Most North Carolinians brag about our universities for their basketball teams. We know our schools are among the best in the nation academically, but we don’t often stop to think about what that means to our state.
Over the past three days, I have had my eyes opened to on that front. And, believe it or not, I have Duke University to thank for that.
I mentioned Chairman Yonekura of Sumitomo Chemical in a previous posting. What you may not know is that Yonekura-san is a Blue Devil – and a very proud Blue Devil at that. He studied Duke many years ago, but maintains on going relations with a strong network of Japanese Duke alumni.
The president of the Japanese company Eisai, whom I invited to speak to the conference on Monday, is also a part of that Duke network. Eisai is a key player in our biopharma cluster, with over 300 employees and hundreds of millions in investment in Durham.
These captains of Japanese industry spent part of their formative years in North Carolina. Their experiences here shaped their perceptions of the United States and of our state in very positive ways that still pay dividends to this day.
And it’s not simply Duke. Don Hobart, my deputy chief of staff, sat next to a young man from Sumitomo at our dinner on Saturday and learned he was a UNC Tar Heel. Sumitomo had sent him to school in North Carolina – in part due to Chairman Yonekura’s knowledge of the state and the strength of all our universities.
The lesson here is pretty simple. Our universities play a far-reaching role in our economy. Students that come through North Carolina from abroad are like pebbles thrown in a pond. They cast ripples that expand outward. They then intersect and create patterns no one could have imagined when the stones were first tossed.
When I return to North Carolina, I intend to pull some of our university leaders together for meeting – to identify new and promising channels to explore on our next trade mission aboard and to explore how we can help make the experience that our foreign students receive in our state as memorable and as positive as possible.