A thought - with a number of Primecoin GPU miners out now, how long do we think it will take for a RIC miner to be released? As soon as that happens diff is pretty much guaranteed to past 1857 if the new miners are at all optimized... which will break the record. Breaking that kind of record should be sufficient to get some serious mainstream media attention by itself (as long as no celebrities do anything really stupid that day), which should help in the recruitment of other interested parties ("We're going this for SCIENCE! ^{And profit.}").

When targeting universities, see who the top researchers in the prime number field are? Of course, now that I think of it, they have probably already heard of RIC.