Yesterday, President Obama’s campaign swing took him through Albany, where he and Gov. Cuomo heaped praise on SUNY Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. The applause is bipartisan: Mitt Romney has cited Albany’s nanotechnology sector as an area “vital to the economy and to our nation’s competitiveness.”
In other words, state government got this one right. But it’s important to understand just what it got right.
As chairman of SUNY’s Finance and Community College Committees and of its Construction Fund during the period of the NanoCollege’s development, I witnessed its effective and efficient use of state funds and facilities and of SUNY’s higher-education platform to foster economic growth.
Then-Gov. George Pataki announced the Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnologyat SUNY Albany in his 2001 State of the State Address. Since then, the facility has grown to become the world’s foremost innovator in nanotechnology instruction, invention and investment.
The center launched that April with $150 million in funding: $100 million from IBM and $50 million from the state. This public-private partnership helped keep IBM, and thousands of jobs, in New York.
The state money built the buildings, bought equipment and provided tax support for a basic research facility manned by IBM scientists. SUNY’s infrastructure allowed the center to avoid stifling civil-service rules and bureaucracies and to use entrepreneurial research leaders like Alain Kaloyeros.
As the cost of nanotechnology research grew, the center provided a platform for more private entities to participate. In July 2002, semiconductor maker Sematech (another successful public-private partnership) invested $405 million; that November, Tokyo Electron Ltd., announced a $300 million investment.
In the fall of 2004, the center was upgraded to the present College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering — which by year’s end issued the world’s first Ph.D.s in nanoscience.
By 2009, the NanoCollege had developed into what Bloomberg Businessweek called “one of the world’s most advanced cleanrooms for making prototypes of next-generation chips,” and the area had become one of two world-class centers for nanotech research, surrounded by a large and growing high-tech corporate presence.
By supporting basic research in well-crafted partnerships with private corporations, by educating Ph.D.-level scientists and by training technicians at SUNY’s excellent community colleges, SUNY and its NanoCollege provide a model for the proper role of government in promoting high-tech economic growth.
There are plenty of bad models, too: In the early Reagan years, I helped prevent the US Synthetic Fuels Corp. from wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.
Rather than supporting basic research, this Carter-era program simply assumed that certain alternatives (oil heated out of shale; gas from coal) would be the fuels of the future, and was to use $88 billion for loan and price guarantees to promote the commercialization of them.
In fact, oil was headed from $40 to $7 per barrel — which meant the alternative-fuel future was too far off for these “investments” to pay off. Happily, we kept most of the money from going out the door and down the drain.
Whenever the current president compares himself to Ronald Reagan, I remember Synfuels — and how Obama did exactly the opposite of Reagan by tossing taxpayer money at “green jobs” firms like Solyndra, even as the “fracking” revolution was building the real energy future.
SUNY’s high-tech success in Albany is now plain to all. And New York, with its high taxes and hostile regulators driving away much potential business, needs the kind of high-tech economic development that the college has fostered.
“I want what’s happening in Albany to happen all across the country,” the president said yesterday. Yet this success didn’t come from making one big bet on what politicians guessed would be “the industry of the future.” It came from gradually nurturing an education and basic-research facility, with the private sector and market realities providing regular reality-checks.
In other words, success comes from government sticking to its core functions — not trying to pick the winners of the future.
Ed Cox is chairman of the New York State Republican Committee.