Awesome!

San Diego was ahead of us for a while, not quite sure why. I heard their chancellor focused on getting 10 or 12 marquee researchers... not sure if that is true.

These rankings can be easily manipulated. Take the USnews; it can take “reputation” and do pretty much anything it’s wants with that. Also, alumni “support”? What the hell does this have to do with the academics? Plus, we all know automatically it ranks all “privates” higher than the rest. But WSJ may be off as well. They don’t rank “reputation” and this is good because its so subjective, but it ranks “publications cited” or something similar and that’s where UCSD is going. It hires a prof out of Harvard with a lot of publications and magically gets credit for all his publications. Back in the day UCSD hired the “surfing Professor” who got a Nobel for some gene thing he discovered; but he was absolutely a TERRIBLE professor and the kids hated his guts. (My Nephew went there). I am sure there are teams of experts who advise on this stuff. I think we had to fire someone back in the day who just forgot to submit the right stuff to USNews. We dropped out of all the rankings that year. Not good!

I agree with you. I mean, it should count for something that we have professors and researchers who have published at other schools. But, publishing while in residence at the University of California, Davis (in our case; name of current school in others) should have greater weight. I was no science major, but I was lucky to have taken a non-major course or two in Alan Taylor's classroom. That man is great and he deserves all those pulitzer prizes. UVA is lucky to have him and it is a good fit for his field. But, reading a lot of his books with UC, at Davis cited was great for our school. Likewise even more so for our Vet and Ag programs.