Centers of … Adequacy, Revisited

Almost two years ago I wrote in this blog about how CERIAS (and Purdue) was not going to resubmit for the NSA/DHS Centers of Academic Excellence program.
Some of you may notice that Purdue is listed among this year's (2010) group of educational institutions receiving designation as one of the CAEs in that program. Specifically, we have received designation as a CAE-R (Center of Academic Excellence in Research).
"What changed?" you may ask, and "Why did you submit?"
The simple answers are "Not that much," and "Because it was the least-effort solution to a problem." A little more elaborate answers follow. (It would help if you read the previous post on this topic to put what follows in context.)
Basically, the first three reasons I listed in the previous post still hold:

The CAE program is still not a good indicator of real excellence. The program now has 125 designated institutions, ranging from top research universities in IA (e.g., Purdue, CMU, Georgia Tech) to 2-year community colleges. To call all of those programs "excellent" and to suggest they are equivalent in a meaningful way is unfair to students who wish to enter the field, and unfair to the people who work at all of those institutions. I have no objection to labeling the evaluation as a high-level evaluation of competence, but "excellence" is still (continue reading...)