Members in the News
UTD president stumps for Dallas to build an 'MIT of the South'
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 16, 2009
Cheryl Hall, The Dallas Morning News
Summertime is often downtime for college presidents. But David Daniel has spent the past three months on the go, holding "presidential gatherings" and trying to bring the University of Texas at Dallas to the forefront of the business community.
"Don't worry," he says at a breakfast event hosted by a downtown law firm. "I'm not going to ask you to pull out your checkbooks."
Not at that moment, anyway.
Forty years ago, the Texas Instruments Inc. executives who founded UTD set out to create the "MIT of the South." But the school, planted in the country fields of Richardson, has always been somewhat out of sight, out of mind.
Daniel, president of UTD since 2005, is trying to change that.
"It's fair to call these stump speeches," Daniel said last week in his office. "I'm trying to answer the central question: 'Why should Dallas care?' "
His central answer: Dallas-Fort Worth is missing out on billions of dollars in economic wealth because it lacks a premier academic research university. "Great research universities are amazing economic engines."
His proof: Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni have founded 4,000 companies that employ 1.1 million people and generate annual sales that nearly equal D-FW's gross metropolitan product of $285 billion.
Austin, boosted by the University of Texas, attracted more venture capital investment in 2007 than Houston, D-FW and San Antonio combined.
"You take MIT and Harvard away from Boston, and Boston becomes no different from Providence, Rhode Island," he says. "Take Berkeley and Stanford away from the San Francisco Bay area, and I don't know what kind of city you have. UT-Austin has transformed Central Texas."
Daniel is intent on joining the club.
More accurately, he wants UTD to become a member of the Association of American Universities. Its 60 elite research universities garner about 60 percent of all federally funded research. The remaining 40 percent is divvied among the other 4,000 or so colleges and universities across the United States.
California has nine AAU members, New York seven. Texas has just three – UT-Austin, Texas A&M University in College Station and Rice University in Houston.
"Of the top 10 most economically productive cities in the country, only one doesn't have an AAU member – and that's Dallas-Fort Worth," Daniel says.
Cutting edge
Curtis Carlson, a partner with Hunton & Williams LLC, which hosted an event last month, came to Dallas from the law firm's Richmond, Va., office three years ago. So he's familiar with the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle created by the ripple effect of the University of North Carolina, Duke University and North Carolina State University.
"When I think of areas that are doing cutting-edge, high-tech research, that's what I think of," Carlson says. "It doesn't make sense that this doesn't exist in a metropolitan area that's as vibrant and relevant as Dallas."
Although Daniel thinks it will take 10 years for UTD to be truly competitive with the country's best universities (the so-called Tier One schools) and another decade before it can meet the AAU grade, there's an imperative to get things rolling now.
As a result of the recently enacted Tier One bill, Texas' seven emerging research universities will receive matching funds for donations specifically given for endowed chairs in research, professorships, graduate student fellowships or facilities. The greater the gift, the higher the match, and donations of $2 million or more get a dollar-for-dollar infusion from the state.
Come Sept. 1, $25 million will be up for grabs by UT schools in Dallas, Arlington, El Paso and San Antonio; the University of North Texas; Texas Tech University; and the University of Houston.
Come Sept. 2, it's likely to be completely taken.
"Any prudent person like me is trying to get as many ducks lined up by Sept. 1 as possible," Daniel says.
UTD's 60-year-old president was the primary force behind the legislation. He wrote the white paper that convinced the Legislature that there was a need for such support. And he came up with the solution to the thorny issue of which universities deserved this financial shot of adrenalin.
Those that garner private donations get the public support.
Private donations
"The state does not have enough money to just throw cash at any one of us and build a great, world-class university," Daniel says. "The fundamental idea was, 'Let us compete for community support.' If Dallas thinks this is important enough, it needs to come through for us."
That's not to say this has been dog-eat-dog among local institutions. Several of Daniel's recent pitches have been made jointly with Jim Spaniolo, president of UTA, and UNT president Gretchen Bataille.
"We want to play nice in the sandbox for purely selfish reasons," Daniel says. "Pittsburgh, the recession-proof city, has the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon literally right across the street from each other.
"I'm dead serious when I say the better SMU is, the better UNT is, the better UT-Arlington is, the better we will be."
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