President Gretchen Bataille’s announcement that the University of North Texas is embarking on a major campaign to become a top-tier research university — with a $25 million ante to start the pot — could be the most important news in years, not only for UNT, but for Denton and North Texas as well.

We say “could” not because we doubt Dr. Bataille’s ability or resolve, but because we have heard previous UNT presidents give lip service to the concept of blazing new research frontiers, with results that ranged from negligible to disastrous. (Do the names Klaus Schafer and T. Lloyd Chesnut ring a bell?) We do not intend to dwell on it unfairly or for long, but there is some history to be overcome if Dr. Bataille’s bold announcement is to come to fruition and if UNT is to become a research university of the first rank.

For our part, we think Dr. Bataille and Vish Pradad, UNT’s new vice president for research and economic development, are off to a good start. Twenty-five million dollars does not in itself produce a first-rank research institution, but it is a beginning, and not an insubstantial one.

The six research projects initially chosen by a UNT review committee are serious and promising efforts that take advantage of the university’s strengths as a teaching institution to inspire and augment the new research efforts. One project in particular — research into increasing effective communication in music and the electronic arts — cannot help but benefit from UNT’s incomparable music department and its equally incomparable faculty, and the other five projects, ranging from autism to nano photonics, are equally exciting. As long as UNT remembers and honors its responsibility as a teaching institution, its drive to become recognized as a top research facility can only be considered a positive endeavor.

The benefits of being a nationally recognized research center are manifest, but some of them are more obvious than others. The economic advantages are obvious: Research is an economic engine that can drive not only a major university but the surrounding area as well. The benefits to be derived from this initiative could be all but incalculable, not only for UNT, but for the whole of North Texas.

But even more important, in our view, are the less tangible benefits. As esoteric as it sometimes seems to us non-academics, serious research produces benign ripples around the world. A discovery made at UNT could result in breakthroughs in treating or even preventing autism. UNT research into music education or theory could change the way musicians around the world approach their art.

An institution that produces such research feeds and grows on its accomplishments; it is infused with a pride and a vigor that begets more researchers and more groundbreaking discoveries. This pride and vigor produces ripples, too, into the community that welcomes it and supports it. A rising intellectual tide lifts all boats.

Dr. Bataille’s announcement is invigorating, but it is just the first step. It is somewhat sobering to realize that many of the next steps will require dealing with the Texas Legis­la­ture, an organization that often seems more concerned with eviscerating political enemies and debating what the official State Vegetable should be than with determining the future of higher education in the Lone Star State.

But this is the world that Dr. Bataille and the University of North Texas are living in — a world in which the fate of a university on the brink of greatness may depend on gauging just how hung over a senator from East Hoofprint may be when he lurches into a committee meeting.

It is not easy work, but it is God’s work, and we wish UNT godspeed in getting it done. Much depends upon it.