<p>Think about it. Brown spends 1/3 of the research money that schools like Chicago or Harvard spend in a given year. It also used to have 1/4th as many professors compared to prestigious graduate school oriented schools like the aforementioned. </p>
<p>Still, we have a homegrown Nobel laureate, while Duke or Michigan has absolutely none such, and we have a homegrown Sakurai prize winner this year. We have a homegrown Pulitzer prize winner, and also a homegrown Fields medalist in the mathematics faculty.</p>
<p>What else do you need for a university-college? The only shortcoming for the faculty is that there are too FEW of these people. Which isn't really necessary -- we do top research, but in less areas as huge schools do. </p>
<p>In the end, our school has elite professors, elite students, and full stop. If you want to be surrounded by many Leon Coopers, Gordon Woods, Gerald Guralniks, or David Mumfords, go to Chicago or Berkeley.</p>
<p>Besides, as long as our Star Professors' specific research areas are not harmed, it does not matter even if Chicago or Harvard makes the offer. </p>
<p>We have a small research faculty, but we also have top areas of research. The graduate school students, in relation to the research faculty, doesn't have to be as high-quality as the faculty members themselves, as long as the faculty members can do their research. You said it is rare that professors come to Brown from large prestigious research institutions, but I've seen some that do, especially assistant professors that are starting to make their mark. One prominent philosopher (and Brown's philosophy department is one of the top in the world), Charles Larmore, came from the University of Chicago Law School after having also taught at Columbia for more than 10 years. He is considered on of the top five political philosophers in the world.</p>
<p>Brown alumni that are preeminent scholars also seek to be Brown professors a lot. Both David Weil (pioneer in the field of growth economics; Brown's graduate program in growth economics was ranked 6th by the US News rankings in 2010) and Kenneth Miller are Brown faculty who used to teach at Harvard. Mark Bear, another Brown alumnus, was headed the Brain Science Lab at MIT for seventeen years before returning to Brown. Ivo Welch (a Ph.D from Chicago) came from Yale Business School in 2006. </p>
<p>On the other direction, THAT is actually rarer. Brown professors are in fact unlikely to move to other schools, except when their specific area of research is being neglected. Lars Onsager was the only notable case, most of whose Nobel winning research was done at Brown. But he won the prize while he was at Yale. But if their area of research is being kept lively alive, even star faculty wouldn't budge from Brown. Examples are Glenn Loury, David Weil, and most notably, Leon Cooper, who has been with us for over thirty years, who has even burgeoned outside of his area in particle physics toward research in neuroscience. </p>
<p>Part of the reason that we can keep our own is because we have an excessive amount of money to keep those professors. Berkeley has a lower endowment than us. The problem is whether the Brown administration is at all willing to keep the research going. Brown is stubborn when it comes to its "educational philosophy" of balancing undergraduate teaching and research, in my opinion. Recently, however, the trend to keeping research alive is becoming stronger, thanks to Ruth Simmons' Plan for Academic Enrichment. Perhaps dangerously stronger, according to those wary to protect Brown's commitment to teaching. But those two are not antithetical, as Ruth Simmons is proving now.</p>
<p>And you need to remember that our faculty are becoming better by the years, both the new ones and the oldies. The way I (humbly) see it, I'm confident that a few faculty members dedicated to Brown will win the Nobel Prize in 10 years or so.</p>
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