(09-15-2022 12:18 AM)Gitanole Wrote: [ -> ] (09-14-2022 10:51 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: [ -> ] (09-14-2022 10:12 PM)Gitanole Wrote: [ -> ] (09-13-2022 01:45 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: [ -> ]It might mean something if scholar bowls and debating contests were part of conference media contracts.
Otherwise, it is just banal conference fan chest pounding.
It makes perfect sense that university presidents care about the academic company they keep. They know that a great many intercollegiate interactions and collaborations take place around sporting events. A lot more goes on during a football weekend than just a football game.
There's a bit more to the rankings as well. The difference between a #15 and #30 ranking by US News means little, really. The difference between #15 and #315 likely signifies much more, though—especially when it happens year after year.
While its true college presidents like their schools to be associated with others of prestige, for perception purposes, intercollegiate academic collaborations never happen as a result of football games.
Intercollegiate academic collaborations are born of relationships made by individual faculty members during the years in training or through interactions at discipline-specific academic conferences, symposiums, study sections, or some other academic-related endeavor.
....
A variety of interactions take place, as I mentioned. Clubs and social societies have get-togethers and seed new chapters. Bands rehearse and socialise. Undergrads start thinking about where they will go to grad school. Grad students take the opportunity to visit a different campus library. Conversations begin. And conversations go many places.
University communities are complex social systems.
If your job is to see that your students get the best experience you can provide them, and you have a choice about sports partners, you'll choose partners who help your institution meet a number of goals as well as advance your athletic goals. When you do get a choice.
And if you're a university president, that is your job.
Yeah, no. Football weekends are not where intercollegiate academic collaborations are born.
I have no idea what type of grad students you are talking about, but none I've ever known or even heard of.
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.
(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.
(09-13-2022 02:51 PM)Hokie Mark Wrote: [ -> ] (09-13-2022 02:02 PM)green Wrote: [ -> ] (09-13-2022 01:53 PM)Hokie Mark Wrote: [ -> ] (09-13-2022 01:45 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: [ -> ] (09-13-2022 01:27 PM)schmolik Wrote: [ -> ]And imagine what that 54.5 would be if the ACC took UConn (67) instead of Louisville (182).
It might mean something if scholar bowls and debating contests were part of conference media contracts.
Otherwise, it is just banal conference fan chest pounding.
^^^ THIS ^^^
I'd add that these rankings mean even less than media payouts (which are themselves way overrated, based on last weekend's football results).
how does fsu jump 50 spots in just a few years ...
SUS
I'd say they learned how to play the game.
https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/156...8458595328
in 2012 ...
FSU was ranked
#102 ...
let me underline that for you ...
#102
GAMING THE SYSTEM
(09-15-2022 07:12 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: [ -> ]Collaborations form because you know or meet someone that has expertise or resources that you don't, and you can create synergy by collaborating.
Of course.
Quote: It doesn't matter one iota what athletic conference the school is a member of.
Except for the part about how conference affiliations enable hundreds and even thousands of people from two different university communities to come into contact regularly across generations to 'know and meet' each other and build personal relationships around common experiences, I guess not.
Where you're missing my meaning, Paco, is that I'm not making assertions restricted to—or even mainly concerned with—symposia and research collaborations. I have in view all the points of contact that can exist between two university communities across years of regular interaction.
University presidents generally keep these things in view as well.
Quote:....
. 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.
So you're saying that except for those instances when the academic standing of one's athletic partners
does matter, it doesn't matter.
The observation seems reasonable enough as far as it goes. I'll keep going with university presidents on the question of which is which.