(05-10-2017 10:02 AM)colohank Wrote:  

(05-09-2017 04:23 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(05-09-2017 04:15 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  JRsec,

OU will still appoint a research minded President. And the SEC will still have an academic perception problem with faculty.

I don't think it is entirely fair as there are some outstanding academic schools in the SEC. But the SEC has not made it a point, nor put any pressure on schools in the league who are not performing well academically and in research to step up their game.

So I see the SEC academic perception issue as a fixable internal problem. But so far little has been done to address it.

Most of those were charter members and in Mississippi the mission of the schools are very similar to those of West Virginia.

The missions of Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and WVU to serve largely rural and otherwise disadvantaged populations are oft-stated excuses for their academic deficiencies relative to most other state flagships, but those schools have been around for a long time (Ole Miss since 1848, WVU since 1867, and MSU since 1878). If their educational mandates were valid and pursued conscientiously over all these years, don't you think those institutions would have managed by now to elevate their populations to the point where such an emphasis would no longer be necessary?

That's taking it too far. Universities are not all-powerful entities.

But the point is fair that there's no reason that Ole Miss and WVU are so far behind other flagships in largely rural states like Iowa and Vermont (or even Kentucky and Alabama). And actually North Carolina was just are rural as Mississippi in 1980.