- Joined
- Jun 14, 2012
- Messages
- 1,228
- Reaction Score
- 368
In one sense, you are actually understating the truth. The distribution of talent follows a lognormal distribution and in such a distribution, the difference between #1 and #4 is about the same as the difference between #50 and #200.
However ... Talent is not the same as achievement. I've taught at Berkeley and Harvard and studied at MIT. I worked with 7 Nobel laureates. There are a lot of worthless faculty at the #1, #2, #3 schools. All the faculty at top schools are very smart, but many are very smart about building successful careers, not doing science. You can find great people at mediocre universities, whose defect is that integrity and love of truth prevented them from the chicanery that can lead to rapid career success. Certain aspects of quality, notably the moral aspects, are in some respects easier to find in out of the way places than in elite institutions. My career has extended long enough to see a transition in many institutions from dominance by true scientists to a dominance by fake scientists who are good at gaming the system.
Any comparison of RPI and academic rankings is compromised by the ambiguous nature of academic merit. Sports are decided on the court and athletic rankings like the RPI are honest indicators of quality of play. Academic rankings are decided by self-interest and gamesmanship and bear no necessary relationship to scholarly quality. They measure how clever the faculty and institutions are, not how capable they are in a scholarly or research sense. Highly rated institutions have smarter students and smarter faculty, the ratings invariably are highly correlated with the average IQ of faculty and students. But smart people with the wrong incentives can actually go farther astray than less smart people. Smart people are very clever and can become very silly if that is what their careers demand.
All of this supports what you say, but there is one key fact which refutes your idea that there is equivalence between Louisville and schools like UConn. It's that UConn is trying and Louisville is not. To be honest, in my career I've never had of faculty from Louisville doing anything at all. I've heard of faculty from UConn, Virginia, Purdue, and most of the other schools we mention. I've never heard of anyone from Louisville doing anything. If a school is not even trying, why debate their quality?
I'm not disputing you. But I'm not seeing the Academic marvels of the Big Ten or the ACC trashing Louisville. I'm seeing schools not in the top 50 of the country and not in the top of either conference trashing Louisville. Ohio State is a top 60 school whose President trashed Louisville. I'm just not seeing top 30 or 10 schools trash Louisville. I just thought schools that are ranked 50-100 should have the fun of being trashed too from schools in the top 25. It might make them feel like they are taking part when they want to dish it out.