Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era, The

Academe, Jul/Aug 1998 by Geiger, Roger

If the methodology used in this study is imperfect, the authors might counter that other conventional measures of academic quality are flawed as well, and that their approach has the virtue of allowing smaller institutions to stake a claim to distinction. To evaluate this position, one can compare their results with the two ratings of faculty quality conducted under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC) in 1982 and 1995.1 The authors used a combined score of their three qualitative measures to identify unheralded, "rising" research universities. (The study looks only on the bright side, making no mention of universities that may be sinking.) In the private sector, there are few surprises, most likely because there is less divergence in the composition and size of faculties. The traditional powerhouses scored quite well, and only four "new" names scored at the median or higher level-Brandeis, Rochester, Washington, and Carnegie Mellon Universities. Brandeis had the second smallest faculty, augmented by a center for biomedical research. Its ranking by Graham and Diamond is consistent with its strong showing in arts and humanities and biological sciences in the 1995 ratings, but their overall ranking for Brandeis is higher (ninth compared to sixteenth).2 Carnegie Mellon, on the other hand, ranked significantly higher in the 1995 ratings (twelfth) than in this study (seventeenth). Washington University was the only one of the four to register improvement from the 1982 to the 1995 ratings (twentieth to eighteenth), but was ranked sixteenth in this study. Rochester was seventeenth in the NRC ratings and twelfth here.

For public research universities, the findings are more curious. At the top of the list, below top-ranked University of California, Berkeley, are the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Also identified as rising institutions are the University of California campuses of Riverside (ranked eleventh), Santa Cruz (fifteenth), and Irvine (seventeenth) as well as Stony Brook's sister campuses at Albany (twentieth) and Buffalo (thirty-first). The authors perceive in this pattern the existence of another source of advantage for rising research universitiesthey are "especially protected and nurtured by the state university system."

For the University of California, this can scarcely be doubted. The four campuses identified are largely undergraduate, letters-and-sciences institutions (Irvine also has a medical school). Stony Brook has a similar structure in the SUNY system. Irvine actually ranked much higher in terms of the NRC study (eleventh compared to seventeenth), but Santa Barbara (twentyfirst) and Stony Brook (nineteenth) had strong rather than top rankings. What seems to have made these campuses rising universities in the Graham and Diamond study is that all have faculties less than half the size of the median, and they are concentrated in letters and sciences. Apparently, being part of a state system has allowed these universities to concentrate on academic disciplines, while professional departments (which do not count in this study) were placed elsewhere.