Sunday, Jul. 13, 2008

Choice of Pastides expresses faith in bold future for S.C.

THE UNANIMOUS decision by University of South Carolina trustees to make vice president for research Harris Pastides the system’s new president is reassuring.

Not “reassuring” in the sense of “comfortable,” or “status quo.” On the contrary, we take the selection of Mr. Pastides as a ringing endorsement of a bold agenda of academic excellence and research-based economic development that has the potential to transform our state, doing much to help us catch up to and surpass the rest of the nation in important ways.

When it was announced that Andrew Sorensen would be retiring after only six years as president of the multi-campus flagship university, we were concerned that with his departure, USC might be deterred from the paths he has led it to embark upon.

Under his leadership, the university has:

• Abandoned the tradition of battling the state’s other two research institutions for the Legislature’s scraps, forming an alliance with Clemson and MUSC that does much to overcome the strategic weakness of higher education governance in South Carolina, pooling resources and energy for the benefit of the entire state.

• Raised South Carolina’s sights toward a potential future that could involve leading the world in such research fields as hydrogen-generated energy and biotechnology. In this area, he and the other two research presidents provided economic development leadership that has been sadly lacking in the State House.

• Embraced and transformed the town-gown relationship with our state’s capital city, setting hopes on fire with a concept — the Innovista — that combines the city’s almost unique opportunity to develop its riverfront and adjacent blocks with the university’s exciting new research initiatives.

Neither the university nor the Midlands nor South Carolina could afford to lose momentum on any of those paths.

Harris Pastides was the one candidate named in recent months who not only understood and believed in these initiatives, but already had his sleeves up working to make them happen. As The State’s Wayne Washington reported Friday, in recent years, “Sorensen thought the big thoughts, and Pastides got the ball rolling.”

He may have been the comparative “insider” candidate, but he is not a “South Carolina as usual” choice. The Greek Orthodox New Yorker made his mark at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Athens in Greece and with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, before coming here in 1998. He is comfortable in Washington’s corridors of power and among the bustling new technology spheres of India.

The challenge that now faces him as president is to bring the university’s promise from potential to tangible reality. To say that’s a daunting task is gross understatement, but obviously USC’s trustees believe he’s the one to get it done. We like to think they believe that because he communicated to them the vision he set out in a recent guest column on our pages:

My hope is that, some day, a book titled Planet South Carolina will chronicle the powerful story of a little state that could — a state that came together to work harder and smarter to create its own place in history.

The only obstacle that could hold us back is a decline in imagination, innovation and conviction, or a setback in time to when internal divisiveness and infighting were rampant.