More Higher Ed Scamming

At the very heart of the new “government-run” approach to economic development in South Carolina is a program that was supposed to match private sector contributions with public money taken from the state lottery.

Unfortunately, the private sector – along with the administration of President Barack Obama – has decided that South Carolina’s so-called “hydrogen economy of the future” isn’t such a wise bet.

And seriously, who can blame them?

Rather than cut our state’s hundred-million dollar losses, however, the University of South Carolina is now upping the ante by using $800,000 from its athletic program to match yet another fuel cell grant.

Here’s the skinny on the scam from an excellent investigative piece published in yesterday’s La Liberbad (a.k.a. The Greenville News) by reporter Tim Smith:

The University of South Carolina in April proposed using an $800,000 signing bonus from ESPN for a new broadcast contract as the school’s match for an equal amount of a grant from the state’s endowed chairs program for solid oxide fuel cell research.

The request triggered a policy recommendation from staff of the South Carolina Commission of Higher Education that the program’s board allow the state’s three main research universities to use auxiliary fees such as the signing bonus as sources for their nonstate match for research endowments.

Critics of the program, however, are crying foul over the proposal, arguing it is further evidence that the program has drifted from the original idea that matches should attract private investment, federal or local funding.

“When we first heard about this, we thought it had to be a joke,” said Joel Sawyer, spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, who has previously criticized the program and its use of matches. “It’s completely against the intent of this program. The idea of this program is matching public sector dollars with private-sector dollars related to research.”

Ashley Landess, president of the South Carolina Policy Council, a policy research organization, said the proposal is representative of what she sees most wrong with the program.

“The biggest problem here is the obvious one – there is no private sector match because there is no interest,” she said. “There is no real demand for it and there is no desire to pursue it.”

Paula Harper Bethea, chairwoman of the board of the Centers for Economic Excellence, which will consider the proposal during its meeting Monday, said the endowed chairs program has done a “phenomenal” job of attracting private contributions.

However, she declined to discuss the auxiliary fees proposal, saying she did not want to comment on the issue before her board has a chance to debate it.

Well, yesterday the “Centers for Economic Excellence” board did debate it … and gave USC President Harris Pastides six months to secure this $800,000 as a direct donation from ESPN for hydrogen research.

In other words, they said that what USC is doing with this money clearly falls outside the bounds of the program, but to go ahead and do it anyway – which kind of defeats the purpose of receiving a real private industry match for USC’s “Hydrogen Hoax.”

Frankly, the whole thing is almost as pathetic as South Carolina’s football team.

Private sector companies clearly want nothing to do with our government-run economic development plans, so now we’re lifting money from a TV football contract to pay for them? That’s almost as bad as ripping off an entreprenuerial fund for small businesses to pay for additional higher ed boondoggling … which is a major part of S.C. Speaker Bobby Harrell’s “economic development” vision.

South Carolina’s public colleges and universities are supposed to be educating our future generations, not running our economy.

Time to cut our losses on all this pillars and pyramids crap and move on …

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