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A year ago, the Association of American Universities quietly revised the criteria it uses to decide which research institutions deserve a place in the highly selective group. The impact of those changes is now being felt -- like a punch in the gut -- by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Syracuse University, which are leaving the association.
The group's members have voted to drop Nebraska against its will, marking the first time that the association has formally dumped one of its own. Syracuse, by contrast, after trying to persuade AAU members that the New York university's strengths continue to place it among the nation's best, is in "discussions about withdrawing" from the association, Chancellor Nancy Cantor confirmed Sunday.
Officials at both institutions complain that the metrics the group uses to assess its members define the contributions of high-quality research universities too narrowly, focusing excessively on biomedical research and the volume of federally supported research. To Nebraska officials, that means undervaluing the university's land-grant mission, and in the eyes of administrators at Syracuse, giving inadequate weight to interdisciplinary and urban-focused research to which few federal funds flow.
The AAU is made up of 62 public and private research universities in the United States and Canada, and membership in the group has historically been much sought by institutions as a sign of prestige, as well as quality.
A year ago, said Robert M. Berdahl, AAU's president, the association -- facing criticism from some would-be members that there were stronger universities outside AAU than some inside it -- decided for the first time that in reviewing its members, it would compare them to non-member institutions as well as to members. The group also declared, for the first time, that "we no longer presume that continuation [in the association] is a given," Berdahl said in an interview Sunday night. "The notion that once you’re in, you’re in forever, is no longer the operative assumption."
Nebraska is only the third institution to leave the AAU in its 111-year history and the first to force a vote from the association's members on whether it would remain affiliated. When Clark University left the AAU in 1999, and the Catholic University of America in 2002, both said that they were leaving voluntarily because their missions no longer aligned with the AAU's focus on research (although there was much speculation that they had been pushed). |
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