Commentary: Bucks for Brains.

Byline: Stephen Prescott

Oklahoma lawmakers took a bold step in 1988 when they created the State Regents Endowment Program. That initiative represented a crucial investment in the state's future. By agreeing to match - dollar for dollar - private gifts to endow professorships and chairs at the state's public universities, legislators opened the state's coffers to help attract world-class talent that we could not otherwise afford torecruit. The program has paid off handsomely, fortifying the facultyranks of the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and adozen other public universities around the state. Oklahoma schools now count nearly 600 endowed chairs in total. Those professors have increased the state's research funding and helped build the state's knowledge-based economy. They have enriched our culture and hard-wired Oklahoma into the nation's higher education network. Most importantly,they have improved the quality of Oklahoma's university system and served as intellectual beacons, attracting the best and brightest to our state's classrooms. Yet all this stands in jeopardy. Right now, our state's universities face a backlog of more than $40 million in unmatched private donations for chairs and professorships. Every day those gifts go unmatched means another day that scores of faculty positions remain unfilled. It means national-class researchers who might otherwise be teaching our children and building our state's economy will head elsewhere. These days, just about every state has created somesort of program to match gifts to state universities. Their motivations are just like ours. The programs are in many cases newer, but what they lack in age, they make up for in ambition. Take Kentucky. In 1997 the Bluegrass State decided to bulk up its state's intellectual capital, it created an endowment matching program and dubbed the initiative Bucks for Brains. Yet it did much more than cook up a clever moniker - it put its money where its cerebellum is. In a decade, Kentucky has put up $350 million in state funds to match private gifts for university chairs, professorships, research staff, fellowships and infrastructure. Those investments have reaped tremendous benefits. At the University of Kentucky alone, the program has created more than 250 endowed professorships and chairs, while helping the university triple its total research funding in the space of a decade. Similarly, the Georgia Research Alliance has spent $400 million since 1990 on faculty recruitment and building research infrastructure. In 2007, Ohio is dedicating a staggering $390 million to such efforts. Even tiny Wyoming, with a population of 500,000, has set aside $105 million to match private gifts for endowed chairs. As the end of Oklahoma's 2007 legislative session draws near, budget negotiations will claim many victims. Let's hope the commitment to erase the backlog in the Regents Endowment Program is not one of them. Our state has momentum, and thanks to recent economic developments, bucks. As OU President David Boren has said, "Oklahoma cannot afford any delay at this critical time.We cannot wait seven or eight years to recruit the experts we need."

Stephen Prescott is president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and can be reached at OMRF-President@omrf.ouhsc.edu.