‘Location, location, location.” That may be the cardinal rule for real estate, but not for higher education. Not any more at least.

V. Lane Rawlins, who will step down next year as president of Washington State University, has been stressing that point in his tenure as top Cougar, and the result has to be regarded as working to the Spokane area’s advantage. And not at the expense of any other region.

Longtime residents of the Inland Northwest will remember the tempestuous turf wars of the 1970s when an aggressive administration at Eastern Washington University forced WSU’s hand in a battle over which school would become Spokane’s four-year public institution of higher learning. Rawlins is not solely responsible for tempering the academic conflict, but since taking over at WSU in 2000, he has helped his school direct its attention to bigger goals. Among other things, his leadership has been instrumental in preparing WSU to become part of a university district in Spokane and the economic spinoffs that can be expected from it.

Rawlins said last week that he will retire in June. WSU regents now have a challenge to find a successor to take WSU forward while sustaining the impact the research university promises to have on this region’s and the state’s economy and higher education.

After years of lip service to the idea of a serious WSU presence in Spokane, Rawlins came here six years ago with a stated commitment to the idea, but he had to overcome a lot of skepticism. He had the advantage of strong relationships with many colleagues at the university where he had been a professor and administrator in the 1980s. Indeed, many faculty members had been stressed by the fear that shifting some of WSU’s activities to Spokane would threaten the Pullman campus’s primacy in the university structure.

To Rawlins, location is overrated. He preferred to see the university as a whole, a program. WSU today has strong branch campuses in Tri-Cities, Vancouver and Spokane. The co-location strategy that he fashioned is working. Important professional and research programs are taking shape, especially in health sciences.

Throughout WSU, enrollment is up, not only in numbers but also in caliber of entering students. Research spending is up nearly 80 percent, and faculty morale reportedly is high.

In Spokane, the Riverpoint campus has blossomed in the past few years, the most recent addition being a $33.8 million academic center to be shared by WSU and EWU, steadily giving shape to a university district that will harness higher education and research with the city’s health care community. In 2008, when a new nursing education center is expected to open on the 53-acre Spokane campus, the first batch of first-year University of Washington medical and dental students will come for classes taught by WSU faculty.

The exciting evolution in Spokane of higher education in general and of WSU in particular offers significant economic development prospects. Many partners have played key roles in this, and Rawlins is one of them. His focus on fundraising, intergovernmental relations, expanded research and the state’s economic health are paying off.