Below are some of Richard Florida's thoughts about the role of the university in the Creative Economy. This is excerpted from his Creative Compact.
Universities are the hubs of the Creative Economy. America's strong university system is the source of much of our best scientific, social, and creative leadership. To this point, though, our modern conception of what universities could or should be has been somewhat limited. The tendency to see universities primarily as the laboratories of new research and technology has grown particularly acute in the last 20 years. They do indeed serve our society as technological and scientific laboratories and amazingly productive ones. But they are much more than that.
Universities also do a remarkable job of fostering the other 2 T's of economic growth: talent and tolerance. On the one hand, they are undeniably our strongest talent magnets, attracting (as we've seen in previous chapters) the best and brightest to our shores. They are the Ellis Islands of the creative age. A huge percentage of the high-tech entrepreneurs that power places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, and the Research Triangle came here originally to attend graduate school. Not surprisingly, almost all of our leading creative regions have one or more great universities.
Higher education institutions are also the community entities that, perhaps more than any other, have opened up city after city and college town after college town to the world. In this respect, they are bastions and breeders of tolerance. A university, with its tendency towards openness to ideas, people, and practices not always considered mainstream, is a natural source of diversity ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural.
Universities and colleges also serve as key building blocks around which older cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh can rebuild. Whenever I am asked how to save Detroit's economy, my answer is the same: Ann Arbor - the future of the Detroit region in the creative age lies more with the technology, talent, and tolerance engine that is Ann Arbor than in stadiums and a refurbished Renaissance center.
The old saying that a picture is worth thousand words still holds ground. The website of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has posted a map of the United States showing locations of the structurally deficient bridges on the National Highway System. Some numbers by states are also available on the website, such as 73,784 bridges are structurally deficient out of a total of 597,340 bridges in the U.S. That makes a little more than 12% bridges as structurally deficient. More than 5% bridges on the National Highway System are structurally deficient. In Indiana, 11.3% or 2,066 out of a total of 18,364 bridges are structurally deficient.
