Fight, fight for old Manufacturing U.

When I read about The Brookings Institution’s proposal to develop 20 U.S. manufacturing universities, my first thought was “what will the mascots be for the football teams?” Purdue already has the time-honored “Boilermakers” moniker but what about the others? Would they be the Michigan Machinists, the Caltech CAD/CAMs, the Lehigh Lasers or, maybe, the Fightin’ Facemills?

All kidding aside, Brookings may be onto something. The decline of U.S. manufacturing is a big problem and big ideas are needed to solve it. In a nutshell, Brookings proposes that Congress designate 20 schools as “U.S. manufacturing universities.” In exchange for at least $25 million annually per institution from the National Science Foundation, the universities would revamp their engineering programs away from “ivory tower” research and toward applied manufacturing engineering. Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell wrote the proposal, which was released in mid-January.

While more federal spending in an era of gargantuan budget deficits may give some people heartburn, there is a precedent for this program. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges to promote learning in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” These colleges developed the ideas and people that mechanized agriculture and grew the mighty U.S. industrial economy.

It’s clear that turning the U.S. into a services-dominated economy was a terrible idea. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we built an economy based on opening endless numbers of Cheesecake Factories and Best Buys, and on tapping into inflated home-equity values to buy boatloads of imported consumer goods. We all know how that turned out.

So, in the hangover from the Great Recession, it’s more apparent than ever that the U.S. must build regional economies based on manufacturing. “In contrast to the debt-driven, consumption-oriented economy of years past, this new economic growth model places great emphasis on innovation activity and advanced manufacturing capacity, which together improve the nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace,” the report stated.