(02-13-2018 11:54 AM)bearcatdp Wrote: (02-13-2018 09:41 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:
What uniform is the Bearcat wearing?
This is not the only thing I am getting out of this thread. :) I agree with most here that this is a really good thing - to be one of two representatives at the statehouse for this issue, next to OSU. Lets be realistic - OSU is the land grant university in Ohio but we can be a close second to them in most things (and better than them in some). That is not a bad place to be. I went to both schools and liked UC better. It's just a different flavor of really good. I like President Pinto's quiet way of working to improve the university. I am sure his goals are similar to Ono's, just done in a more diplomatic way.
I would guess his goals regarding an AAU invite and CCC designation are similar. I think that he's probably abandoned the multiple or co-flagship (which is what Ono was really getting at) thing and is working to secure a solid "second school" in the system. The VaTech to their UVA so to speak, which I think is attainable, UC's proper role in the system and will help move the university forward both nationally and in the rest of Ohio more than tilting at the windmill of co-flagship status.
The CCC designation is probably the most important one, and I've heard that's where Pinto is putting most of his emphasis in preparing the 1600 page application.
We're further from AAU status than most believe. We do well in some of the hard metrics, such as total research $, federal research $, federal research $ per tenured faculty member. We don't do so well in others (we only have 8 members of the National Academies, and they're all in medicine). It's in the soft metrics that we really fall short, and these include things such as undergraduate reputation and selectivity and broad based strength among core doctoral programs (i.e. things like physics, economics, chemistry, history, political science). This last item is what kept even Georgia Tech out for years as they were seen as too one-dimensional. I've posted the National Research Council's most recent rankings of Ph.D programs, and UC doesn't do as well as most would think. Many times, we're not even the second ranked public in Ohio and when we are, we're almost always closer to the third ranked public in Ohio than we are to OSU. We beat OSU in neuroscience and are roughly equal to them in Aerospace Engineering, but that's it where we're truly competitive.
So is OSU to blame for this? I'm going to answer with a resounding no. The problem is two-fold. First, OSU and the rest of Ohio had no control over UC until the late 70s. The Cincinnati business and political establishment had a century to build up a great urban university, and they chose not to. They built up the medical school and were quite content to let the rest of the university be a commuter school. Had they invested more broadly into building a modern research university the way Pittsburgh did with Pitt, we'd probably already be in the AAU. And the second factor contributing to this was what the Ohio state system had become by the time we joined it. It was a largely unregulated, over-built system with massive redundancies in graduate and professional programs. It's not Ohio State's strengths that held back UC, it's the spread the peanut butter mentality that led to the funding of countless unnecessary and mediocre programs at OU or Toledo or KSU. Money that could have better been spent building up UC.
So, moving forward, I don't see UC having the resources to simultaneously make a big push to both strengthen the cancer hospital to secure a CCC designation and build up numerous departments across the board from Astronomy to Zoology to move us into the AAU. Right now, and just based on the hard metrics, we're at best the third public in line after Utah and NC State
(publics ranked on P 20). And with the glacial pace that the AAU takes on members, that probably equates to a decade or two away. So, my guess is that the CCC bid will take precedence over the AAU. If we get the former, continue to improve on the latter and work constructively with Ohio State to impose some structure and hierarchy on a historically (at least since 1960) unruly higher education system, then our role as the Michigan State or VaTech should come easily and naturally.