tristatecoog wrote:EastStang wrote:One thing that has bothered me, we are a great academic institution, we do cutting edge research. Why haven't we joined the American Association of Universities? If the PAC 12 and the Big Ten are going to prefer AAU members why haven't we done that. UH apparently has? What's the deal President Turner?
While it's made very good academic strides over the last decade, UH isn't in the AAU. The worst schools in the AAU are Buffalo, Missouri, KU and Iowa State. I believe they all have pretty strong research budgets.
SMU's $100MM gift from the Moody Foundation has fueled a new college and lots of investment into research. Hopefully SMU is the next AAU member.
We can only wish but I'm not so sure we have it as a top priority under RGT, although it seems to be something to aspire to. From a 2018 SMU report (see link below), it states "although not a formal initiative at this point, we make a case for SMU to be on a trajectory toward future AAU membership."
https://www.smu.edu/-/media/Site/Provos ... Ascent.pdfAlso, AAU is by invitation only and universities have to meet specific Phase I and Phase II criteria to be a candidate for invitation.
https://www.aau.edu/who-we-are/membership-policyGiven the emphasis on federal, USDA, state and industrial funding for research plus memberships, affiliations, doctorates, research, etc, what this means essentially is that universities that are AAU or AAU-eligible have to have a heavy focus on graduate-degree programs, and many of them (3 out of 4 of the AAU schools) also have medical schools, which focus a lot on doctoral programs and research. Most are also very strong in engineering.
Notre Dame is a clear example of a top 20 undergraduate program but that is not AAU because it tends to focus significantly more on its undergrads and also does not have a medical school. Notre Dame though could likely be AAU if it really wanted to given its significant endowment to put expand its graduate programs more. SMU on the other hand doesn't have as much financial clout and needs more external support. Rice is AAU (but much lower endowment than ND although UG rankings are similar) so it should be something SMU aspires to as well.
The AAU goes back over 120 years, and was founded in 1900 by a group of 14 Doctor of Philosophy degree–granting universities. Those include many of the Ivies (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, Cornell) plus many of the top non-Ivies such as Stanford, UChicago, Johns Hopkins, as well as top public universities at the time such as Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana. There were 2 other universities that were part of the original 14 that are no longer AAU - Clark University and Catholic University of America. Now it consists of 64 universities. The last invitations came in 2019 where UC-Santa Cruz, Utah and Dartmouth.
It would be nice to have it be a formal objective for sure, particularly as a private university, it carries more weight as it signals academic excellence.