From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 3 Aug 93 18:06:16 GMT From: netnews.upenn.edu!gopher.cs.uofs.edu!guinness.cs.uofs.edu!beidler@rutgers .edu (Jack Beidler) Subject: Re: Are 'best' universities being targeted Message-ID: <23m9eo$src@gopher.cs.uofs.edu> List-Id: In a number of posting, including the original posting, as one who is not at one of "the best universities", I was wondering what makes a school "the best". Over the years as a computer scientist/ software engineer I have found that I can rarely use the term "the best". Greg's list of "the best" contains at least two universities that do not have undergraduate computer science programs and at least one university that only recently started offerring an undergraduate degree in computer science! Surely Greg doesn't want to automatically give money for Software Engineering and Ada Education to schools who don't have undergraduate programs in the discipline, or do not have a track record at the undergraduate level. Suppose we use accreditation of the undergraduate program by CSAB as a criterion for "the best". How many of Greg's best qualify? Not many. Oh, I forgot, some of them feel they are too good, too superior to be evaluated by others. That sounds too much to me like pork barrel, the very thing that is creating our national debt. The fact is there is no such thing as "the best" in this case. The best we can do is submit proposals and have them reviewed by unbiased reviewers, people who don't have a preconceived notion that funding should only go to an elite few. People who evaluate a proposal on its merits, the quality of the proposal, not the school where the proposer teaches. -- +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | John (Jack) Beidler | | Prof. of Computing Sciences Internet: beidler@cs.uofs.edu | | University of Scranton BEIDLER@JAGUAR.UOFS.EDU | | Scranton, PA 18510 | | | | Phone: (717) 941-7446 FAX: (717) 941-4250 | +------------------------------------------------------------------+