OK, this isn't going to be about economics. And I will not say much about basketball except Wow and Congratulations to Coach Larranaga, his staff, and his players. His team epitomizes what it means to play basketball as a TEAM game. All five starters in their victory over UConn, just as they have all season, scored double-digits in points, played great team defense and rebounded aggressively.
At Friday night's game I ran into former President George Johnson and congratulated him on his dreams for GMU coming true. When Johnson came to GMU it was a commuter school with a community college reputation even though it offered undergraduate and graduate degrees. He saw something others didn't and he acted in a bold fashion to build a great university. He built up the economics department establishing a new PhD program and orchestrating the move of research teams from VPI (Center for Study of Public Choice) and Rutgers (Center for the Study of Market Processes). He also enticed Henry Manne to move from Emory to build up GMU's School of Law, and he established the School of Public Policy, built up the English Department and also the Information Technology group. In short, his dream of building the "Stanford of the East Coast" was pursued as aggressively as one could imagine.
George Johnson, however, also orchestrated the establishment of the Patriot Center --- a beautiful sports arena that is the home of the GMU Patriots.
President Alan Merten inherited Johnson's vision of GMU and built upon it. Both were there on Sunday March 26th to watch the Patriots make history. 
Great post, Pete!
I found President Merten's comments interesting (via ESPN):
'Merten acknowledged that while the university has had two Nobel Prize winners since 1986, the reality is that, at the presidential level, the Final Four can drive conversation.
"I'm going to be at a different table now," Merten said. "I walked by a room the other day that had 10 of our top biologists, some of the best in the world. I walk by and I hear one guy say, 'I was worried about the score at halftime [when Mason was down seven to North Carolina].' So, they weren't talking biology. What this means to us, we don't know yet. One thing it does mean is that we did it right. We did it right."'
More thoughts and a roundup of news and opinions about the game here: http://thinkingonthemargin.blogspot.com/2006/03/final-four.html
Posted by: Brian | March 27, 2006 at 10:28 AM
As a GMU alumni, I especially enjoyed your post. Thanks for giving credit to George Johnson and Alan Merten. I put a link to your post in my blog entry today:
http://www.frankmurphy.com/2006/03/jubilation.html
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