Oklahoma Creates Technology Institute

With the establishment of a $1 million trust fund to serve as seed money, the new Oklahoma Institute of Technology intends to position the state as a national leader in information technology, engineering, and biotechnology. Governor Frank Keating signed Senate Bill 694 into law June 8, creating the public-private collaboration. Tulsa World news reports indicate supporters of the institute anticipate raising a $100 million endowment for the project and securing additional state support.

Several objectives are laid out in the legislation for the institute to pursue, including: 

• attracting and retaining outstanding faculty and graduate students at Oklahoma colleges and universities through public-private partnerships that will support endowed chairs, scholarships, and research grants in engineering, information technology and biotechnology; 
• creating partnerships to facilitate public-private joint R&D projects; 
• implementing distance-learning opportunities for engineering courses and
  
  degree programs; 
• developing strategies to provide technology workforce training; and, 
• identifying strategies to upgrade the rural technology infrastructure. 

Institute governance will be the responsibility of a board of trustees consisting of representatives of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science & Technology (OCAST), the state's academic institutions, an unnamed private institution that grants engineering degrees, the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education, an unnamed private foundation "that has a history of providing grants for capital higher education funding and health research and delivery systems," and five gubernatorial appointees representing the information technology and biotechnology industries. 

SB 694 can be found online at http://www.state.ok.us/osfdocs/leghp.html