Editor’s note: The following editorial appeared in Tuesday’s editions of the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

Larry Perlman is one of only a handful of Minnesotans who have been a University of Minnesota regent, a private college trustee and a chairman of two major corporations. That gives him standing to fret aloud about how today’s trends in higher education funding will affect tomorrow’s prosperity.

Tuition’s climb at state universities and colleges does not worry Perlman, as long as student aid rises accordingly. It’s the other consequence of diminishing taxpayer support for higher education the squeeze on research and outreach at the University of Minnesota that has him concerned.

“The funding of research is absolutely critical to this state’s economic future,” Perlman says. “We need to think about a different way of funding research. The university’s education mission should not get special favorable treatment. But its research mission needs protection.”

Perlman’s caution should not be lost on a new governor and the 2003 Legislature. The next session should be a time of reckoning with reality in state higher education policy.

One piece of that reality is this: The University of Minnesota is not just a big state university. It is dedicated not only to imparting knowledge to students, but also to creating knowledge and extending its benefits to the whole citizenry. Its value to Minnesota goes beyond the number of students it graduates and its support from the state should be based on considerations that go beyond enrollment.

At times, Gov. Jesse Ventura and past Legislatures have acted as if they understood that distinction.

Too often, they have not. The habit of simply slicing the state’s higher education pie down the middle half for the University of Minnesota, half for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities has been hard to break.

Still, lawmakers in 1999 and 2001 wisely earmarked about 12 percent of the state’s tobacco lawsuit settlement for medical education and research at the university. The 2002 Legislature also saw the wisdom of putting a proposed $37 million translational research building on a fast track while Ventura, in vetoing that bonding authorization, dealt university research its biggest setback in many a year.

Giving that building early authorization in 2003 one year ahead of the Legislature’s usual bonding schedule would be a fine show of state support for university research. It would signal that Minnesota is willing to play the role that other states have played to make their public universities research powerhouses.

The winning formula: The state provides state-of-the-art facilities and salaries high enough to attract top investigative minds; the federal government takes note, and funds the investigations.

The facilities needed at the university are not to be minimized. But as Mark Yudof said a few weeks before taking his leave from the university presidency, the big constraint on Minnesota’s research capability is faculty salaries. They’re 27th among the nation’s top 30 research universities. That’s too low.

The Legislature has been responding to Yudof’s appeals for salary help with sympathetic hand-wringing, and a tacit agreement not to fuss as the Board of Regents raises tuition at a double-digit clip. What the next Legislature must see is that the regents have needed big tuition bumps just to stand still on salaries. Raising salaries substantially in the absence of more state help would require more of tuition-payers than they should fairly bear. Students are but a fraction of the many Minnesotans who benefit from the work of research faculty.

Regents chair Maureen Reed says she has been heartened by recent poll findings that Minnesotans understand and appreciate what university research does for them now, and can do for their future.

Let those findings encourage the university to come boldly to the 2003 Legislature and assert, even in the face of a state budget shortfall, that more state money is needed for faculty salaries. Smarter spending of Minnesota’s higher education dollars demands it.