<p>Peter05, maybe I can explain things to you more clearly this way. The truth of the matter is that academia is highly segmented. You are unlikely to know a lot about programs and schools that have nothing to do with your field. </p>
<p>As a case in point, I am quite certain that it is not a well-known fact to most people that the University of Minnesota has arguably the best chemical engineering department in the world, arguably even better than that at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or Caltech. Sure, obviously chemical engineering professors and graduate students know this, and perhaps to some extent, academics in related fields (i.e. materials science, chemistry) know this. But would we really expect an English professor to know this? I doubt it. Yet even so, I would not slander this English professor by claiming that he is “not a serious academic”. He is a serious academic * in his particular field*, but I certainly would not expect him to know much about a completely different field. Why would they know it? </p>
<p>Similarly, it is not a well known fact to most people that the University of Pittsburgh has an extremely highly regarded philosophy department. This is true even of people in academia, if we’re talking about academics in the natural sciences. Be honest. How many US-born-and-raised professors in the natural sciences or engineering would know that Pitt has a stellar philosophy department? Perhaps a better question is, why would we expect them to know this fact? After all, if you’re, say, a mechanical engineering professor, you rarely if ever talk to philosophy professors. You don’t go to their conferences. You don’t read their literature. You don’t know what’s going on in their field.</p>
<p>Furthermore, let’s now extend this argument to even having heard of a particular school. I’ve already used places like Olin College and the Webb Institute as examples. But allow me to use a few more. I would surmise that many English professors have never heard of, say, the Wentworth Institute of Technology. Or Polytechnic University of New York. Or New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (a.k.a. New Mexico Tech). Or Montana Tech. Or Michigan Tech. Or the Florida Institute of Technology. Or the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Or the Indiana Institute of Technology. Or Lawrence Tech. Or the Oregon Institute of Technology. Or West Virginia Institute of Technology. Or South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. </p>
<p>Be honest. In that above list, I think we can agree that there are humanities professors who have never heard of at least one of them. Heck, I would surmise that many humanities professors have never heard of most of them. Think of it this way. Imagine going up to a bunch of English professors and asking them to say in which state Lawrence Tech is located. I think we can all agree that many of them would not know. </p>
<p>What is happening is quite clear. I specifically chose a bunch of technical schools/institutes to illustrate my point. These schools may be known by people who are engineers, scientists and technologists (and even that is somewhat questionable, as I strongly suspect that even many MIT profs have never heard of, say, West Virginia Tech). But certainly they are not well known by those who are not in those fields. In particular, if you are a humanities professor and academic, you don’t really care about those schools. They have nothing to do with you. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not a “serious academic”. It just means that you know your field well, but you don’t know other fields well. I wouldn’t expect you to know other fields well. </p>
<p>So just like I don’t expect English professors to know about Lawrence Tech or West Virginia Tech, I also don’t expect engineering profs to know about OWU. I also don’t expect plenty of other profs in other disciplines to know about OWU. OWU is not strong in everything. The disciplines in which it is strong, I agree that people may have heard of it. But in those that it is not strong in (or doesn’t have at all)? Why would we reasonably expect “serious academics” in those fields to have heard of OWU? Academics know their own field, but don’t know other fields. That’s a simple truism of academia. You know a highly concentrated amount of information in one particular field.</p>