RPI Student Union

[ursusminor]

I am amazed that I have not yet commented on this thread yet although I have certainly read it whenever there is a post. It is really way past the time to get rid of Shirley. If it wasn't for the fact that MIT has been higher ranked than RPI since before I was born, I would think that her goal in running RPI into the ground was to benefit her alma mater.

One minor incident. I was standing by the dasher to watch the pregame skate and practice about five years ago as I have done since I was a student and as many others do. Since there is a wide walkway there, this is easy to do without keeping others from walking past. Suddenly Shirley and her entourage came by and one of her beer-bellied bodyguards pushed me into the dasher almost knocking me over. She was going to drop the first puck for a reason which I have forgotten. I was with USCHO poster turk181 who will vouch for the accuracy of this.

[marty]

Fencing at RPI

Two Years Later the Times Union Joins the Party

[marty]

The RPI Student Experience

[Trotsky]

The RPI Student Experience

30 paragraphs in is the following sentence:

The college's finances have been in question in recent years, with Standard & Poor's, a leading credit rating agency, lowering RPI's long-term bond rating at the beginning of 2017 from A- to BBB+, citing the college's high debt burden and low available resources. BBB is the lowest score for which a bond would be considered investment-grade, according to S&P.

Oh.  Talk about burying the lede.

[marty]

Times Union Late to the Party Again

RPI Poly

[marty]

Renew Rensselaer - Unofficial Alumni Site

Times Union coverage of Renew Rensselaer

The Troy Record

[marty]

More Fuel

[billhoward]

RPI is in a bad position. Unless everything in the Times-Union article is wrong, something needs to change. One solution may be a change in RPI's leadership.

Albany is bigger than Ithaca, but it's still a small town in many ways. Were RPI located in Boston or NYC, this would get a lot more scrutiny from media people you (the school) can't just blow off. RPI's administration seems to have challenges doing more than circling the wagons. The TU story included a goodly number of alumni who're sitting on the sidelines, along with their checkbooks.

Meanwhile, as manufacturing continues to slip away from New York State, education is an increasingly bigger part of NYS's economy. If I recall correctly, Mount Sinai is the biggest employer in New York, and Cornell and Columbia are in the top ten. It sure isn't Kodak anymore, or Xerox, or Carrier.

[TimV]

Riiiiight!  They hate her because she's SHORT.::doh::

[Al DeFlorio]

Renew Rensselaer - Unofficial Alumni Site

Times Union coverage of Renew Rensselaer

The Troy Record

From The Ugly Story:  

"In contrast, top aspirant peer schools for RPI, which include MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Lehigh, and Johns Hopkins..."

Rather optimistic definition of "peer schools."

[marty]

I felt the same way circa 1968. The "It's just as good as a Xerox" -make that MIT - mantra was unbelievable to me as a local teen. The school has some great programs and amazing alums. That doesn't mean it's in the same league with top tier "competitors". In the late 60's the unbelievable comparisons caused me to look down on the school and in retrospect I was overly harsh back then.

President Jackson decided on a path she thought would raise the school's stature. Rather than doubling down on good programs in engineering, she built a very large and modern bio-tech building. She went off the rails building EMPAC as it attempted to invent a new path to glory and perhaps even more importantly the budget overruns on that building helped to harden the cement overshoes on the Tute's finances.

If I'm an engineering professor in CE, EE, ChemE or any other E I've just been excessed to at least a degree. Adding more of an emphasis on how much research money a specific professor can bring to RPI (and yes,this is a trend in other schools too) while emphasizing bio-tech and whatever the hell EMPAC represents was a disaster.

I live in an adjacent burb of Troy and the rumblings from professors, wives of professors and support staff made me feel like a fly on the wall. I have been very hesitant to publicly comment on anything relating to President Jackson's leadership. My feeling is that those who grumbled were in much the same boat. Though we truly disagreed with her we didn't want to appear quick to pass judgement lest we appear racist. As a community I think we were slow to react.

As an aside, as she was being considered for a second 10 year contract(?) I was rooting for her to retain the job in hopes that she could cajole the alums into bailing the school out of debt. The changes in giving after the 2008 Great Recession were not anticipated and not her fault. I wanted her to turn things around.

The Student Union debacle though has soured many of us. Any remaining support for her by me is gone. I have no proof but believe that if she didn't have a super majority of trustees backing her, she'd be enjoying the fruits of her overly generous pension.

[ugarte]

Renew Rensselaer - Unofficial Alumni Site

Times Union coverage of Renew Rensselaer

The Troy Record

From The Ugly Story:  

"In contrast, top aspirant peer schools for RPI, which include MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Lehigh, and Johns Hopkins..."

Rather optimistic definition of "peer schools."

"aspirant peer schools"

[billhoward]

Renew Rensselaer - Unofficial Alumni Site
Times Union coverage of Renew Rensselaer
The Troy Record

I talked with a couple RPI people I know. Wanted to see if you're just a whiny guy looking for a Big Red shoulder to cry on, or if you've got a point. What I heard: Things have not gone well recently at RPI, that Jackson is brilliant, she deserves credit for being the first black woman to earn a PhD at MIT (in 1973, can it really be no one did it before Jackson?), she and RPI did well early in her RPI tenure, that racism may have been (probably was) an issue affecting parts of her tenure, things have not gone well that are not (in their opinion) necessarily caused by racism, and/but perhaps as she heads into her 19th / 20th year at RPI she should be thinking about a graceful wind-down to her career. That's what I heard.

The Times-Union article to me seemed on-target and, if it was, suggests RPI has a problem. The letter of support for Jackson from professor Chris Bystroff was not, I thought, a reasoned endorsement of Jackson. He was a bit shrill.

Industry is abandoning New York State. Education now is one of the state's biggest industry's. (Columbia and Cornell are top ten NYS employers.) RPI, Union and SUNY Albany are a big part of Albany's economy. If RPI is not Cornell or MIT or CalTech, it's a very good school and deserves to continue to improve. It sounds as if RPI is treading water.

I'd be happy if RPI was better academically and a little less good against Cornell in hockey.

It's up to the trustees to decide if this is a storm they want to weather.

[marty]

In an attempt to give President Shirley Jackson a break I did not post articles concerning the change in Greek life at RPI on eLynah.  Even though it appeared heavy handed some comments by President Jackson in the late spring regarding the Student Union were cause for hope with regard to that battle.  Yet today's Times Union makes a connection between the two conflicts as they both are orchestrated from Jackson's office with all the hallmarks of her overbearing personality. Tony Reale one of the WRPI hockey announcers has quit over the change in Greek life that was recently announced.

"This administration, over the last three years, has done something remarkable. They've taken a person who had an uncanny and certainly unusual amount of pride in a school that rarely seems to engender such pride in its students and alums, and turned him into someone who is quite ashamed," he wrote, noting that his grandfather, father and even great uncle are graduates of the school.
 
The public resignation is the latest reaction to the school's decision announced June 20 to halt the traditional fall "rush" period in which new students are recruited to join fraternities and sororities.
 
"They are going to stop rush in the fall and they might bring it back in the spring," said Reale, who learned of the move in an announcement to Greek organization alumni. Reale is on the board of directors for RPI's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.

Today's Article.

The timing of the Greek life suspension just after finals precluded any meaningful input from the student body at large.  She isn't just an authoritative kook, when it comes to disagreement with her fiats she's a lazy coward as well.

[marty]

RPI caves.  As I mentioned in the post above there have been signs that President Jackson is starting to soften her imperial reign.  This compromise looks promising.