that was not what happened
1. the AAU places a value on "competitively awarded" research.....land grant universities get statutorily awarded research dollars from the feds based on being a "land grant" university with those dollars awarded based in a large part on the agricultural productivity of the state the university is in......a very very very large number of AAU members are also land grant universities and the AAU has never considered their statutorily awarded dollars as part of the evaluation criteria.....because getting those dollars has nothing to do with the quality of research of the university and also because other universities that are not land grant do not have the ability to compete for those dollars......that was simply an argument that Nebraska used to cover their ineptitude....and more so their inability to take those land grant dollars and use them to build out infrastructure that can then gain large amounts of competitively awarded life sciences grant money......with the AAU placing a high emphasis in life sciences grants because they feel those often have national and international benefits (along with engineering and medicine)
2. Nebraska made the claim that not having a medical school hurt them (something similar to what Iowa State just claimed).....but there were issues with this false claim as well.....Nebraska - Lincoln is one of only 2 major public universities in Nebraska with the other being Omaha and the other public schools in the state minor players of under 7,000 enrollment......there is the one medical school as well.....there was NOTHING that stopped that medical school from being merged in with the Lincoln campus (similar to how aggy has all of their medical components across the state all under college station since about 2012)......but the state never saw fit to do that.....and the reason for that is because that medical school is not a major producer or research it is more of a teaching facility......and more importantly the AAU evaluates universities against "peer universities" (both inside and outside of the AAU) in part based on having a medical school or not having a medical school
so in the past prior to the Dell Medical School opening up Texas would be evaluated against PUBLIC universities like Berkeley (that does not have a medical school), or against aggy (that in the past did not have their medical schools under the college station campus) or against Iowa State, Oregon, or Colorado (that do not have a medical schools).....in the case of Texas the medical school is new so that plays a part and more so Texas has plenty of other factors in their favor to remain well within the AAU even now being evaluated against "peers" with medical schools
or in the case of private schools Rice is not evaluated against Vanderbilt or Duke or Tulane because they all have medical schools....they would be evaluated against any AAU members that are private without a medical school (Cal Tech) or outside of the AAU schools like SMU, Baylor, Tulsa, or similar private universities
in the case of NU because they were already being told to improve or face removal and because their medical school they COULD have merged was not very research productive the only thing that would have happened if they had merged it would have been a new set of schools to evaluate NU against especially in the AAU and all of those schools and their medical component would have been an even harsher comparison for NU....thus they were out
the AAU of course uses many other evaluation criteria that are not based solely on research and are not based on total research, but the end result was NU had ab out a decade warning to improve and they did nothing and they were out