Houston Chronicle, June 14, 2010, Monday

Houston Chronicle

June 14, 2010, Monday

Houston Chronicle

Baylor Med falls from Top 20
Funding from M.D. Anderson no longer counted after UT’s urging

As if it weren’t enough that the University of Texas’ football ambitions left Baylor University in a lurch last week, it now turns out that some UT medical leaders one-upped the state’s other Baylor in an influential national ranking of medical schools.

UT’s Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas jumped ahead of Baylor College of Medicine in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual survey after UT officials demanded that Baylor stop taking credit for federal funding for M.D. Anderson, which is part of the UT system.

In the 2010 list, UT Southwestern tied for 20th and Baylor fell to 24th, marking the first time that UT outranked its main state rival and the perennial Top 15 mainstay.

Dr. Kenneth Shine, the UT System vice chancellor for health affairs, pressured Baylor to stop counting M.D. Anderson’s National Institutes of Health funding. He told the Chronicle that after UT Southwestern and other sources alerted him Baylor was counting M.D. Anderson’s grants in its magazine submissions, he called then Baylor President Dr. Peter Traber to object.

Shine called the inclusion inappropriate.

Sharing programs
Baylor spokeswoman Claire Bassett said the medical school was doing nothing wrong, noting that it had approval from both M.D. Anderson and U.S. News & World Report to count the funding. The magazine allows medical schools to include NIH money received by their affiliated hospitals but offers no guidelines on what constitutes such a hospital. Without the inclusion of affiliated hospitals, schools whose grants are primarily run through their affiliated hospitals, such as Harvard, would fare poorly.

Baylor shares some programs with M.D. Anderson, which is part of the UT System, but the relationship is nowhere near as integrated as the college’s affiliations with Texas Children’s, Ben Taub and the Veterans Administration. Those institutions are wholly staffed by Baylor faculty.

Ronald Ehrenberg, the director of the Cornell University Higher Education Research Institute who has written frequently on the U.S. News & World rankings, said the incident marks the first time he’s heard of an institution urging another to change its data.

The U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings often are criticized as popularity contests but remain hugely influential, touted by rising schools and feared by falling schools. They measure four primary areas — peers’ assessments, student selectivity, faculty resources and NIH research funding. The latter constitutes 30 percent of a school’s ranking.

M.D. Anderson funding
Baylor began counting M.D. Anderson’s NIH funding in its 1998 U.S. News & World Report submission, following a conversation between Dr. Ralph Feigin, the medical school’s president at the time, and Dr. John Mendelsohn, the cancer center’s president.

Baylor actually got a little bump at the time from the added funding, just less than $57 million. It moved from 15th to 13th in the next two years — it takes that long for the full effect to show up because the magazine averages the last two years of funding — but in that time its own NIH grant money also increased significantly.

Baylor stayed in that range for the next decade, peaking at 10 in 2006 and 2007. M.D. Anderson’s NIH funding for both those years was more than $150 million.

It was after the 2007 rankings came out that Shine called Traber.

“I asked him what the justification was for (including M.D. Anderson’s funding), and he said that they’re an affiliated institution ... and that other medical schools include such research,” recalled Shine. “I pointed out to him that that may be true in circumstances when the faculty is actually the faculty at that medical school, but in this case the faculty at M.D. Anderson is actually University of Texas faculty.”

Baylor stopped the practice in the submission reflected in U.S. News & World Report’s 2009 survey, after three calls during two years by Shine and a request from Mendelsohn.

What’s unclear is whether Baylor will claim any M.D. Anderson numbers in the future. It eliminated all M.D. Anderson grants from its past two submissions, even though the two institutions share programs from which it easily could claim grants.

Bassett said that question will be up to Baylor’s incoming president, expected to assume the job Sept. 1. She said she didn’t know what priority the rankings would take.

If it is a priority, Baylor would appear to have the right person for the job in its presumptive next president, sole finalist Dr. Paul Klotman of Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Since 2005, that school has risen from 32 to 18 in the rankings.

todd.ackerman@chron.com