For $50,000 the University of Connecticut bought a consultant's report concluding, as was announced with fanfare this week, that the university has a big economic impact on the state.

Anybody could have told that to the university for free. So did UConn want the report to show that life in Connecticut might imitate art? The report sure does evoke the opening scene of the movie "Animal House," which highlights the quotation inscribed on the monument to Faber College founder Emil Faber: "Knowledge is good." In government even celebrating the obvious costs money.

More likely the university commissioned the report to deflect criticism generally, of which it has earned plenty under the administration of its new president, Susan Herbst, criticism that the Senate chairman of the General Assembly's Higher Education Committee, Stephen T. Cassano, D-Manchester, nevertheless dismissed the other day as mere harassment. Heaven forbid that Cassano's committee might ever have to undertake any critical oversight.

The consultant's report said UConn generates $3.4 billion in economic activity in the state each year - as if anyone has been proposing to abolish the university. Of course there have been complaints that this economic activity includes a lot of big salaries at UConn, including Herbst's own half-million dollars per year, which comes with two houses, as well as annual pensions for retired professors that far exceed $100,000. Further, the other day the state auditors reported that UConn's economic activity included a million dollars spent on a computer program the university couldn't use. Then there are the $1.3 million UConn paid this year to settle lawsuits accusing it of negligence in handling sexual-assault complaints and the $251,000 paid by the UConn Foundation for a speech by Hillary Clinton.

None of this has evoked comment from the Higher Education Committee.

The consultant's report, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said, shows that UConn is "a unique resource that can be leveraged to create jobs." It sure can, like the job at the UConn Foundation just created for the chief of staff of the Senate Democratic caucus. While the Higher Education Committee has had nothing to say about that too, in private at least the Democratic senators may have wished their aide the best in his new sinecure, whose responsibilities will include lobbying them for the university, apparently an exemption from the state's "revolving door" law.

But the report was most self-serving for promoting the perpetual motion theory of economics. Every dollar spent by the state on UConn, President Herbst proclaimed, returns $11 in economic activity to Connecticut.

Yes, UConn brings in a lot of money through grants from the federal government and foundations, and that's great, but it's only what universities do. And it's not as if the money Connecticut puts into UConn would sit around doing nothing otherwise. It would be spent and recirculated wherever it resided, even if those who spent it might not do it as self-righteously as the university does and might not pay a consultant to certify them as a credit to the planet.

Not fully grasping what was happening, Tom Foley, the Republican nominee for governor, denounced the UConn report as a "political puff piece" written to boost the campaign of his Democratic opponent, the governor.

While the governor eagerly associated himself with the report, it will serve him far less than it will serve UConn's own campaign for political supremacy. After all, governors come and go but higher - that is, more expensive - education is forever, and Foley himself has had nothing to say about UConn's excesses. Those excesses may not be placed on Connecticut's agenda until both UConn basketball teams have a losing season.