish together.
Tech did not respond. It never has. In 13 months.
"We know they have a state mission. Do they also have a regional mission?" Fitzpatrick asked.
* * *
Joe Meredith, who directs Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg, said he considers the near-constant tug of the university sleeve as a challenge. But he thinks some who question the sufficiency of Tech's commitment to job creation are being a little unfair.
"We're doing a whole lot, yet we're still collecting criticism for not doing more," Meredith said.
For example, about 1,000 people work for nearly 60 companies and organizations at the 8-year-old research center, a for-profit subsidiary of the Virginia Tech Foundation. It's a cluster of 11 buildings paid for largely with foundation funds and no local or state government money.
Faculty or student entrepreneurs created as many as half of the companies there. "To me, that's real economic development," Meredith said. "If you grow your own, they have deep roots, loyalty and are more likely to stay here, hire people and build the economy."
The Corporate Research Center is a variation on the typical business incubator, which requires tenants move out after three to five years to make room for others. At the research center tenants can stay as long as they like.
Also, Meredith said the search for new technologies on which new companies can be based and existing companies can expand is exploding. The university performed research valued at $148.5 million during the 12 months that ended June 30, twice the figure for 1987. The figure represents research grants paid to the university and its research teams primarily by federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense, industry and state government. Tech adds in some of its own expenses even though they are not reimbursed.
The projects range from perfecting computer chips to providing pest control agents a birth-control pill for cockroaches. Researchers are striving for lusher forests and healthier colons. A faculty member invented optical fiber couplers, used in most every long-distance call.
The university received 20 U.S. patents, placing fifth of 57 universities without medical schools, in the 1993-94 school year, the latest for which comparisons are available. In the 1995-96 year, patents rose to 31.
Companies paid $626,838 to use university-owned technology in 1993-94, placing the university 18th. In 1995-96, royalties rose to $1.2 million. The money is shared with the inventors, their departments and the university as a whole.
In the area of training, the university schooled 28,900 people from companies, government agencies and organizations, in 1994 alone. Two-year-old data is the latest available.
Tech also was the driving force for a new Internet database of state university experts. It designed home pages for the state tourism and economic development offices.
Torgersen offered his own recent success stories. In an interview around his large, glass-topped desk, the university president recalled "a very small, intimate dinner for the top people at Motorola."
Lest anyone think Tech isn't already in the economic development recruiting, he explained how he sat in at the dinner, at Gov. George Allen's request, to represent the state's colleges and universities. Torgersen promised the executives tailor-made courses in graduate-level engineering for the plant's new employees - one element of a cash-heavy incentive package accepted by the company.
"In a very small way, we helped secure Motorola," Torgersen said.
* * *
This spring, Allen added his own voice to the chorus of calls for more university-based economic development. He told each university to name an economic development officer.
Torgersen realized Tech's contribution - though formidable - wasn't going to be enough and told business leaders at a March transportation summit to expect news in a few weeks.
It has taken nearly seven months, but the new steps and how they came about are now clear.
Administrators will press internally for more outreach work, while stopping short at this time of sweetening faculty rewards. "I think if I say it and I believe it, hopefully they will be persuaded. I think you lead these sorts of initiatives more by persuasion than anything else," Torgersen said.
The external advisory board, picked from university officials' contacts in industry and government, will meet early next year. Their meetings will be closed to the public, according to Tech officials.
"We'll put them in a room and say, 'Well, here's what we're doing. Tell us what we need to do that we're not doing and I expect were going to get some excellent advice," Torgersen said.
And once that advice is in hand, "it may be a good idea" for the new board to try and suggest some New Century Council strategies to implement, Torgersen said.
"The New Century Council is important to us, but so is Southwest Virginia, so is Northern Virginia and so is Richmond," he said. He said Wayne Sterling, the state's lead economic developer who heads the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, agrees.
Torgersen dismissed a suggestion that some might have expected he and his staff to redefine the outreach mission themselves.
"We need advice. We really need advice," he said. In addition, the advisers represent to Torgersen possible new avenues to foundation or corporate gifts for university programs or possible extra clout with the state, or both.
"This is a strong statement, but I'll make it anyway. More so than other academic institutions in the commonwealth, we have the opportunity to help create jobs in Virginia and we do but we can do more," he said. "Tech can make a major contribution in my opinion to the commonwealth of Virginia by getting our economic development act together and we're going to do that."
LENGTH: Long : 269 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. Dixon Hanna accepted a new leadershipby CNBjob at Virginia Tech for economic development - vice provost for
outreach - to stimulate more initiatives such as TechLab, a private
maker of diagnostic test kits for intestinal diseases. It is in
Tech's Corporate Research Center. color.