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Larry Monteith .

TRANSCRIPT—Interview with Larry Monteith

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(Compiled October 13, 2006 by Chad Morgan)  
Interviewee: LARRY MONTEITH  
Interviewer: Chad Morgan  
Interview Date: October 11, 2006  
Location: Raleigh, NC--N.C. State, Special Collections Research Center, D. H. Hill Library  

LM=Larry Monteith
CM= Chad Morgan  

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

CM: Thanks for agreeing to speak with me, and I wanted to start off by asking a little bit about your background and how you originally came to work at NC State.

LM: Okay. The first time that I came here was as a student in 1956 after I was discharged from the navy. I wasn’t able to enroll right away, and I worked in the bookstore until I could enroll that fall. I was married, and we had our first child while I was here. I spent four years here as a student, graduated in 1960. And almost immediately [I] began to teach extension courses where I was located. I was working in Burlington. And then I was in graduate school at Duke. I continued to be in touch with the people at State, and when they had an opening in the electrical engineering department, they invited me to apply. I was given the offer and so I joined the faculty in 1968. I spent 30 years at NC State from the time that I arrived in ’68 to the time that I retired in ’98.

CM: You were dean of engineering, I guess, when the Centennial Campus project originally got underway. Is that correct?

LM: I can tell you—I can give you the dates, but I can’t remember all the beginnings and everything. I was head of electrical engineering from ’74 to ’78; dean of engineering from ’78 to ’89.

CM: So I guess you would have been dean in the very, very early phases, and I wondered if you would talk about your role in those early stages.

LM: Well, I think in the very earliest part, I had no role at all. I don’t recall—Chancellor Poulton is probably the only person that knows the earliest activities. I do recall that he shared with the deans his concern about the shortage of space and the availability of the Dix property. I know there was some public discussion about it at the time. And at some point along the way, he informed us that there was an effort underway to transfer the property to NC State. I don’t know much about how that happened but there is, as I understand it, once the governor and the chancellor decided that was something they both agreed upon, that Jane Patterson, who was the Secretary of the Administration, was key in organizing the transfer so that it would not be one of those long, drawn-out discussions about it happening. So it happened rather quickly. I do recall going down to the old general assembly hall in the capitol building, at which time the governor and Chancellor Poulton spoke and the official transfer took place. I do believe the counsel of State had to approve it, so they would have been an important part of the process to transfer the ownership from, I guess, one department of the administration over to the university, and I’m not sure where the university reports in.

CM: So you became interim chancellor in ’89.

LM: I did. Oh, and before I became interim chancellor, there was a lot that happened, and maybe you’ve heard about it. I was on the committee that began the process of planning. So you may have all of that and you don’t need me to speak to it. But I was on that committee—I don’t know how long it was—but it was a very active committee. The chancellor had decided that this was going to be essentially a third-party project. So he brought in the Carley Group—and you probably have all that—transition up to the master plan that this committee reviewed and participated in. The approval by the city an the county. But we didn’t get approval by the board of governors to make it a third-party activity. So I guess you have that. Because that’s an important part of the early stages.

CM: You mentioned the importance of getting the Carley Group on board with the Centennial Campus project. . .

LM: I think they were very helpful because they had done things like this. And the fellow who headed that up who was—you could tell from the way he handled things he was a visionary and was excited about this, and I think all of us were excited. The thing that we all wondered about was that if the university was going to develop this. We knew the state wasn’t going to do it for us. And we were taking ownership of a piece of property in which we had talked about it being multi-use activity and gone so far as to develop plans for it, and there was no way you’re going to back out and not be totally embarrassed, so I think that all of us wondered just how they were going to be able to do it. And I don’t think we ever fully understood how they would develop the resources and to what extent there would be enough return to them that would justify them being the developer. So when that was turned down that was just a little bit before I became interim chancellor. But there was a very, very important event that happened that if you don’t have it recorded, you ought to get both parties to tell you because I don’t know which is right and which is wrong. But the School of Textiles—you have that on your notes—the fact that they were going to renovate the building down here—

CM: I think I’ve heard about it—

LM: But the reason it’s important is because we needed to put infrastructure on that campus. It was just land. And so it was important that we get infrastructure, you know, electricity and water and sewer as soon as possible. The thing that made that really possible was the insistence of the chancellor that the College of Textiles take the money they had to renovate this building and actually build a new space. Now, the thing that’s interesting is that, at least to the university, we were led to believe that the dean and the faculty did not want to go. Now, as it turned out, as I talked to them in subsequent years, they all felt it was one of the best things to ever happen to the College of Textiles. That’s good. But it was also one of the best things to ever happen to the Centennial Campus because there was a presence there before any public nay-sayers could begin to try any road—because we had just put forward this plan which was not adopted. And everybody was waiting for the chancellor, Chancellor Poulton—that was a very, very brave and a very smart move on his part to say we’re going to put the textile college over here. It was the right move because the vision of it was that it would be a high technology campus, a technology-driven campus. And it brought textiles into the forefront of leading us in that regard. They were there. They responded. And they did an excellent job in that college in representing the Centennial Campus.

CM: To this point, I guess we’ve been talking about Centennial Campus’s development before or right when you became chancellor—

LM: I wasn’t involved in any of that. I was the one who, when the College of Textiles opened, I was chancellor. And I invited chancellor Poulton and Governor Hunt and others to come and speak on this, and they did. This is probably recorded somewhere. But that was a moment in the history that really began to make it possible. What we did is we got the state investment. The state investment helped us with the infrastructure because we had to get it to this building. They made all the right decisions on location to get just far enough away to get enough infrastructure to fill in behind it. So everything was developed and I suppose Claude was probably the one who made those decisions, he and George Worsley, but they were the right decisions. Important ones.

CM: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your perspective on Centennial Campus changed as you became Chancellor.

LM: As a dean, I had a very strong point of view. I though we ought to make it a graduate campus, and really play it up as graduate education. As an institution at that time and especially in engineering and the sciences, we were not generally recognized as national leaders in those fields. I mean, we had good people but our productivity wasn’t high enough to get enough attention. And so it seemed to me, as dean of engineering, if we could really put our graduate programs over there and if we could attract industry and if we could generate patents and businesses, that campus would be kind of like a beacon, just shining all the time, for the state of North Carolina to understand the value this institution has for it in every department. But once the textiles college was put there, my suggestion was put aside, and rightly so because I began to see that this campus could, in fact, accommodate undergraduate education. And then I began to talk to my colleagues in engineering, suggesting that instead of just putting the graduate program over there, they ought to move the entire college over there. It’d be a great asset to the rest of the campus. And I can explain that if you wish but that move is akin to the textile school going there in terms of its importance for the whole university. So when you’re ready to talk about that we can.

CM: I’m ready.

LM: Okay. Once I became chancellor and began to see the way the campus was developing, it made sense for me that the institutions on campus who were going to interact most with the development of that campus should be the ones to decide who goes on the campus. So I put a policy in place that for any outside organization located on the campus—it had to have a campus sponsor, a college, a department. And that college or department had to establish a relationship to that organization that had some long-term activity. It could be part-time work with students. It could be research grants. It could be intellectual property. It could be education. It could be anything, but it had to be something that that entity being there is a value to someone on campus. Not one person but some organization. Having made that decision and having put that policy in place, it became clear to me that the undergraduate college over there would be a good idea. It would give their undergraduates opportunities to work part-time with some of those organizations over there, get good experience, and they would be able to schedule their classes accordingly, and that it would then free up space on the main campus that organizations that wouldn’t normally need to be there would be able to expand. First and foremost the college of management and social sciences, which has always taken space that people vacate. But I put in place before I left a plan that would transition engineering to the Centennial Campus and as they go would re-assign buildings on this campus and we would tie one building there with a rehab here. So if we build a building for engineering, we rehab the buildings they left for them to be occupied, not just give someone the rundown space. And so that’s working beautifully. If you go through the campus, you can see these buildings that have been there a long time rising up beautifully again to be used by colleges that need to be expanding. And so I think all of that move and all the decisions it forced us to make has really given the university new life. It has life for growth. It has life for specialization that can develop within the space that we can provide it. It has places for graduate education. It’s just opened up the entire university for its future development.

CM: How, as a former dean of engineering, do you think that school is prospering over on Centennial Campus?

LM: Well, I don’t really know. I mean, they’ve been over there for a few years. I’ve been in the space. I haven’t looked under the engine so to speak and see “well, how many students you got? How much research you got?” I haven’t looked at that. But I think their attitude—the ones I’ve talked to—is very positive about this new space. Eventually, it’s going to pull all the engineering together so that there can be more cross-fertilization between departments and students. And that is something that I desperately wanted to happen. I used to talk to the former dean, who was the one who moved over there, and share with him that the future of engineering was going to be more in the areas between departments than areas in departments. And that getting them in a geographic area where they see each other, lunch with each other, share with each other will really bode well for their future.

CM: Could you talk about the importance of private, third-party financing?

LM: Okay. It became clear after we had built the building for ABB and a couple of buildings—I was the first one to pledge indirect cost money—I was dean—to build Research I. We had run out of space. We had two or three large projects coming in. And so I—and George Worsley helped me—we arranged to float a bond and to retire the bond with the research overhead from the college of engineering. Now that was the first building. But that, you know, that’s limited in how many of those you can do because you need some of that overhead to pay for the day-to-day operating expenses of the university associated with that. So you can’t pledge all of that to new buildings. I think a few others did it, and we probably—I don’t know this—but we were probably getting to the point where that was no longer the way to fund the expansion. Standing in line to get state funding—the Engineering Graduate Research Center was something I worked on for fifteen years to get it. And it’s an absolutely wonderful building for the college of engineering to expand its research and graduate program in. And it now has my name but that’s okay too. They’ll do well even though they have to carry that burden. But waiting in line was not going to move the Centennial Campus forward. In fact, there were signals coming back to me from people that I don’t need to talk about asking questions like “Is that all there’s ever going to be over there? Seems to be going slow, doesn’t it? Where’re you going to get the money?” And so it did begin to be a bit of an issue. So I put together a committee and I think it was probably the new visitors committee that I established at the request of the chairman of the board of trustees—Bill Burns—and asked them along with others to look at the Centennial Campus and to review what we’re doing and to help us maybe some additional focus activities over there. In the meantime, I had hired Dick Daugherty, and Dick—I give him credit but I don’t know how much his discussion and interaction with the committee or others did it—he became a proponent for us looking for third-party finance, getting people to build buildings on this leased land. That they would take the responsibility to fill but we would be the ones that they would have to go through. Our concern and this is why I put this policy in place [was that] if a third party builds a building and rents it out to insurance companies, it may pay for the building but it doesn’t have much value to the university. So it was a very difficult and challenging activity to get a third-party person to come in and agree under those circumstances to build a building with us having to approve their tenants. But we found someone, and Craig Davis should get a lot of credit for being bold enough to take the risk to come forward and win the opportunity to build third-party buildings. We had one other. AT&T came—I don’t know who built the building. I don’t think we did. But I’m not sure. But now Red Hat is in it so there’s another—if it is a third-party built building, it’s financed other than through us. So we’re not having to carry all that debt of all these buildings, which would have limited our growth rate very much. Now with the new state-funded buildings opening up—the engineering, the new biotech building, the new science building—all of these are going to be attractions for other kinds of partners to come there, creating a demand for more space. I don’t know whether they will go third-party financing or not. There are some things that the board of trustees has to worry about. And there is an eventual call on third-party financing. Eventually the third party will probably want to sell the buildings. That’s the usual exit strategy for making any money. Well, in that exit, we’d sure like to know who’s going to buy it and we’d sure want our agreements to stand up through the transfer. And then some day, down the road, it’s going to be to the point where purchasing the building ourself makes sense for our own internal use. So we’ve got to be paying attention to both of those as this ages. Right now we’re in the early stages but as this ages, future generations are going to have to have those things planned and ready to act when the opportunity comes. Now, that’s third party. That’s what you wanted to talk about?

CM: Yes sir.

LM: Okay. Another part of the activity that goes along with the policy for requiring that there be a sponsor for occupants on the campus was the decision—at the time I became chancellor Claude reported to me, and I decided that he’s the planner. And George Worsley was the person that we depended on to execute the financial part of the planning. And there needed to be a third party involved in this, so I reassigned Claude to work with George as the planner and the person to decide on the finances, and then I placed in the research office the responsibility for approving the customers and recruiting customers to come to that campus. And so we had sort of a two-party group which is one that worked on the planning and finance and one that worked on the occupancy. And we created a committee that we would meet and share—it wasn’t a committee that made decisions. It was a committee that worked to share and to have a discussion in my presence so that I could stay informed on the issues that we were dealing with. That was very useful at that period where we were learning how to recruit clients and the decisions we would have to make as a university to finance and to respond to the clients who were coming there. There were a few other things that we decided to do that were very important. I don’t recall exactly who made these decisions—but to create it so that all of the employees on the Centennial Campus were in an official relationship with the university. I can’t remember what we called it, whether it’s an associate, but there’s a name for it. At that time, they got library privileges, many of the buildings were on our computer network. I do not know if they qualified for athletic tickets and things like that. I didn’t get down to that level of it. But at the time it seemed very important and I don’t know if that has sustained itself, but what we wanted to do was to create a community. We didn’t want the people coming there to feel as if it’s just a real estate deal, just leasing them land. We wanted it to be a partnership where we could add value to their business, and they could add value to our educational enterprise.

CM: With some of the other people I’ve talked to for this project, a lot of their focus has been on attracting those first “anchor" tenants. But I’ve seen where you’ve talked about attracting small start-ups to the Centennial Campus—

LM: There was a bit of a division of views on that. And I’ll tell you what my view was and still is, but it doesn’t count anymore. I felt that if we got eight or ten big ones, it would be over. And they would overwhelm us. We really would not have anything other than a park, a research park. I thought a few large ones that were appropriately chosen would make sense. But I felt that the creation of small businesses out of the technology that we develop on campus—and with technology in the area that would want to locate there. And with that technology and those small businesses hopefully getting large enough that they don’t want to live there anymore so that we become an industry export organization—industries grow up on our Centennial Campus and relocate anywhere. I just thought that that made a lot more sense to me—for the Centennial Campus to have 100 small businesses—than eight large ones. And I still think that that is important for a lot of reasons. You want a turnover on that campus in the sense—I don’t want people to leave tomorrow—but you want to refresh the campus as the technologies and as the activities that are important to the university change. That will happen if you have enough small companies that are in specialty areas. It’ll either get bought up. It’ll get big. Or eventually it won’t exist. It’ll have a useful life. So I just thought that was, to me, unique. It’s not a real estate deal. It is an extension of the university to the people of the state through this process of using our technology to create jobs and to create wealth. I still believe that if this university is able to do that, and do it as well or better than anybody else, it will change our state. It will change our institution. And we will become a leader in a field that’s evolving.

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

CM: What sort of role do you see for proposed amenities on Centennial Campus like the golf course and the convention center?

LM: Essential. Absolutely essential. I know they’re controversial. I know there are people who say, “Why do you need a golf course and a conference center?” But I’m going to tell you why. The universities need to be a magnet. They need to attract people, the best people to come, to stay to teach, to go to school, to visit. Now, it’s okay if we’ve got downtown or somewhere else. That’s not where people want to go. They want to go to something that is very convenient, like getting out and walking to the activities on campus. Those who really do this well have centers. They have places to house large groups, small groups. And they become the focal point of state and national groups that want to go there to have meetings about the most important things. Now, I’ve tried to attend meetings where all of our visitors are scattered over eight hotels all around town, and you’re moving people all over the place. It won’t work! And so if we’re going to be the kind of campus we want to be, leading the state in the technologies and the development of small businesses, we need a place that the best people can come and meet. And stay. And talk. And enjoy luxuries while they’re there. We need that. That is an essential part of the vision of that campus and if it’s not realized, then I don’t think we will make the level of achievement that we’ve set for ourselves.

CM: You’ve talked also about the importance of creative types to the campus. To what extent do you think that Centennial Campus, and maybe more broadly North Carolina, has been successful in doing that?

LM: I’ll give you some—I can’t answer the question, first of all, so I might as well admit what my answer is I don’t know. But I can tell you what I think. We are better positioned than we’ve ever been as a state. I’m writing about this so I’ll give you a little background. When the industrial revolution hit in the Northeast, the South didn’t want any part of it. They were agrarian. They got their productivity out of slaves. They wanted nothing of this Northern economy. So we missed that. When the mass production happened in the 1900s, we were just getting the textile industries from Boston that had left there because of low wages and the owners had beaten the strike. When World War II was over and science became the way the economy was going to move forward, we had no PhD programs that were active and productive in the sciences and engineering. So it went to places that you now think about. Boston, Illinois, Texas, California. It did not come into the Southeast. Now, we’re in a new era in which entrepreneurship, individual initiative, creativity has got to provide jobs. And you have to have a good education to do it. On all these others, we didn’t rank in the upper half of states in any of that. In fact, if you look at manufacturing, we did rank 49 th largest. I mean we ranked highest. We had more manufacturing jobs than anybody else. But our salary per capita was 49 th. So I don’t call that success. We were a manufacturing economy, but we were always getting manufacturing because we had really good, dedicated people, and we had cheap labor, and we didn’t have a union. That’s not the way to build our state’s future, in my opinion. So we’re positioned now with the creativity coming out of extraordinary places in our state. We’re positioned with investment money. But. We’re still two states. We’ve got the Piedmont, and we’ve got the other half. The key to the future success of our state is probably not the Piedmont. It has the resources invested. It has the in-migration of outstanding and talented people. The growth of activities is there in different ways. It’s the other half. And any activity that a university undertakes that is for the state needs to try and figure out how to spread prosperity east and west. Now, what I’m writing is going to try to address that. But it’s a pretty big challenge because if we simply try to do it by moving industries in there, and most of those industries are going to be challenged and there’s not an internal generator of new businesses and industries, then as inevitably off-shore competition competes for those jobs, if you can’t revitalize the community, you’re just going to be going one after another. In this area here, from here to Charlotte, we can revitalize. I mean, the park out here [RTP], if you drive out there, it’s a lot of vacant buildings. A lot of companies that used to be big out there aren’t big anymore. But you wouldn’t know it with the economy because our economy, with these new start-ups and technologies primarily in pharmaceuticals and the healthcare industries and the internet and so on, we’re keeping a lot of people employed, offsetting a lot of those [job losses]. And a lot of those who were laid off were at a level where they could move somewhere else, so it wasn’t like they were the basic, common jobs of our state. So the state is positioned. But it’s behind where its position ought to be. We’re the seventh largest state in the country. All the data I have says we’re positioned about number 14 th. That’s a lot better than we’ve ever been. But we’ve got a lot of work to do because most of that being number 14 th is the other half of our state in education, in health care, per capita income, all the measures that say “How’s you state doing?”

CM: Other states have, I guess, fallow areas, too—

LM: Sure they do. But here’s the key to it. If you go around the country and you look at prosperity, it is not always manufacturing prosperity. I mean, there are a lot of different ways. Some of it is natural resource prosperity and so on. Ours—I hate to put it this way—ours is cultural. If we were in Georgia, I don’t know what percentage of the people live near Atlanta, but it’s a huge percentage, like 75 percent. So the culture of Georgia outside Atlanta would look like ours. But that’s only 20 percent. And so the 75 percent can create enough prosperity to help the other 20 percent. But we’re 50/50. Fifty can’t fifty the other.

CM: That makes sense. How and to what extent do you think Centennial Campus is distinct from other university-affiliated research parks?

LM: I don’t know as of right now. I do know I worked at the Research Triangle Institute in the Research Triangle Park, and at that time most of the parks were mimicking the Stanford Research Center on the west coast, which was where they had very large companies but they also had small companies that became very large companies. And so our park began that way. There were dozens of others of which there are maybe fewer than half a dozen remaining. I think ours is novel. It’s not a real estate park. When we decided that you couldn’t come there unless we had a relationship made us different. It was a lot of risk because what if nobody wants to come and have a relationship? Are you willing to simply make a real estate park out of it? Just a place in which you can offer land in the right place at a good price with a good deal that makes someone want to build. We wanted them to be there not for that reason but because they wanted to be close to NC State University. That’s different. That’s different than most. I have visited a few of them. I admire what they’re doing. Some of them look a lot like us. I visited VPI [Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University] and they have a park right up next to their university, and it’s doing a lot of the same things we’re doing. So I haven’t been up to see it, but it looked, you know… We’ve had people come and visit here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t some places that already have started and are prosperous with a park like ours because I think our people put together a really good operating plan and, to date, I think it’s been successful.

CM: Where do you see Centennial Campus in its development?

LM:It depends on what we’ve been talking about. I suppose that the university—that the engineering will move over there. There’ll be a few more university entities that want to be there or will have new programs that require them to be there. And I think we developed, I don’t know how much of it, maybe a fourth? I don’t know, something of that order. Maybe a third or a fourth of the place. So most of the rest of it, at least for a while, is probably going to look different from what it does right now. It wouldn’t bother me too much if someone came up with a plan, and if we got the golf course and the center, the hotel. There’s a lot of land that’s high ground that’s a long way from us out near the interstate, and they’ve been talking about a flyover to have at that entrance on I-40 out on that end. There were plans for housing over there, that is, private housing out over there where the chancellor’s going to be. And a few large entities over there might make sense since it’s over next to the highway quite a ways from us and [it] might be a real head-turner if we got the right ones. But the further you move this way [toward campus], the more I think the policy we have ought to stand up, that the closer you get in to us, the more we want to have people we’ll work with. A time will come when one other thing is going to be extraordinarily interesting. There’s to be down around the lake a retail-type center. If they really think that through and make it a place people really want to come, because of the things that are there; the environment; everyone’s thinking that’s where I’m going to eat tonight; or that’s where I want to go to get this—you know something that’s special to NC State being here, then that would be sort of a crown jewel because it would attract people to come to the campus who would be here to visit there, and by doing so, they would see the presence, the feeling about this great place like you do at a lot of universities. You know, we don’t have a large fountain and statues. We don’t have the things that, like, when you look at Harvard and those courtyards, and say “Oh, boy, that’s 200, that’s 400 years ago.” We don’t have those sorts of things. So we could have something there because it will be readily accessible; it’ll be on a lake; there’ll be—I don’t know where they’re planning to put the library that’s going over there, but if that were somewhere prominent and that library was built with a spire on top of it that said “Top us”—those are the things that the university doesn’t have that creativity and imagination on that campus could give us. The way this looks, the way it feels represents the whole of this institution.

CM: We’ve hit on this some but what role do you see NC State and Centennial Campus playing in the state’s development?

LM: Oh, it’s developed quite a bit. I had this vision that I articulated a few times that the campus would be filled up with small companies. A hundred, two hundred of them. And that they would be incubating and developing with our graduate students and faculty and then they would need to go somewhere and that Asheville would come down and recruit them and offer them money to come down there and locate. And over a 15- or 20-year period, there would be 100,000 or 200,000 people working in businesses or that came from Centennial Campus spread all over the state. And that people would look at the land grant institution and say that’s the new land grant mission. This is a knowledge center. This is a center of creativity and look what it’s done for our state. The Centennial Campus is the place where all of that has to occur. It can’t occur in the buildings of our academic activity. The research can, but the development, the building of the business, the getting it to the point where it has the capital to be able to take the next step. That needs to happen over there. So that’s my vision and that’s why I don’t feel like we want eight big boxes. We want a mixture. I think Red Hat is a great addition because it’s a creativity business. A lot of our students can probably get jobs there. And I think the wildlife—all of those are good additions. So I have no fault with it. But I do think that we need that hundred or hundred and fifty or whatever it is small businesses—half of them or more using technology coming out of the university, growing and prospering and filling out those two areas that I talked about. That’s where they ought to go.

CM: Alright, I guess that’s all I had to ask you. Was there anything else you wanted to add?

LM: No.

[In the post-interview talk, Monteith hit on some other points he wanted to make and he agreed to turn the tape back on.]

LM: The past extension of our university in the land grant was through agriculture. And it was an extraordinarily successful program. That is, the research I’m doing on my book shows the need for science and agriculture long before our state created NC State to do so. And so we had a long history of a lot of suffering and a lot of things that wouldn’t have had to happen if, with the land grant act, we’d have had a real agricultural school here, 40 years before we ever got it. But anyway, having said that, that model works. But the model today, while agriculture’s still important and they will do their thing, they—agriculture—has gone from being widely [practiced], with a lot of population working in it. I think even up to the 1900s, 90% of our people were agrarian. And so the number of people in agriculture shrunk down to where it’s 5% or so. What we need in extension now is the universities to live through that again, but in a different way. And this time the way is just like it was for agriculture in which you were helping the individual, who was an entrepreneur on his farm, to generate the ideas to be prosperous. Now the farm is substituted by a person living in an urban area or close to an urban area. You have to create the farms, if you will, of opportunity with new ideas that create jobs in each of these areas. That’s what this university ought to be doing as the land grant, is creating the opportunities for prosperity in these pockets that need them. You’re not going to do it by looking backward. You can’t do it by government aid. You got to do it by creating the job opportunity that challenges that region to improve their educational program to take full value of it. That’s what you have to do in these areas. That’s what this university needs to do. That’s why the Centennial Campus as a new part of our extension program needs to prosper as well.

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