The Seventeenth Robert and Mary Ferguson Lecture
Given by Richard C. Longworth
Senior Fellow
Chicago Council on Global Affairs
At Western Illinois University
Macomb, Illinois
March 25, 2009

It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here in Macomb tonight to give this lecture in memory of Dr. Ferguson and his wife. Dr. Ferguson devoted his life to business education, and I suspect he’d have a lot to say about what’s going on now, both in business and education and about the intersection between the two. The business, the entire economy, of Illinois and the Midwest is changing radically. How we educate our students to cope and compete in this new economy is literally a life or death matter, for them and for this region. Your students will play a big part in how this economy evolves. More broadly, we all have a role to play in educating Midwesterners in general about the realities of this economy. This is really why I wrote my book, as an educational project to help Midwesterners understand this new economy and how it works. Everywhere I go these days, I talk with a lot of Midwesterners who are caught in this global transformation, and I find know their lives are changing, are being changed, not always for the better, and they want to know why, and what they can do about it. That’s what my book is about, and what I want to discuss tonight.

Now, you all know a lot better than I do what’s going on here in the Macomb region. But what I want to do is to put this local impact into a global and regional context, to talk about how globalization is transforming the entire Midwest. Part of this is about economics. Globalization at base is an economic force. But it’s about so much more than economics. The shape of our economy and our economic vitality determine everything else, not only how we work but how we live, how we think, how we view ourselves and the world around us . The Industrial Age literally created our Midwest, our industries but also our towns and cities, towns like Macomb and Moline, and it created our culture. We’re more than a labor pool. We’re a civilization. Now globalization is turning all this inside out. This future has just arrived and we’re still figuring out how to deal with it, how to shape it.

My book dealt with the effect of globalization on the Midwest -- on all of it, from big cities like Chicago and Detroit, to smaller factory towns, to the farm towns and rural areas that give our region so much of its flavor. A lot of this, I’m afraid, was a little grim. If Chicago is booming, most other major cities, like Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis, are lagging far behind. Many of the old factory towns existed to serve a company or an industry that has left town -- places like Dayton in Ohio or Newton in Iowa or Galesburg not far from here. Some of these places might not survive as the towns they once were. A lot of the Midwest’s little farm towns might not survive either -- literally. These towns were founded to serve the farm families in the region. As farms consolidate, the number of those families declines by the year, leaving some of these little towns with no reason for existence.

As I said, a lot of this wasn’t very cheerful. Basically, my point was that the Midwest -- al l the Midwest, from Ohio through Iowa -- does two big things for a living, which are intensive farming and heavy industry, and globalization has tossed both of them up in the air. We’re not coping with this very now -- not our leaders nor our governments nor our schools and universities. Once upon a time, about a century ago, the Midwest was the Silicon Valley of the United States, the wellspring of all the good ideas and innovations that made America tick. Many of these ideas and innovations were so good, so powerful, created so many corporations and jobs, that they’ve sustained us for generations and we didn’t need to have any more good ideas. Somewhere along the way, .we lost the knack of innovation. We made do with what we had. Today, too often, the Midwest looks more like a backwater, having trouble keeping both our jobs and our best young people. I suggested in my book that it’s time for the Midwest to face facts, to stop denying reality, and to work together -- as a region -- to find a future in this new globalizing world.

Since the book came out, a couple of interesting things have happened. First, we’ve elected a Midwesterner as president and he’s given good jobs in government to a lot of other Midwesterners. For a change now, when the Midwest calls Washington, somebody there will answer the phone.

Second, we’re in a global economic downtown, the worst financial crisis in eighty years or so. This isn’t fun for anybody. Here in the Midwest, this crisis is probably going to finish off much of what’s left of the old Midwestern economy.

But crises and catastrophes do concentrate the mind. Denial no longer is an option. When you hit bottom, you have two choices -- either turn out the lights or reinvent yourself into something new, something innovative and competitive. Even before this crisis hit, a lot of Midwesterners were thinking hard about the new challenges, including global challenges, and how to meet them. I think that what’s going on now may be the jolt, the good swift kick, that we needed to reinvent ourselves, to reinvent this Midwest, possibly with a little help from our old neighbors now in Washington.

Home 1 2 3 4 5 Next