DaytonDailyNews.com

Last week Ohio State University beat Vanderbilt University and you would have thought it crushed Michigan. The fuss in Columbus was that big.

The occasion was that E. Gordon Gee was recruited back to OSU as president, after he had issued pronouncements that even wild Buckeyes could not drag him away from Tennessee.

Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, of Kettering, was among those who could not contain his enthusiasm. "In my book," he said, "we've just won the NCAA national championship of college presidents."

Mr. Gee, who says he owns 900 bow ties, is both a character and a visionary. Known for frankness — he called former Gov. George Voinovich a "dummy" — and being a supreme fundraiser, he can be as good for Ohio as he is for Ohio State. When he's selling, promoting and advancing the university, Mr. Gee also will be doing all the same for the state.

Mr. Gee departed Ohio State in 1997 after seven years. He made no secret that among his frustrations was Ohio's lack of support for higher education and the state's ambivalence about having a flagship university. In the 10 years since he left, much has changed.

The consequences of neglect of Ohio's colleges has never been more apparent, with maybe the best example of that being annual tuition at Ohio State in 1996 was $3,660; last year it was $8,676.

Yes, Ohio State is on a mission to raise its prices and be more selective about its students, but tuition didn't more than double in a decade only because administrators concluded that many families would pony up more; another big factor was the state's disinvestment.

But not all the change since he left has been bad.

For instance, among the people who helped recruit Mr. Gee was Gov. Ted Strickland's chancellor of higher education, Eric Fingerhut. He assured him that it's a new day in Ohio, and, as evidence, he bragged about the next two-year budget that substantially increases funding for public colleges and freezes tuition for the next two years.

There are undoubtedly other things that Mr. Fingerhut told Mr. Gee. Among the chancellor's goals is to stop dancing around the fact that Ohio State is — and should be — Ohio's pre-eminent university. That's not something the politicians like to say too loudly for fear of getting into trouble with the other institutions. But c'mon.

With almost 60,000 students and upward of $600 million in research awards, there's nothing wrong with singing Ohio State's praises. There are still plenty of other students and roles for the other universities to capitalize on.

When he was president previously, Mr. Gee traveled around not just Columbus, but the state. Once he settles in, Dayton needs to welcome him home, too, and remind him of the multiple collaborations that this region has with Ohio State.

To name a few, they include involvement at the Air Force Institute of Technology and with the Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute; joint research projects at the University of Dayton Research Institute and with Wright State; and support for Central State's fragile, but important, Speed to Scale program.

Mr. Gee prides himself on being a consummate builder of relationships. Lucky for him, there already are many between Ohio State and the Dayton region. The way he can help is to insist that they keep growing.