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Post by reformation on May 1, 2024 13:53:55 GMT -5
Georgetown 4 or 5 kids a year to the Columbia program--demand has been increasing from Gtwn students. I would not be surprised to have Gtwn set up additional programs with other Univ's, e.g. Dartmouth, Caltech etc.
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Post by reformation on Apr 30, 2024 15:56:57 GMT -5
Maybe Georgetown should look at doing exchanges with some other US colleges--I can remember a bunch of girls from Wellesley doing a year or semester at Gtwn when I was there in the 80's. We could pick places with big time STEM programs and the kids from the other colleges could take 2 or 3 classes at Gtwn and get an internship. Might work well for both sides.
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Post by reformation on Apr 20, 2024 21:33:52 GMT -5
Seems like we have momentum which is good. I think the Rutgers kid would make a big difference--we'd have a much more balanced and athletic team by position with him. My biggerst concern is that Cooley seems target guys who are not really good shooters.
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Post by reformation on Apr 19, 2024 13:35:08 GMT -5
You are probably right, not realistic to change given both the low prob of BF coming to Gtwn and advanced stage we were at with Mack.
Having seen both Mack and BF up close I'd say there is a decent talent gap, though I do think Mack is a good add. Obviously, there's always a hs vs college gap in judging perf, though I did see BF light up other P5 recruits. BF replaced RJ Davis as his team's PG when Davis graduated--at the HS level BF was more talented (by a little).
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Post by reformation on Apr 19, 2024 12:13:48 GMT -5
Re Boogie Fland I guess Cooley either was too far down road with Mack and for whatever reason is protective of EPPS. Having seen them all play Boogie Fland would be my clear choice. Not sure what his attitude toward Gtwn is as I don't think Cooley went after him earlier either. I know his coach pretty well so will ask him his take.
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Post by reformation on Apr 15, 2024 21:23:45 GMT -5
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Post by reformation on Apr 15, 2024 21:18:21 GMT -5
In terms of philanthropy, I would say that top donors respond to what they are pitched (could be positive or negative). They will have their own philanthropic interests, e.g., biomedicine, but they will listen to pitches that fit their basic interests. I doubt that Gtwn's big money people (including McCourt-I've sat next to him at dinner a couple of times) would react negatively to a stem focused pitch. I think Gtwn's issue in this regard is actually coming up with and prioritizing a compelling pitch.
In terms of the board leading this type of issue, I don't think that it's really the case in a univ context (certainly makeup of Gtwn's board-5 priests, bunch of finance people, some probably quite capable) are going to lead some big transformation.
I think most univ boards expect the Univ President to lead strategy. The Gtwn board would set a change in direction by their choice of president.
I would think that marginal hiring of Profs, i.e., lets hire 3 history and 3 compsci vs 3/3 phil/theo is well within the President's chain of command.
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Post by reformation on Apr 13, 2024 14:13:23 GMT -5
Re Northwestern (which I know a lot about--my wife is on the board of one of their major professional schools) and Penn which I know mostly as a parent of kid looking at the college and also have lectured there a few times I would say that both of those places are run more like a business vs Gtwn. Both Univ's have clear strategic targets, are focused on rankings.
From an admissions perspective they are very focused on restrictive ED. That + the common app makes them seem much more competitive than Gtwn than they actually are.
I would say however re Penn and Northwestern specifically vs Gtwn, Wharton has really separated itself from other undergraduate business programs and has a big rise in popularity. Wharton has great joint degree programs in Science/Engr and Intl affairs that are more comparable to HYP in terms of admission than Gtwn or regular Penn for that matter. That was probably not the case 15-20 years ago.
Re Northwestern they have made major investments in things like CS and have a number of innovative undergrad programs (Integrated Science, Quant Social Science/) which are very competitive to get in. Thier biggest investments are in CS & Engr. They also have some decent joint programs between undergrad and Kellogg etc.
The guys who run these places are very pragmatic for the most part (excepting maybe the Penn pres who was booted), results oriented and have clear strategic goals and benchmarks. Gtwn has none of that TBH-which one can take as a good or bad thing. Northwestern benchmarks its clearly vs U Chicago, so it has a pretty clear goal to shoot for-we do not have the same focus or perhaps myopia depending on how one looks at it.
The guys who run most top univ's are generally top academics themselves. They have confidence to make strategic decisions that favor/disfavor academic departments/programs. My gut feel is that Gtwn's admin does not have similar confidence, so we are timid in making changes (even obvious ones).
Back to the main pt--some of the admissions selectivity gap is manufactured by restrictive ED and the common app--some probably also relates to perceptions re quality of STEM/offerings.
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Post by reformation on Apr 13, 2024 13:32:45 GMT -5
Re the whole Soviet Studies thing, the quotes from Cohen and Stansfield Turner came straight out of the Wikipedia entry on the subject. I think they are there to represent consensus opinion at the time, so Cohen's turn to being a Russian/Soviet apologist in his later years is not that relevant to the discussion-he was on Nightline all the time in the early 80's for ex as a leading academic expert etc. Same general idea goes for Stansfield Turner.
More to the point I don't remember any of the Russian/Soviet Studies people at Gtwn having a way out of consensus view re the Soviet Union. The only Gtwn person who could come close to having some prescience re the Soviet Union's impending demise was Murray Feshbach (an adjunct prof of Demography-who ironically given the discussion here had a very quantitative approach forecasting decline in Soviet Life expectancy etc.). Feshbach was the world's foremost demographic expert on the Soviet Union at the time. I would say that the academics who studied the Soviet Union in the US/Europe tended to break down into the Russ-European emigre and non-emigre camps with the emigre's generally being more hawkish, but few really saw the collapse.
Fyi my father-in-law was also a CIA guy focused on the Soviet Union and I had many friends in the agency, other friends running big multinationals there etc--I'm quite confident that the CIA did a full-scale reappraisal of its approach to its intelligence failures on the topic as have many in academia--conferences, articles etc.
There is nothing really uniquely bad or good re Gtwn's approach to the topic at the time. The idea however that the Soviet collapse did not cause people to reevaluate the utility the methods of traditional Area Studies in general just is not the case.
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Post by reformation on Apr 11, 2024 16:40:17 GMT -5
I wonder if Cooley is making any reach out to the Kentucky decommits. For all the talk re the portal guys we are pursuing, I'd take one of these guys in a second. Obviously i know this will not be easy but might be worth a try.
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Post by reformation on Apr 9, 2024 22:30:44 GMT -5
On Cognitive Science you are definitely correct that Gtwn recognized the potential of the field early--even earlier than you indicated as we had a collaboration with an Italian Pharma(Fidia Spa?) in the 80's that unfortunately went bankrupt.
The sad part is that we did not capitalize on our early work in the space and generally did not capitalize on Gtwn's linguistics dept or recognize the quantitative turn in the field, i.e., integration with Computer Science. It's probably not too late to catch up TBH.
Regarding the decision not to invest more in CS/Math, the idea was discussed/proposed in the Georgetown Faculty Senate in the late 90's early 2000's. I was told this directly by members of the econ dept (incl head of the faculty senate) as they debated Gtwn's competitive advantages in making investments in the sciences. The econ faculty argued specifically for the positive spillover effects generated by making a big investment in statistics would benefit econ/govt psych. The econ faculty also argued that the costs of post docs + hard facilities argued for more CS/Math investment at the margin vs hard sciences. They cited LSE & NYU as urban places that had made big investments in Math/CS respectively which yielded institutional rewards. If you really want to know the individuals involved, I can message privately.
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Post by reformation on Apr 9, 2024 22:03:59 GMT -5
Don't want to stray too far from the science discussion but briefly re the whole Soviet Studies thing: There is a whole literature about this: topic has its own wikipedia entry!--excerpt below: I get that there is a debate about this, but most people feel this a was a substantial miss.
In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.
The Central Intelligence Agency also over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union and did not anticipate its rapid dissolution. Former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem."[
Yes, you are correct that I am not a strategic or Russian Studies professional; however, I have some acquaintance with the subject, having also studied abroad in the Soviet Union and have done business in the region over the years, speak Russian etc.
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Post by reformation on Apr 7, 2024 15:38:29 GMT -5
I'm guessing Rowan is probably more comfortable on a developmental role in a better program which is understandable. Also, I'd guess, he probably feels Cooley defers to EPPS somewhat unjustifiably. None of us including me really know--hard to know what relationships he has with team/staff etc.
Not sure how we know Mack is the best option for us at PG? Having seen him play in person he's ok, didn't seem transformative, but I guess getting ball out of EPPS hands more is good.
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Post by reformation on Apr 7, 2024 9:42:41 GMT -5
I guess overpay vs market is a question of degree--if we have to significantly overpay people, I guess what's the point of also paying a lot to Cooley. If he has cred with recruits, he should be able to attract people at maybe a slight mkt premium (because of the recent program issues). Of course, we'll never know these things to a level of detail to figure out what is really going on.
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Post by reformation on Apr 6, 2024 22:19:40 GMT -5
Lots to discuss, may take a few posts. I think I have a unique perspective on the Gtwn "Science" discussion as I teach at an Ivy Engr school, am co-founder of a decently big AI company in the med tech space, and maybe most importantly have a current HS senior going through college process now, so I'm pretty current re Gtwn's and other schools STEM programs.
First just want to address a couple of misconceptions. The idea that Statistics is a joke is seriously misguided. The whole AI thing is based on applying algorithms (most ML, Bayesian Networks to name a few-admittedly some come out of computational statistical physics) were developed by statisticians. Think Stanford's Stats dept and Bell Labs Operations research staff years ago. If one is thinking about statistics based on AP Stats from HS sure it's not an interesting field, but that is hardly the case in either the academic or the real world. In practice people from Stats /CS/Math/EE work on these opptys collaboratively
Second, the idea that Gtwn has made the right historical calls re deploying resources and developing academic programs in STEM broadly is kind of silly-nobody at Gtwn really thinks that, so I'm not sure why some here make believe that is the case. I actually think Gtwn has some good STEM programs, profs and external opptys for students but can do a lot better without new buildings, e.g., as a prerequisite. Specifically, Rusky, the biggest miss in the social sciences in recent memory was the failure of the whole Soviet studies apparatus to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union. A close second is the misjudgment of China's rise. The traditional social science crowd that made these important misjudgments reign supreme at Gtwn. I'm glad Gtwn has strengths in these areas and would not say that they are in shambles because of their bad calls in the past. The idea that Psychology is in Shambles is silly--The top places in the world have integrated Psychology, Computer Science, Linguistics, Neuroscience and do a lot of work on decision science(econ/pol/soc) and brain science generally--most of the work is quantitative and the grads from these programs tend to get jobs in the tech sector that a lot of Gtwn grads would love.
A third fallacy is that it would be hard for Gtwn to recruit faculty competitively with say Dartmouth. Most faculty want to live in an urban environment with a lot going on--particularly the young ones. I've asked academic colleagues in NY and London re Gtwn specifically and they've always indicated that it would be an interesting place to work, especially if Gtwn wanted to build in a particular field. Most external academics feel Gtwn has some good people but tends to build strengths in areas that do not take advantage of its unique location. For econ Ex Gtwn has a lot of theory-oriented staff, where it should really be focused on policy/applied micro--in bio for ex theres no reason it shouldn't be elite in computational bio and neuroscience, and applied stats and data science. Hiring theory-oriented people in the center of the policy world makes no sense across the disciplines.
In terms of where I think Gtwn has a competitive miss in STEM it's really in math/CS and computational approaches to Bio/Psych/Econ/Poli Sci/Linguistics. If I were Gtwn I would double the size of math/CS and populate the hires with people who specialize in the areas where Gtwn wants to focus elsewhere, e.g., Computational Bio and Neuroscience, Poli Sci, etc. In terms of academic programs for undergrads we should have explicit computational tracks in Bio/Chem/Govt/Psych/Linguistics etc--most top schools do--we are an outlier for no good reason. Other simple things we could do to attract more STEM oriented students is have some special honors tracks in Math, e.g., like most other top places--again it would cost a lot. Also we could have academic exchanges with top STEM places--I'd bet they'd all be willing to do it as Gtwn would be a super attractive place to go for a year for their students.
In terms of peers Dartmouth is actually not a bad one, as are some of the lib arts colleges in terms of evaluating Stem programs along with the usual suspects among bigger research places. I think the lack of thinking creatively re the honors STEM experience for undergrads is due to a draw of resources for the proliferation of Masters programs + some lack of strategic thinking re the admin generally, but thats just a guess.
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Post by reformation on Apr 6, 2024 21:14:47 GMT -5
Same applies if he's getting $4mm
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Post by reformation on Apr 6, 2024 20:11:37 GMT -5
Who knows the reality, but if we have to overpay big time for guys what's the point of paying Cooley $6mm
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Post by reformation on Apr 6, 2024 14:00:58 GMT -5
I saw Mack play once vs Columbia. I think he is an upgrade vs EPPS in terms of running the team. Still a pretty mediocre shooter, who still shoots a lot. Unless they both improve their offensive efficiency a lot and maybe adjust the defensive scheme not sure it's a great combo with them at 1 & 2. If Cooley uses them at 1&2 I guess he thinks we can run & gun --at least based on what we've seen these 2 so far that will not work well.
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Post by reformation on Apr 6, 2024 9:34:17 GMT -5
Agree with Hoya above. Having two short mediocre shooting shot heavy guards is not a recipe for success. Would go with Mack at the 1 and Peavey at 2 if that's what we get. We can't be a - at every position. Let EPPS come off the bench--that would be a potential +.
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Post by reformation on Apr 3, 2024 9:58:21 GMT -5
Kind of agree re skill set--we'd probably have to hire consulting group to help--given the $ involved we should. Btw I don't think there is anyone on the current team that is untouchable-not trying to run people out, but it's hard to see anyone on the current team who deserves extra $.
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