JOEL

(beginning of fragment) Our business community to repeal that in the future. Now, it’s my pleasure to introduce our moderator for this morning’s program, Bill Goodman. Bill is the host of KET’s Emmy-award winning public affairs series, Kentucky Tonight, and of One To One, the network’s compelling conversations series, featuring in-depth interviews with a variety of interesting people, several again who are here today, who have been on that show, from current and former political leaders, to entertainers, newsmakers, and Bill Samuels, who’s in a category all by himself. He also hosts the KET series Bookclub at KET as well as a number of other KET specials, and he is here to help moderate what is hopefully an enlightening discussion. Bill, take it away.

GOODMAN

Thanks Joel, very much. And thank you and good morning, we’re going to try to get to our key topic here as quickly as we can, I just saw somebody glance at their watch, and we are certainly aware of your time constraints, so we’ll do our best to get this moving. You’re all familiar, of course, from the business community, the terms that we all are using every day: economic stimulus, TARP, bailout, nationalization. The business world is now the world of everyone that is familiar with these new business terms. So, to begin with today the obvious questions, but nonetheless the questions that we want you to think about today. Would it help your business and the region’s economy to have, for example, access to a stream of highly educated, upper income new customers? Access to a pool of well-trained, highly educated, well-prepared potential new customers? Access to any number of cultural, athletic, and artistic advance, and new startup companies that could benefit the health and welfare of your employees, and maybe more importantly, your family. Well, the University of Louisville leadership team is here today to address some of those things, and you know these leaders, and they’re in your program guide, but just very quickly as a matter of introduction: Dr. Shirley Willinghanz, Executive Vice President and University Provost, managing the day-to-day and long range operation of the university. Dr. Larry Cook, UofL’s Executive Vice President of Health Affairs, he heads the University’s Health Sciences Center, located in downtown Louisville. Dr. Manual Martinez, Executive Vice President for Research, who oversees all efforts to promote and support research, scholarship, and creative activities. Rudy Spencer is the President of UofL’s Student Government Association, a political science and communications major from Louisville, he is a McConnell Scholar, a Harlan Scholar, and a member of the society of Porter Scholars, and, of course, Dr. James Ramsey, the seventeenth President of the University, who took his post in 2002. So, as I said we’re going to do our best in the next few minutes to give you an update on UofL’s emergence onto the national and international research scene, academic achievement, and of course the assistance that we’ll talk a little bit about from the Congressional Stimulus Package. But first, Dr. Ramsey, you know I look back at some of your speeches and your notes over the past few months and you’ve been referring to, entitling your speech: “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” and not only did I find that strange because it’s an old movie, Clint Eastwood’s old too, but I did my very best to try to work in to my opening remarks Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler, and I couldn’t do that. So I’m just going to begin and say to you that, as we all try to become more enlightened about the economic recovery that we’re going through, as Joe referred to in the nation, in our state, and in our cities. I want you to talk to us about what kind of pardoner the university can be to the business community in changing the economy. What does it mean for the Louisville economy to have a premier metropolitan research university?

RAMSEY

Well thank you Bill, thank you for all you do, we are big fans of yours and all your work on KET and we appreciate you being here. Ross Devoe at the Milligan Institute did some research not too many years ago and looked at the 30 fastest-growing communities in the the United States, and 29 of those communities have a major research university in their community. So, we’re absolutely convinced that a research university like the University of Louisville is critical to the economic success, in fact, that’s part of our mandate from the state. If you look back at the history of the University of Louisville, it’s a great history, a history that goes back over 200 years. The founding fathers of our community, when they founded this community, they said ’we want this community to be a place of consequence’. and to be a place of consequence we need an institution of higher education, and so the roots of the University of Louisville were formed over 200 years ago. Over that 200 years we’ve accomplished a lot as an institution, we have much to be proud of. But 40 years ago, for financial reasons, we became part of the state system. We were a private institution, and became part of the state system. And as we came into the state system, very kindly the state didn’t know what to do with us. We had professional program much like the programs at the University of Kentucky; medicine, engineering, law, and so forth, and we were a smaller school, we didn’t have the outreach across this state, and so, for a number of years we sort of existed within the state system. But all that changed a decade ago with the enactment of the Post-Secondary Education Reform Act of 1997. First, all of higher education was given a public agenda, and that public agenda is to, its our job, its our focus, its our mandate to be involved in proving economic opportunity and the quality of life for the people of our community, and our state. And the specific mandate, it’s in the law, it’s what we live by daily, it’s what drives us daily, but what’s in the law for the University of Louisville is to be a premier, metropolitan research university. And that state mandate that we were given by the people of Kentucky through the General Assembly, I think is very consistent with the community mandate that you gave to us over a decade ago in the Boyle Report, is that we need to develop new economic clusters within our community. Manufacturing has been and will always be an important part of our state economy and our Louisville economy, but know the numbers and that we’ve lost 80,000 manufacturing jobs since the year 2000. And so we need to create new jobs and new job opportunities and new economic clusters, and so we’ve been given a community mandate to be part of building a strong, vibrant health care/life science cluster, a strong, vibrant logistics and distribution cluster, we’ve been given a state mandate to take our teaching and take our education programs, to take our research programs, and to take our outreach into the community and really make a difference in this community, and make a difference in our state, and that’s what we’re focused on. And our board, as this community, this community supported the reform, not every community, not every institution in the state supported the reform effort, but this community did, and our board of trustees did, and they developed a ten-year plan right after reform, 1998, a ten-year plan to 2008, the challenge for excellence. And, the challenge for excellence said ’here’s what we as the university are going to do, here’s our goals, here’s our strategies, here’s our tactics, here’s our metrics of performance. ’ And we’ve gone those ten years, 1998 to 2008. And last summer, at the board’s annual retreat, they said we met the challenge, we achieved those goals. We’re not where we need to be, we’re nowhere close to where we need to be, but we’ve come a long way, and we’ve changed the culture and the focus of understanding, that we have to drive, and be a key driver of this community and the economy of this community.

GOODMAN

So along with that, well you just said it, the economy of this community, and to more directly address that, you really do believe, and what you’re putting together is a way the university can change the economy in Louisville.

RAMSEY

No question about it, we now have a new plan. The board said ’you did what we asked you to do, in a tough fiscal environment, for the time period, 1998 to 2008, develop the plan that will take us to 2020’, and 2020 was one of the dates established in the Post-Secondary Education Reform Act. So, we have our plan, our roadmap that we as the university will work with. We’ve worked with people in the community in putting that plan together, it does the things that Joel’s talking about, we’ve gone the last ten years from 1,700 graduates a year, undergraduate graduates a year,, to 2,300. Our goal by 2020 is to get to 3,100. We need to provide that creative class, we need to focus on quality, we need to focus on excellence, building the intellectual capital that is needed. We need, and Manny can talk about it, to build research, not for the sake of research, but research makes a difference, in what we call translational research; research that really can transform, whether it’s health care or business processes, and then we need to be engaged in the community every day. All of that is outlined on our 2020 plan, and that’s what we’re focused on, that’s our roadmap, that’s what will drive us everyday from now to 2020.

GOODMAN

Dr. Willinghanz, I read an essay this week written by a teenage young lady in California. She wrote that, as a teenager, she shouldn’t be caught up in this economic downturn, but she was because she couldn’t walk in her neighborhood without seeing foreclosure signs. She couldn’t go to the gasoline pump and use some of her hard-earned money to fill up her tank to go to her job. So, she wanted to impose the question: when will this economic turnaround really begin to occur? So, in listening to what a teenager had to say about it, I want you to talk to us this morning a little bit about job preparation and I want to ask you, if you will tell us this morning, what you tell people about how the university is addressing job preparation, especially through the Metropolitan College?

WILLINGHANZ

Let me start with your broader question, you know, we like to think we’re preparing students for life, not just for jobs. The most recent surveys that I’ve seen, suggest that a teenager today will have 30 different jobs over their lifetime, the way the world is changing. So part of what we have is prepare people who can think creatively, who have a knowledge base, know how to find more information, who know how to work with people, who have that idea of civic pride and civic engagement so that they’re not just prepared to have a job, but are prepared to have a life and to make life better for the community that they’re in. Now having said, it’s also true that we want to prepare them to be able to work when they get their degrees. I know many of your parents in the audience here this morning are also are looking for the day when you can ceremonially close the checkbook, and your young people will be able to handle that for themselves. So job preparation is also important because our students will need to be able to go out into the world and earn a living. We have a new program called “Ideas to Action,” and it will become a signature program for the university. And that program will really emphasize not only the development of the whole person as a student in terms of civic engagement and critical thinking, but will actually require all of our students to do some real-world preparation before they graduate from college. So that could be service learning, that could be internships, that could be co-ops, that could be applied research projects, but the idea is that we’ve got 20,000 people-plus, in our university, and if all of those people do something that helps make this community a better place while they’re in school, that not only helps the community, that gives them some real-world preparation for going into that work force, so by the time you hire them, they really understand what it means to work, and not just what it means to know things. Metropolitan College is probably the best example of this commitment, where you’ll remember that, when UPS was thinking about moving out of the community, University of Louisville, UPS, Metro Government, Jefferson Community College came together and said ’let’s figure out a way that this can be a win for everyone’. So many of our students work at UPS in the middle of the night, catching the planes, moving the packages. They’re also full-time students at the university, they get scholarships, they get books paid for, they get bonuses when they achieve academic milestones, and this is something that helps our students stay in work, in school its helped them learn what it means to have a job, and be committed to all those things that make a good worker, and it’s been a tremendous win for our community, as UPS as seen an extraordinary stabilization of it’s work force, because rather than having turnover every nine weeks, these are people who stay. So that’s a really good example of our community commitment. Let me back up one second too, because you know that teenager you were talking about, being in that community where things weren’t good, our signature partnership program is another example of where we’re partnering with the west end to see if by taking resources that are there and dreams that people there have, as well as resources that the university has to look at those neighborhoods and make sure that no other teenager has to feel that way.

GOODMAN

Rudy, you’re sort of at the heart of all this; it’s all about you, it’s all about the students, it’s all about the success, or in some cases the failure of students. So I want you to talk to us, and maybe enlighten everyone in the room, because we don’t get an opportunity to talk with someone who has your perspective enough. Talk to us about how students are involved in really shaping the mission of the school, and I guess the other question I want you to address is: is the university getting it, is it something that there a real connection that you feel that students and the university are sharing, is the university engaged in the process that you’ve heard already Dr. Willinghanz and Dr. Ramsey speak about?

SPENCER

Well, it’s really interesting to think about the strategic plan, being on the board of trustees, I had the opportunity to actually vote on where we’re going to 2020, but when the state actually gave us that name, to be a nationally prominent metropolitan research institution, most of the students who were at UofL were in elementary or middle school. So, when we start thinking about it now, at least the metropolitan part of working with businesses and trying to figure out how can we enhance what we’re learning in the classroom in the community, and I think the university’s definitely doing that. To talk about the Metro College partnership, or the Ideas to Action or really where we’re going in the future and a lot of the support that student government, this year has been trying to do, this year we focused on the idea of engagement, focus upon campus, community, and civic engagement, and the university has been helping hand-in-hand in trying to make that happen. So yes, the university gets it, and I think students, as they’re coming here to UofL, they’re looking forward to seeing where this is going to go over the next ten years , and the plan really helps to facilitate that.

GOODMAN

Great answer Rudy, but for these people in the audience- let’s expand that just a bit- how would you suggest to them this morning that the business community become more engaged and involved in the community, and especially with the students at the University of Louisville right now?

SPENCER

Well definitely the offering of internships or work-study programs. Basically any opportunity that you can see a student at the University of Louisville to help enhance what you are doing in your businesses. I mean, you have 20,000 students that are in an environment that are always trying to find some way to expand their mind or come up with creative ways to engage ideas, and your businesses could tap into that because we’re only a mile away. So definitely talking to your team, and figuring out how we can incorporate more students into that process so that you can use a resource right there at the university.

GOODMAN

Dr. Cook and Dr. Martinez, you have the tall order this morning of taking us into your laboratory for just a few minutes and covering a lot of test tubes, if you will, very quickly, full of exciting things that are going on in the university, some that you may be reporting on for the first time today, because you just returned from Washington, where you heard a lot about the stimulus package and what it means. But, Dr. Martinez, let me begin with you, and let you inform us on what the university is doing in the area of research. You can mention the federal stimulus package, and really, again, keeping with the theme of today, how the university and the business community can benefit more in the future as we go forward, than we have in the past?

MARTINEZ

Thank you, Bill. I think that the critical point at the moment is the fact that the stimulus package has infused 10.4 billion dollars into the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, and three billion into the budget of the National Science Foundation. These are the two major funders of the research we do at the university. The university has a portfolio that rounds around 150 million dollars that mostly comes from those two agencies, and one of the reasons I came here, I asked to come, and they said ’yes’. It was because, during the years of 1998 to 2003, this University of Louisville was the envy of the country because it was growing faster, five-fold, growing faster than any other institution in the country, from obtaining grants through the NIH. So, I always like to be where thinks are happening and where things are getting better, so here I am, and we’re still doing that. One of the plans that we have for the future is to hire 180 new investigators and scholars. Now, the 180 people usually bring with them, eventually, ten to fifteen other people who ultimately also do research. Now think of it for the economy of the city and the state, what that would mean to have people at that level, and that intensity producing knowledge. Now, the knowledge that we produce mostly relates to researching cancer, cardiovascular and heart diseases, neurosciences, movement disorders, birth defects, alcohol and liver diseases, and now we have embarked on a new, important activity that is renewable energy. I don’t have to tell you all that one of the major problems that afflicts this country is the impossibility of taking energy from other sources than the fossil sources and coal. This would be a major new endeavor of the university. I think it promises to be a major transfer of technology into the community which may result in income for the university. We also are ready to work on new batteries, for the production of batteries. I don’t know if any of you realize that the original battery manufacturing, the significant battery manufacturing in this country, we depend up batteries being produced in the far east, which makes vulnerable to being, sort of blackmailed because we don’t produce batteries. The other aspects of research that are key is something that Dr. Ramsey mentioned, translational research. It means, that everything we do should find it’s way into the community, and into the marketplace as fast as possible.

GOODMAN

Dr. Martinez, let me just interrupt and ask you to talk a little bit more about that. To the business community, to these economic leaders, when you bring a scientist to Louisville and to the region, and they bring ten to fifteen other scientists and researchers with them, how can the community best benefit and be prepared to engage with those people? Why is that so important?

MARTINEZ

It’s critical for the business community. We have a mechanism whereby every time that an investigator finds something new, they disclose it to our Office of Technology Transfer. That’s key because we need to be able to access that intellectual property and have it be owned by the university. The university owns it’s intellectual property. but it’s on behalf of it’s use, there’s no point in having property that sits on a shelf. So what we would like to do is open that up, create a portfolio of technologies, so that the business community can look at it, say what they would like to develop or participate in, and have investors and so on, to partake in that. Take this little statistic: fifty percent of all the biotechnology companies in the world are within a thirty-mile-radius of a University of California campus. Now, why are they there? Because they want to access the talent of the university, and what we would like to do is built up the talent in the university so that we can create companies that will stay here, around the university, and attract new ones to come and seek our talent, and therefore partake from those developments. So if we can achieve that, it will be great, certainly for Louisville, a city that I think is a lovely city, I’ve lived in many cities, and for the state.

GOODMAN

Thank you, Dr. Martinez, and just as a side, Dr. Martinez lived in Houston and Atlanta, and now he’s in Louisville? Smart guy. Dr. Cook, you were on the trip to Washington, you heard what benefit we can have from the federal stimulus dollars, but I want you to talk to us also about the federal stimulus package, the health sciences center, and what we were discussing that, I did not have in my notes before I began today, about your four core missions. Could you just tell our audience about those and how they’re ingrained in what you’re doing, and how the community should be aware of those?

COOK

Well, as I think the audience appreciates the health sciences center, it carries a major part of the mission of the total university. We play a large role in philanthropy, we play a huge role in research, we play a select role in professional education, and much of the process Dr. Martinez was referring to of, commercialization of intellectual property, actually comes out of the health sciences campus, so we’re very proud of our role. In terms of our four key missions, our principal mission is to be the pipeline for the production of health care professionals, and at any one point in time, we have about 700 men and women studying medicine, almost 400 in dentistry, hundreds in nursing, hundreds in public health, and in addition to that we operate 60 accredited residency and credited programs training another 600 individuals in sub-specialties of medicine. So, these are all individuals that will all emerge into the community, join the work force, generate incremental intellectual property. Our second core mission is to help the university achieve it’s goal in becoming a major metropolitan research university. I’ve been here long enough to remember the days Dr. Ramsey referred to, being a private college, being really a blue-collar health sciences campus. We trained great doctors and dentists and nurses, but it was the Boyle Report and the Higher Education Act that really energized the university, by introducing the dimension of research, and I can tell you that it’s been one of the most energizing and transforming events in the 30-plus years I have spent here, it’s just an incredibly different place. Our third mission, of course, is providing clinical care, we do that though our University of Louisville hospital, through our many clinics and practices through our partnerships with the many hospitals in the downtown medical campus, through our outreach to central and western Kentucky, trying to be the repository of cutting-edge technology, and knowledge as it applies to clinical care, and the relevance of that is, of those three missions that I have referred to, two of them are what we call non-revenue sports- you don’t make any money on education, and you don’t make any money on research. Both of those have to be supplemented in the academic health sciences center, they way they are supplemented is through the clinical enterprise. The fourth mission is what Dr. Martinez referred to, and that is our participation in the transference of intellectual property into commercialization.

GOODMAN

Very quickly, tell us what you learned about the federal stimulus package and how the cancer center can be a benefactor from an enormous infusion of dollars, which will carry the mission of the center even farther.

COOK

Well, Dr. Martinez referred to a dimension, one dimension of the stimulus package that is enormously important to the health sciences center that is the 10.4 billion dollars of infusion into the NIH. Probably no entity within the health sciences center better exemplifies the utilization of the Bucks for Brains program, and the utilization of NIH resources than the James Graham Brown Cancer Center. The Cancer Center, is exemplified in the creation of the cervical cancer vaccine. It is the kind of entity that actually creates medications that can cure and prevent a cancer. Dr. Miller who’s here this morning, our director, tells me that our cancer center in Louisville has more cancer drugs in the pipeline, than any other cancer center in America. So we certainly expect our cancer center to grow and to successfully compete for those NIH dollars, but the dimensions of the stimulus package, in our aspirations, to renovate some of our research facilities, some of our educational facilities, the relief that money is going to provide to the Medicaid program in Kentucky, which is important to all of the hospitals in our health sciences campus, the emphasis on e-Health, think of what we could accomplish in health if we could develop and internet-like program for health information with a common language, and having everyone’s health information instantly accessible, no matter what emergency room they enter, what doctor’s office or hospital they enter. So there’s a lot of potential health care stimulus within the stimulus package.

GOODMAN

As I promised the audience, we’re going to do our best to wrap it up here in the next few minutes, to try and get you back to the real world in just a few minutes. There are some cards on your table, if you have some questions, I know a lot of you have to leave at around 9:00. We’re going to be here a few minutes after 9, we’ll try to address those questions that time. So if you have those, there will be some people that you can pass those to, and we’ll try to answer as many of those as we can. I’m going to ask another, sort of final question to the entire panel, but there is someone else in the audience, you know, we’ve gone through about 50 minutes to discussion here, and only Dr. Cook mentioned sports just a minute ago, although there was a round of applause earlier in some introductions. But, Tom Jurich is in the audience at one of the back tables, and I’m gonna ask him for just a minute to come up and take the microphone and he’s got a couple of things to say to you this morning.

JURICH

Thank you Bill, thank you very much for having me. You talk to us about the teenagers with the economy and that’s very interesting to me, because I have twin teenagers and I promise you they have zero clue about the economy, and hopefully when they get through UofL, Shirley, they’ll have a much better understanding. It’s great to be here and I can tell you, and I’ll be very brief because I know everybody wants to get out of here, but everyone in this room has pretty much touched our athletic department and have done so many wonderful things to help us grow at probably the most rapid pace in this country’s history, and we’re so appreciative of it, but I tell you what, what you can do to help us is what you can do for the university. I’m going on my 25th year as an athletic director, I’ve worked with and for many, many institutions that have great leadership. But I promise you, there’s not a better A-plus team than what you have sitting right up here, and that goes for Rudy also. Rudy is a tremendous student body president. It’s an incredible family of a university, and Dr. Ramsey in 2002 brought a great theme with him that everybody kind of looked around and said ’what did that mean’, and it was ’one university.’ And one university has grown on our campus, I think to be a model for the rest of this country, because what it did, it took all of our individual departments, took us out of silos and put us all together, where we all pull for each other, and I think that’s the greatest thing about teamwork. You know we’re always associated, you know we’re always worried about winning and losing, that’s why we have scoreboards, but the great thing about it is the team that Dr. Ramsey and this great team that is assembled, so I thank you, I urge you to support them in the way that you have supported us, because I tell you, that’s a much bigger mission. We’re just the icing on the cake, so we thank you very much, and Bill, thank you for having me.

GOODMAN

We’ll wrap it up this way, I’m gonna ask all of them to address this core question for you, and that is: what would you like at the University of Louisville, the leaders that you are, what would you like to leave this audience in the ballroom today realizing about what you said? Where are, we always talk about connecting the dots, where do you want them, if they haven’t already thought through this process, where do you want them to connect the dots? I was going to save this last one for Dr. Ramsey, but I’m going to ask all of them to address this. I was going to refer to, I want you to do it in a tweet if you can, and I was gonna say to Jim, if he didn’t know what a tweet is, see Rudy after this thing’s over. But, if you’re on twitter, it’s 140 characters. That’s not very much time for you to speak because we are on a time deadline, so try to do it as briefly as you can. Let’s just start at the very end, Dr. Willinghanz, and what do you want this audience to know, what’s the most important element they can take away from this conversation?

WILLINGHANZ

A great university educates great students, in this community, over 200 million dollars has pumped back in economically from the 12,000 alums from UofL who work here; 3,000 new businesses started by our alumni, so this community really benefits from the work force, and the great students, and the academic programs that really prepare students to go into the work force.

MARTINEZ

Support science, support education into sciences, support inquires in the budget for NSF and the NIH. Come to talk to us, if you need something from me, you can find me from the webpage of the university. I’d be delighted to talk to any of you about the intellectual property, how we handle it, how we would like to engage all of you in developing it, and I look forward to hearing from all of you.

COOK

I’ll steal a phrase from Dr. Ramsey: ’great cities have great universities’, and we are either going to succeed or fail together.

SPENCER

The students at the University of Louisville are really looking forward to working with you because if we benefit from your work, you will benefit as well.

RAMSEY

Well, I’m an economics professor, I can’t say anything in 140 characters, I mean, to set the record straight. Thank you for your support. Kentucky cannot be what it needs to be as a state if we don’t have a great metropolitan area, a great urban area like Louisville, driving the train, and so we want to be your partner in making a great community, and making a great Commonwealth of Kentucky.

GOODMAN

Let me say that we perfectly understand if you have to leave at this time. There are some questions that we’re going to be here just for a few minutes to address, but we appreciate it and I’ll ask you once again at the conclusion of the questions to give this wonderful panel a round of applause. Here’s a question, the first one: Can we use the university for private business research and development?

MARTINEZ

Absolutely. We have programs where we could do that. We have, for example, our Clean Room is available for use by industry. We will be opening our biosafety laboratory in the Shelby Campus sometime in the summer, and is our intention to develop contracts with the business community, with big farmers, etcetera. And there are other possibilities, so please, as I said, don’t hesitate to contact me and we can to whatever we need to do.

GOODMAN

And to follow up on that from either Dr. Martinez or someone else: Does the university receives stimulus money for research development and other activities outside of health sciences?

RAMSEY

Yes. The governor and mayor announced yesterday the money that’s flowing through the state but there’s significant money as Manny mentioned, is in the NIH budget, the Department of Education budget, Department of Energy budget, and other agency budgets that we have to go in and apply for. And certainly the energy area is an area of great focus for us, where there are a lot of opportunities. So in addition to the money that is flowing through the state, and then will flow through the local governments, we’ll be very aggressive and very active in applying for money from other federal funding agencies.

GOODMAN

And this question is also similar: Is there business innovation, research, or invention-type assistance available? In other words, if someone came to you, would there be other assistance, whether it would be dollars or management or grant writing? You know, the Courier-Journal does an excellent job this morning of spelling out the criteria that has to be met. It’s not just walking up to the door and knocking and holding your hand out. There’s a grant-writing process that’s pretty arduous. So, will there be some of that type of assistance from the University of Louisville, for the business community?

MARTINEZ

We have a division that does exactly that. A division that will look at ideas and if you bring a formed idea, we could help you improve it, and maybe help you edit it. Yes.

GOODMAN

Alright. Dr. Ramsey, what are your thoughts in respect to Kentucky’s plan to revise the tax code, and how would that benefit the university, i.e. the business community?

RAMSEY

I’ve been a proponent of that for many years going back to KERA, and we tried to do some things then. I think Jim Hostess slipped out, we talked about the concept of the sales tax on services, that was a concept that we introduced in 1990 as part of KERA, but our tax system is an-equated, it’s not a tax system that meets the needs of the modern economy, there have been starts and stops over a long period of time going back to KERA in 1990. Bereton Jones put together a task force headed by Bill Leer and our good friend Pat Milloy to look at our tax system. Governor Patton focused on this, Governor Fletcher focused on it, so we’ve talked a lot about it, we just haven’t had the political courage and will to do what it takes. But we need a tax system that meets our needs to grow as an economy, that restores the elasticity and is not a patchwork of the tax changes that we’ve made and continue to make.

GOODMAN

Sounds like a Monday night topic on Kentucky Tonight.

RAMSEY

It’d be a great topic.

GOODMAN

That’s all the questions we have, but we’ll do a short shout-out here real quickly, does anybody have anything else? If not, we’ll just say thanks, very much, to the panel, very informative. Let’s give them a round of applause.