re: UAB study

quote:

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Well, no. Montgomery is a fair-sized city with no major college football team. Why doesn't AU start a football program at AUM?

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Really? Montgomery metro has 374k people; Birmingham has 1.1M. AUM has 5,000 students. UAB has 18,000. AUM has not much of anything in the way of academics. UAB is a good academic school. One of those has the potential to operate independently. One does not.

Your immediate reaction of "Why don't you just do it at AUM?" evidences the problem: viewing this as Bama vs. Auburn, or acting as if UAB should only be considered as a subservient part of the UA system. I do not believe that is in the best interest of Birmingham or the state at large. And that is the point of public universities. This is not about Bama vs. Auburn. It is about not permitting our public institutions to be used to play political power games. It was wrong when Auburn had to deal with it from Lowder, and it is wrong when UAB has to deal with it from the BOT.