It has been mentioned that academics play a big role in the Big Ten's realignment and that there are millions of dollars in research incentives for Nebraska to realign with the Big Ten.

My query: Even though there is plenty of research dollars within the Big Ten (and t.u. and A&M), those dollars aren't shared, are they? My guess is that institutions, departments, units, and professors are gobbling up the dollars, and that sharing is laughable. So besides prestigious association, what is the incentive academically?

The Big 10 runs a research consortium w/ the university of Chicago.

Does that mean more dollars or more opportunities for dollars or collaboration or is it just a prestige thing?

I am not entirely sure but I believe it is a little bit of both. The schools in the CIC work closely together. As they are all tremendous research universities (especially chicago), this provides a huge benefit to the faculty in terms of collaboration with absolutely top flight peers. This can lead to more papers being published, more grants being awarded, and more funding. Which in turn will continue the cycle of more papers more grants more funding etc

There is little to no research dollars being shared due to athletic conference alignments. Profs write grants and will collaborate with profs from another school to "share" research funds when the projects overlap. This is based on the expertise of a given faculty member at a given university and not on whether a prof is at a school in the same conference. In fact, I've never seen any funding opportunities due to Big XII affiliation.

Academics comes into play because athletic directors (and presidents) want to make sure that all schools within a conference can agree to similar admission standards. Nebraska was upset early on because tu and A&M demanded a limit to the number of partial qualifiers that could be admitted for football. NU changed their admissions standards, so they are probably more in line with the Big 10 now, compared with 15 years ago.

You don't want another school telling a recruit that classes at A&M are too tough, so come to our school and we'll make sure you pass every class without trouble. That will force us to lower admission standards to match that of other schools - unless we have the political juice to make everyone else raise their standards.

while conferences themselves dont offer the extra research money, membership in the CIC (including the Big 10 and University of Chicago schools) would be a tremendous boost to A&Ms goal of being a top academic university. the CIC would definitely be a plus for A&M. The big 10 offers this, the other conferences do not.

edit: please correct me if wrong retinag




[This message has been edited by quanttastic (edited 6/10/2010 5:34p).]

Athletic conferences carry with them a certain perception in academia. Some of this is based of course on admission standards (all major universities have mechanisms for athletic recruitment that differs from normal admission standards). Conferences set admission standards as well, and the SEC is among the lowest in this regard. Generally the academic reputation of state universities is correlated with educational priorities of the tax-payers/voters and education in most of the southeastern states is down the list. One measure of academic status is membership in the American Association of Universities which includes 61 US institutions. The old (last week) Big12 had 7 members, including us, the Big 10 had 10 members, the Pac 10 had 6 members and the SEC had 2 (Vandy and Florida).

This is correct. It's a 2 for 1.

Membership in the Big 10 is athletic, just like joining the Pac 10/SEC.

But ... with that, and separate from athletic conference membership, comes membership in the CIC.

I don't know how to link to it (and I'll get carpal tunnel if I write it all again!), but I wrote a pretty detailed post here:

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1636312&forum_id=5

Go Blue and Gig 'em!

I've stolen this quote from the other thread, but I believe it makes a strong point...

quote:

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There are lots of factors that affect the relative growth of R&D expenditures.
You could make as strong an argument that snow leads to higher R&D funding as for the CIC.

OKC-Ag is correct from my POV as someone who has reviewed NIH and NSF grants for the period shown in those tables. I also got my PhD at a Big 10 University and I never heard of the CIC until idiots on FB boards started trotting it out.

What I fear is that our BoR is dumb enough to buy the CIC argument.

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Most of the Big 10 schools are known academic powerhouses (Michigan, Northwestern, Wisconsin) and the rest very strong to good. There are no Oklahoma States in the Big 10. That said, these schools were known for their academics before the creation of the CIC.

I've been in academia for 15 years and have reviewed grants for NSF and NIH. I have NEVER heard anyone mention CIC affiliation as rationale for funding a grant during grant discussions or anyone mention that CIC affiliation was the reason their grant WAS funded.

Nevertheless, I'm sure there are some advantages and opportunities to be had by CIC membership, but it's not going to increase research funding at A&M by hundreds of millions of dollars. Looking over the CIC website, it appears that most of their programs are designed to remove excess red tape from academic collaborations. It certainly does nothing to guarantee funding success. As someone who has submitted collaborative grants with people at several different institutions, there are very little roadblocks at A&M and the grant success depends on the ideas, not any kind of institutional agreements.

On another point, I wonder how CIC membership would even be viewed by our Regents and Chancellor. They want as much control over the TAMU-College Station research enterprise as possible and are trying to strip control from the university and place it at the System level. The CIC is about collaboration and open access across universities and does not fit into a McKinney model of rigid control from the top. I question whether McKinney would want to loosen his grip over the R&D money.