Brains or bricks

Companies are already starting to favor intangible assets like talent and creativity over physical ones like buildings.  Earlier this week, we saw how Best Buy is embracing a "post-geographic workplace" where its people can come and go as they please. 

Research universities are the consummate knowledge-driven institutions, but they continue to invest huge sums into real estate and physical assets. Real estate was needed in a previous age. With limited transportation and communication technologies, a need to be around colleagues and libraries, central space was absolutely necessary.

Not so anymore. I am frankly amazed how much of their limited resources universities allocate to owning land, constructing dormitories, building and maintaining office and library space. Instead of  going into the real estate business, why not developers and land-lords do this and focus resources on talent. 

Honestly, I have never, ever seen an institution where space is of such poor quality, inefficiently allocated and poorly planned for.  Professors offices sit vacant for huge swaths of time. One colleagues once referred to his office as little more than a "warehouse for books."  Laboratories can sit fallow. And classrooms are not only inefficiently utilized: the bigger question is to what extent do we even need them.  Certainly, technology offers us the ability to educate and learn outside the classroom to a much greater degree.  I could go on.

But according to a report in the New York Times, these issues have come to a head at Florida State University where the university used an "endowment" established by one of its own star professors, Robert Holton, to support new professorships to finance a new building instead. People have often said it's difficult to control resources in a university environment, but this one takes the cake.

"In gift agreements signed with university officials in 1999 and 2002, he pledged $11 million from his foundation and $18.5 million from his lab account as a faculty member toward establishing Florida State as a national leader in his field of molecular recognition..."

He intended those donations, augmented by contributions from the university and the State Legislature, to pay for erecting a chemistry building with several molecular-recognition labs, and to help endow four professorships in the specialty... “The goal,” Dr. Holton said in a recent interview, “was to compete with — or even better — Harvard.”

Now it has all ended badly. After T. K. Wetherell was appointed president of Florida State in early 2003, and as the building costs escalated, the university decided to drop the endowed positions and to construct a more general kind of chemistry center. So Professor Holton sued in state circuit court to get his money back.

This fall, a judge ordered Florida State to return $11 million plus interest — $13.5 million in all — to the professor’s foundation, while permitting the university to keep and spend the $18.5 million from the professor’s lab account however it wishes.

Ending the litigation, however, has hardly ended the debate. Questions remain about Florida State’s priorities in choosing brick and mortar over faculty positions and specialized research.

I GUESS I’m a religious fanatic,” said Dr. Holton, who got his doctorate at Florida State. “I’m a through-and-through academic. The university and the research have been my whole life. Creating an environment where new things can happen is what I’m about. But that’s not what’s happened here. The moral of the story is that Harvard’s Harvard and F.S.U.’s a football team.”...

“If you’re going to have a world-class program,” he said, “you need certain things. You need to have state-of-the-art facilities. You have to attract the top people in the field. And you can’t just attract one. It has to be synergistic.” More here.