CrazyPaco
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RE: USNews ranking
(09-15-2022 01:30 PM)SouthernConfBoy Wrote: Paco, I think the lies Maryland's System President told to bamboozle the supporters of UMCP and the MD Legislature have really taken hold in some. Egg heads have their own things within their own disciplines and football games, museums, or parties are not where they do anything. Now the journal and article writers get together over some symposiums and national conferences but football and basketball games? Not in North Carolina or Virginia.
This is an example of Universities working together to get money https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives.../view-hubs
I note that the Mid-Atlantic hub is led by MD and includes Carnegie Mellon, GW, Johns Hopkins, UNC, NC State, VT, Penn State, Penn, and Hampton.
PItt is in a group with Cornell as the lead and Binghamton, Dartmouth, Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, Pitt, WVa, Vermont, and Rochester Tech.
Ready access to each other's research labs seems to be the driving thing. What I see is Medical, Biological, and various forms of specific engineering labs like those with glass, memory metals, physics, radiation, and specialized textiles and materials, etc. These groups form due to proximity to each other - a commuter flight, and due to the cross pollination of grad students, and professors. There are some schools whose graduate programs will be heavily populated by one or two graduate producers because the receiving university can generally rely on what they are getting.
Collaborations form because you know or meet someone that has expertise or resources that you don't, and you can create synergy by collaborating. It doesn't matter one iota what athletic conference the school is a member of.
If you can facilitate, as you say, cross-pollination of faculty in their specific endeavors, then you have something. That doesn't currently happen with athletics contests. Unless you have campuses and faculty that overlap and are constantly running into each other, like at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, that cross-pollination mostly happens at regional and national conferences and symposium, etc, put on by the professional societies of whatever discipline you are talking about. Yes, there are some programs like the NSF one you linked, but mostly this happens more organically.
Now would it be a great thing if, say, the engineering or biology departments are NCSU would have a joint academic poster session ever time they played FSU? Sure. But that never happens. You may be able to facilitate something around, say, the conference championship game. But then, why would faculty spend their limited travel money to go to a conference science meet up with dozens of fellow peer researchers when they can instead go to a national society conference specific to their field where there will be 100s or 1000s of their peer scientists, colleagues, and friends from all over the country or world?
Conference membership just means little to nothing, practically, for any of this. It's a bragging point to be in a conference with a good academic veneer, but that's all it is, and the Ivy is really the only "conference" where this means anything from a academic brand perspective.
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