Now every university in every city cannot be the star of every particular field, decrepit or me-too departments that don’t have the talent to be better than the University two towns over isn’t doing anything good, at best they turn out unskilled candidates with worthless diplomas, at worst they draw talented students away from the place where they could learn to excel. Universities need to focus on the areas where they have the best professors in the vicinity. If Turing award winners (or at least candidates) are teachers, you should give them a CS department to pass on their skills. If Pulitzer winners (or at least candidates) are teachers, you should give them a literature or journalism department. If you already have a century long tradition in a field (or at least as close as can be expected in younger sciences), then you should try to keep up the proud tradition and attract geniuses in that field.

Great CS departments like the ones at MIT and UCB are key national assets that should not be thrown away. Historically significant CS departments like the ones that people like Knuth and Gries call home should be kept alive unless they have run out of talent (being out of fashion or having no recent breakthroughs is not out of talent in any science, they could be preparing the next big thing).

But the time when every little University would slap a CS department onto their campus just to be hip are hopefully over. I really have no respect for places that hand out CS Masters degrees for knowing how to create a simple database front end in C# or Java. That should only result in a low level “skilled craftsman” diploma, one needs to know the science and tech from top to bottom and across the board to get a CS degree.

As for Florida, maybe they are better at space science and need room for all those NASA scientist that are in danger of being lost in short term budget cuts.