Counterpoint:

    For several decades, the Rice Faculty, Administration and Board of Trustees have shared a common vision for the University. This shared vision has empowered us to steadily advance the quality and impact of our research enterprises, while maintaining our core commitment to unequaled undergraduate education.

    While a merger with BCM is the quickest way to increase our research expenditures, it is not the only way to enhance Rice’s standing as a major research university.

    When asked if the merger is “the best way to preserve, longer term, Rice’s standing as a major research university,” almost 44% of the Rice faculty said no (Faculty Survey, December 2009). Only 40% of the faculty agreed with this statement.

    The FMRC Interim Report further sharpens this conclusion when it states that a BCM-Rice merger is “the clearest, but not the only way” for Rice to become a major player in the life and medical sciences.

    In essence, a comparison of Rice’s NIH funding to those of Princeton, Caltech and MIT, three top private universities without medical schools, is an argument against the merger when one considers the premier status of the latter three universities.

    Caltech has about the same number of faculty in science and engineering as Rice, a smaller overall footprint and no medical school in the immediate vicinity of its campus. And yet, it received 4 times as much new research funding from NIH in 2008.  The closest top-tier medical school to Princeton is located in New York City.

    And, MIT equaled BCM in new NIH awards for 2008 without having its own medical school.  MIT’s success in raising NIH funding is undoubtedly linked to its joint educational and research programs with Harvard Medical School and other Boston area hospitals and research centers.

    The Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) brings together the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School (HMS), Harvard University, Boston area teaching hospitals, and an assortment of research centers in a unique collaboration that integrates science, medicine, and engineering to solve problems in human health. Over 400 graduate students of science, medicine, engineering, and management take their training side by side at HST. And HST's more than 60 full-time faculty members and 200 affiliates guide these students into vibrant careers as medical pioneers.

    Clearly, MIT, Harvard, HMS and its teaching hospitals were able to overcome any institutional barriers that may have prevented collaboration. 

    Rice is also blessed with an ideal location that is literally “across the street” from the world’s largest medical center, which includes BCM, the top cancer research and treatment center in the country (and arguably in the world), another major medical school and several distinguished hospitals.  The physical distances here are even smaller than those separating MIT, Harvard, HMS and its many teaching hospitals.

    This analysis leads us to the following two questions that are not addressed by the Administration:

1. •Why can’t Rice and BCM emulate the HST model to advance cross-disciplinary research and educational collaborations in the biomedical sciences?
   

2. •Will the merger help the other science and engineering disciplines maintain a top-tier research standing in the long term?
   

    Several recent studies have pointed out that the presence of a medical school on a university campus does not guarantee enhanced research competitiveness. In fact, the national rank of universities with medical schools may drop when the research expenditures of the medical school are subtracted from the university total (Click here for a detailed analysis).

    Another analysis of the national rankings of engineering schools reaches similar conclusions (click here for details).

    Actually, the V2C 10-point strategic plan points out the way to achieve similar results to those of Caltech, Princeton and MIT when it calls for focusing on “... departments and disciplines in strategically selected areas where we have an opportunity to achieve nationally and internationally recognized levels of distinction and achievement. Success in this endeavor will require significant investments in and improvements to our research support, physical facilities, and information technology infrastructure...”

Point:

From the Rice-BCM site - Question 1

First, Rice has had a long and productive history of collaboration with Baylor and, when the opportunity arose last year to explore a closer affiliation, President David Leebron and the Rice Board of Trustees decided it was in the best interests of both institutions to begin discussions with Baylor.  One of only a handful of independent private medical schools, Baylor is seeking a strong university partner to secure its future.  Rice would benefit in many ways – in research, academics, reputation among them -- from having a top-ranked medical school.  And because of the barriers that exist between separate institutions, a merged Rice and BCM would be able to achieve a greater level of intellectual integration by seizing collaborative opportunities that exist between medicine and a wide array of other fields.

Strategy: In its Vision for the Second Century, Rice set out 10 major objectives, the first of which is to visibly and substantially increase its commitment to its research mission and to raise its research and scholarship profile. Recognizing the path-breaking work now emerging through collaboration among clinicians and researchers in the biological sciences, chemistry, bioengineering, computer science, physics and other disciplines where Rice is strong, the strategic plan also seeks greater collaboration with the Texas Medical Center. A merger with a medical school is consistent with those goals and would provide a major impetus in the area of biomedical research, which is playing a growing role in the global economy and in higher education. In fact, to remain competitive with its peers, Rice will need to double its annual research volume and space to keep pace with Princeton and at least quadruple to keep pace with Stanford, Duke, Yale and others. Top research universities without medical schools, such as MIT, Princeton and CalTech, have significantly larger biomedical and life sciences research portfolios than Rice. For example, in 2008 Rice received new awards from the National Institutes of Health totaling $11.7 million, compared with $210 million for MIT, $49 million for Princeton and $43 million for CalTech. A medical school also would allow Rice to greatly increase its research endeavors without significantly altering the experience of students and faculty on its main campus.

Future:  Because health care already accounts for more than 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product with a large, aging baby boomer population that will need more medical care, biomedicine is expected to be a central and growing focus of research and education in the coming years.  The scientific community has developed a consensus that future advances will result from the integration of traditional biomedical sciences such as biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology with other disciplines in engineering, computational sciences, evolutionary biology, physics, chemistry, social sciences and humanities. Because there is very little overlap between the Rice and BCM faculties, the stage is set for productive interdisciplinary collaborations in these areas.