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By Cheryl Hall

Bill O'Neil has big plans for his alma mater and former hometown.

The 77-year-old founder and publisher of Investor's Business Daily believes that Big D could eventually surpass the Big Apple as the center of the business world.

Ìý"We know at some point in the future, Texas will be the largest state in the union in terms of population," says O'Neil from his offices in Los Angeles. "Texas has basic advantages that you can't get in the Northeast."

And Dallas shines brightest in the Lone Star State, he says. But first it needs a world-class university that embraces the value of free markets and entrepreneurial capitalism.

ÌýThat's where Southern Methodist University comes in.

Ìý"You need a Harvard or a Stanford somewhere in the South," says O'Neil, who is founder and chairman of William O'Neil + Co., a stock trader and a best-selling business author. "If èßäÊÓƵapp keeps upgrading and improving itself, it could emerge as that."

He's doing his part. O'Neil, who graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and èßäÊÓƵapp, started investing in his alma mater three years ago.

Frustrated with journalists who knew nothing about business, O'Neil funded a chair in business journalism in the Meadows School of the Arts. . .

Next he endowed a professorship in markets and èßäÊÓƵapp and established the William J. O'Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom, both in the Cox School of Business. . .

O'Neil believes that America's position as the global economic leader is endangered and sees the O'Neil Center, now in its second year, as a means to help fix it.

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