Upstater:
You seem to be one of the "go-to" people for this stuff. So....
In another thread a poster alleged that someone in the Big-10 is "very impressed" with the assistance/support Malloy and other CT politicos are giving UCONN in it's attempts to gain AAU entry.
Forgetting, for the time-being, whether any of this(above) is true, just how much does AAU acceptance depend on professional politicians? Where do academicians fit?
Thanks, in advance.
It has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Not at all.
The money Malloy is thinking of giving is mostly about private-public foundations. This is not really related to grants, which is what the AAU is interested in. Look at SUNY-Albany. They took a few billion in seed money to start a world class microchip fabrication research center, and the tech coming out of there has spawned $14 billion of private investment. That's what Malloy is hoping for. He's hoping that state funding for high tech will yield more high tech jobs for the state, and he can only hope that UConn scores the way SUNY-Albany did. New York state is trying the same thing with Binghamton, Buffalo and Stony Brook. Each of them is picking two specialties. In Buffalo, this has to do with Rare Earth Materials (of the kind that make up an iPad or iPhone) and Biotech.
Note: Albany is the big winner in state money, but it's also the only SUNY center that is NOT an AAU member. The other 3 are. The difference is that the other 3 schools bring in a very high amount of research grants, which are awarded through peer-reviewed (i.e. academic) national and federal foundations and private enterprises.
Nebraska was kicked out largely because most of the grants it brought in were a result of pork-barrel allocations for agriculture. The AAU decreed that this money should not count, and so Nebraska's research money collapsed.
Right now with the sequester, the research grant world is in upheaval. It's causing a major dent in the awarding of grants. So, no school is going to jump ahead under the current circumstances.
