PACKET EDITORIAL, Jan. 15
By: Packet Editorial
It was surely no more than ironic coincidence that at precisely the same time Princeton University was hosting a conference Friday touting New Jersey’s leadership in scientific research, innovation and high technology, the Ford Motor Co. was announcing plans to close its assembly plant in Edison by 2004.
But while the timing of these occurrences may have been mere happenstance, the messages they send not only to New Jersey’s political, business and academic leaders but to every working man and woman in the state are very closely related. There is a reason Prosperity New Jersey and the Innovation Garden State Alliance sponsored their first "Innovators Conference" in Princeton just a few days before a new governor was to take office. And there is a reason Ford, after years of hinting that it would one day close the Edison plant, chose this particular recessionary moment to announce it would indeed shut down the 52-year-old Middlesex County landmark and put more than 1,600 people out of work.
The conference organizers and Ford’s management see the same handwriting on the wall. New Jersey’s economy may have been driven for decades by the auto-assembly factories, petroleum refineries, chemical plants, textile mills and other manufacturing facilities that once dotted the Garden State’s distinctly industrial landscape, but those days are long gone. This is not your grandfather’s New Jersey. It isn’t even your father’s.
In a span of about 30 years, suburban pharmaceutical and telecommunications campuses have supplanted urban petrochemical factories as the dominant symbol of New Jersey’s economy. Sprawling complexes housing Bell Labs scientists, AT&T executives, Aventis Pharmaceuticals researchers and Merrill Lynch investment counselors have cropped up in places like Holmdel, Basking Ridge, Parsippany and Hopewell. Meanwhile, all the textile and steel mills along the Delaware River, most of the rubber and ceramics factories in Trenton and many of the heavy manufacturing plants that lined the New Jersey Turnpike from New Brunswick to Weehawken are gone, either to points south and west or across the Pacific Ocean.
In 1969, production jobs accounted for 35 percent of New Jersey’s workforce; today, they account for 10.7 percent. Over this same period, manufacturing employment in the state has dropped from 892,500 jobs to 433,500.
We could, if we so chose, lament this transformation of New Jersey from a hotbed of gritty manufacturing plants to a haven for glitzy high-tech centers. Or we could embrace it as an opportunity to place the state squarely in the forefront of 21st-century innovation in scientific research and technological development. With so much brainpower at our disposal New Jersey has more scientists per capita than any other state, ranks fourth in the number of patent grants and is home to 10 percent of all workers employed by high-tech firms in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and telecommunications it is easy to cast this choice as a no-brainer.
When James E. McGreevey is sworn in as governor today, he will have an opportunity to start putting into practice the vision he described at Friday’s Innovators Conference: nurturing relationships that have been developing, but have not yet matured into full partnerships, among public, private and nonprofit institutions and corporations engaged in scientific and technological research and development. His idea, and it’s a good one, is to use state government not as a financier at the moment, it couldn’t afford to be one even if it wanted to but as a catalyst, a promoter, a matchmaker for blending the already considerable scientific and technological resources amassed in research labs, corporate offices and academic settings throughout New Jersey into a powerful economic engine that drives the state out of recession and into the high-tech future.
The vehicle for accomplishing this still may be in the conceptual stage, and it’s a long way from the drawing board to a test drive. But one thing is already certain: When New Jersey is ready to hit the high-tech road, it won’t be in a Ford.