(03-10-2013 11:19 PM)CrownRoyal Wrote: (03-10-2013 07:05 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (03-07-2013 08:44 PM)orangefan Wrote: The America 12 should invite VCU. VCU would:
- Balance Navy's membership as football only
- Give the hoops league 12 members, so it's membership would match its name
- Boost the quality of the hoops league
- Have a similar institutional profile to Cincy, UCF, USF, Houston, Temple, ECU and Memphis
- Serve as a travel partner for ECU in hoops and Olympic sports
- Be an Additional eastern school to help keep UConn happy
While I agree that VCU would be a good add....did you really just say that ECU has the same institutional profile as the rest of the conference?
I mean, the rest of those are (or are trying to be) urban research institutions. Some of them aren't as good at it as others, but they at least share the same goal. ECU has different goals as an institution than the rest of the conference.
ECU wants to be more like WVU or Texas Tech than any Metro/A-12 school (whatever we end up calling ourselves). But even they'd admit that they're not quite there yet as an institution.
Captain Bearcat, without looking it up, please tell me what ECU's institutional profile is. And while no institution should ever be satisfied with it's current status and should always be seeking ways to advance, I would bet you we're farther along than many would like to admit or even know about.
Certainly. I would say that ECU is a public teaching university.
There are several types of institutions in D-1 athletics:
Private research universities - typically, but not always, are urban to take advantage of large hospital networks - Duke, Vandy, NW
Private teaching universities - focus on undergrad education - Wake, Syracuse, SMU, and Xavier
Public Ag/Engineering flagship - Purdue, TAMU
Public Liberal Arts flagship - Texas, Michigan
Urban public research flagship - act like a combo engineering/liberal arts flagship for a large city rather than a rural region. These schools work closely with Fortune 500 companies and typically are the center of a large hospital network - Cincinnati, Pitt, UCLA, Buffalo, USF
Normal schools - historically focused on degrees in education, and still do to a great extent - Indiana State, Northern Iowa, Ball State, Bowling Green
Public teaching universities - focus on undergrad education - these are often derisively referred to as "directional" schools, even if they don't all have directions in their name - probably the best of these types of schools is Miami (Ohio).
Urban teaching universities - typically only have small grad schools, typically have large vocational programs - Cleveland State is the type I'm thinking, but some would put schools like NIU in this category too. Many "urban public research flagships" started like this, and many schools that aspire to be research universities (like Memphis) arguably still fit this category to some extent.
Some schools arguably are stuck between two types (such as Georgia Tech). There aren't any schools that are more than two types other than maybe Ohio State (which is ag/liberal arts and is the flagship for Columbus).
The problem between "teaching" and "research" schools is that all the federal money is in research, so most teaching schools try to get some research funding, too. So from the outside, it's often hard to distinguish between a low-quality research school and a good teaching school that happens to get research grants.
For example, WVU's numbers indicate that it is either a bad research university or a good teaching university. Based on what commenters on these boards have said, they don't try to be a research university, which means that they probably are a good teaching university.
Other than ECU, all the schools in the Metro are, or aspire to be, urban research flagships. I don't think that is ECU's goal, do you?
/
The America 12 should invite VCU
"Forget all this hybrid garbage......."
