Leadership is needed from Boston `eds' and `meds'

(Second in a series)
OUTSIDE OF Red Sox celebration and Big Dig turmoil, what makes today's Greater Boston globally famous and distinctive? Answer: its universities, colleges, and research hospitals and laboratories, a collection of intellect arguably without peer on Earth. Take these institutions away and the regional economy would shrivel in the face of an exodus of hundreds of thousands -- faculty to staff to students, MDs to lab workers.

ADVERTISEMENT

OK, it's not going to happen -- great academic institutions, unlike today's footloose corporations, are geographically rooted. Still, the health of academia is critical to the Boston region. The eight top universities alone enrich the Boston area's economy by $7.4 billion a year, according to the 2002 "Appleseed" report. Even when town-gown issues rankle, citizen groups and politicos do well to remember how their bread is buttered.

Conversely, smart universities and their hospitals -- the "eds" and "meds" -- have to keep in mind how very dependent they are on the region -- for workers, community safety, public transportation, water and sewer, schools for staff, and much more.

And, we suggest, these great institutions have to start thinking of the regional leadership role they've always shunned. In today's economy, they're the big show in town -- the lead employers, lead purchasers of goods and services, lead economic actors. They need to assume the role accorded top dogs in every citistate across the globe -- to be key regional conveners, policy leaders, deal makers. They need to fill in for the "absentocracy" of leading business firms that are no longer headquartered here, or far less civically active.

If the region has a severe housing affordability and supply problem, for example, academic leaders ought to be in the fore, not only acknowledging that their own students are part of the supply problem, but banging on political doors, seeking zoning changes, offering some capital of their own -- whatever the problem requires. If state investment in public higher education lags seriously -- as it clearly does, notwithstanding rising distinction of the University of Massachusetts -- then the universities, collectively, need to warn publicly about the perils of a skill-short regional work force.

But are they ready? In our university interviews, we heard repeatedly: Someone must ask us to take leadership. Otherwise, we were told, no individual university president or chancellor would dare step forward for fear of offending others or being rebuffed.

Just maybe, that's about to change. Thirty-seven colleges and universities located within Route 128 have signed up in recent months for a Carol R. Goldberg Seminar series focused on Boston academia's civic role. The effort, cosponsored by the Tufts University College of Citizenship and Public Service and the Boston Foundation, recruited top-level leaders -- Northeastern President Richard Freeland and former House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran.   Continued...