Final
State of the Institute
President Bill Destler
Brick City Homecoming 2014
Thank you for that wonderful introduction Ashley … Good
morning everyone and welcome to RIT’s Brick City Homecoming
and Family Weekend. It is wonderful to have so many parents,
alumni and friends joining us for this magnificent weekend. As you
tour the campus, you will discover a thriving and growing
university full of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity.
We are off to a great start this fall, welcoming about 2,700
freshmen, 660 transfer students and 1,175 new graduate students.
RIT is now the 11th largest private university in the nation. And we
are second among the private universities that graduate students in
the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines. We are
well positioned to become a leader in areas that are essential to the
future economic success of the nation. With 3,500 international
students on this campus and four campuses overseas, we are also
making our mark globally.
RIT is a unique, very good, comprehensive university with a
growing national and international reputation. The university is
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currently going through a Strategic Planning process that will chart
our future through 2025. The plan is expected to be adopted by our
Board of Trustees in November. More on the Strategic Plan in a
minute. First, a few examples of where we stand today:
 U.S. News and World Report annually singles out RIT as one
of the nation’s elite internship/co-op schools. Each year,
more than 3,500 students complete more than 5,500 work
assignments with more than 2,000 companies and
organizations from small start-up firms to Fortune 500
corporations. Let me add that 96 percent of our students are
employed in their fields of study within six months of
graduation, or are in graduate school.
 RIT was recently ranked in the top 40 “most technologically
advanced” universities in the world.
 A range of other rankings include: “Best Value”, “Best Online”,
“Best Workplace”, “Best Industrial Arts”, “Best Fine Arts”,
“Best College Radio Station” … And yes, we have been ranked
the “Geekiest Campus” in the nation!
 We launched our new doctoral program in engineering this
semester. It marks the seventh Ph.D. program at RIT. This
past spring, 29 graduates earned their doctorates— the most
in our history. This increase in Ph.D.’s will soon elevate RIT
from a “master’s university” to a research university by the
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Carnegie Foundation – a move that will also place us
amongst the top national research universities in the U.S.
News rankings.
 Our faculty are increasingly the recipients of funding awards
for their research work. More than 400 new awards came in
this past year from a variety of state, federal, corporate and
foundation sponsors. This resulted in more than $52 million
in new research awards, a 10 percent increase from the
previous year and in very difficult and competitive times.
 Employers from small start-ups to multi-national
corporations actively seek out our talented students. Earlier
this month, a record 250 companies attended our Fall Career
Day. We actually had to turn some companies away!
The campus continues to thrive and we have more in store
this year.
 We recently christened the Gene Polisseni Center, home to
our men’s and women’s Division I hockey programs. The
state-of-the art arena has capacity for 4,300 fans and is open
later today for guided tours.
 In April, we broke ground on the new Clinical Health
Sciences Center, which will be home to:
o Our College of Health Sciences and Technology.
o A primary care clinic—to be run by our partner
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Rochester General Hospital.
o And the new Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition.
This new facility will be open a year from now.
 In two weeks, we will be having our first open house at
Construct @ RIT. The Construct is student-run maker space
open to all RIT students, alumni and friends. It is full of tools
and students with the expertise needed to help make ideas
become reality. Use of the lab is free, and students of all
disciplines and year levels are welcome.
 And beyond our 16 million bricks, our Innovative Learning
Institute has developed a strategy for creating high demand
online programs that takes advantage of the best that RIT has
to offer - all in the virtual world.
Let’s now turn to my favorite topic ~ student life.
One area in which RIT has seen the greatest progress in
recent years is in the quality of student life outside the
classroom. With a strong Student Government and more than
300 student clubs and organizations, all students can find ways
to become engaged in extra-curricular activities.
Our intercollegiate athletics program has contributed to a
marked increase in school spirit. Our Division I men’s hockey
team continues to compete and beat the nation’s elite. After
winning the NCAA Division III National Championship in
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2012, our women’s team moved up to Division I and quickly
captured the College Hockey America conference championship
last season. Our men’s lacrosse team is a perennial Division III
national contender. And for the first time in program history, the
women’s cross-country team is nationally ranked this fall.
We have some amazing students at RIT, and here are just a
few recent examples of their great work:
 Jen Lamere is only in her second year of college, but the
software engineering student won a global 2014 Net Award
in the category of Emerging Talent of the Year. She was the
only woman nominated in the 10-person category and the
only nominee from the U.S. She flew to London to attend the
awards ceremony. Jen was also the youngest ever intern at
Twitter and even created a popular app, Twivo, which allows
Twitter users to block television spoilers from their Twitter
feed.
 A team of students from the National Technical Institute for
the Deaf received $25,000 and acceptance into a high-tech
business accelerator in San Francisco to help further their
work on a program that will help deaf and hearing people
communicate more easily. The team, Motion Savvy, is
developing applications for the Leap Motion 3-D sensor.
Leap Motion recognizes the slightest hand movements. The
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team plans to develop applications that will enable devices to
translate sign language into words and sentences.
 Each spring, hundreds of students show off their talents at
“Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival.” Since
2008, Imagine RIT has drawn more than 200,000 visitors. It
has jump-started new ideas, products, services and studentled ventures. Save the date for our next festival - May 2!!
To our distinguished alumni: The true measure of RIT success is
not just the graduation of students, but also the success of our
alumni!
And I have a few examples:
 Austin McChord, founder and CEO of Datto, officially
opened his Inc. 500 firm’s offices in downtown Rochester in
September. Datto, an information backup and disaster
recovery firm, is the first company in the Rochester region to
launch as part of the START-UP NY program. The company
is located in our Center for Urban Entrepreneurship in
downtown Rochester. McChord started Datto in 2007 while
finishing his degree in bioinformatics here at RIT. Datto
achieved nearly $50 million in revenue in 2013 and is the
fastest growing privately owned company in the state of
Connecticut. We are thrilled to partner with Datto on their
New York expansion and it should be noted that a huge
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number of Datto’s employees are RIT alumni.
 RIT graduates are also making an impact in the thriving
animated film world. A little bit of RIT lives inside the Oscarwinning movie Frozen, the highest grossing animated film of
all time.
 RIT’s progress has not gone unnoticed by our alumni and
friends. Last year, we received nearly $29 million in
philanthropic contributions and we were delighted to have
more than 28,000 alumni actively involved in the life of the
university. We are always looking for more ways to engage
our alumni with current students – as mentors, guest
lecturers, and career advisors. I am proud that we now have
nearly 115,000 alumni living in 123 countries.
Let’s now outline where we are going with our new Strategic
Plan:
Throughout its 186-year history, RIT has always been a different
kind of institution. RIT continues to redefine higher education. We
have several distinctive programs, our “crown jewels”, which
include our co-op program, the National Technical Institute for the
Deaf, imaging science, the School for American Crafts, industrial
design, photography, film and animation, sustainable
manufacturing and computational astrophysics. It should be noted
that none of these is in a traditional academic discipline.
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RIT will become an internationally distinguished university by
exploiting its differences and better meeting the needs of a rapidly
shrinking world. Or, more succinctly: RIT will achieve greatness
through difference. We belong in the category of the world’s
great universities, not because we seek to replicate the great
universities of the 20th century, but because we are already
practicing what future universities must provide.
During the strategic conversations of the past year, five
intersecting spheres of effort have surfaced repeatedly. We have
elected to concentrate on these dimensions:
 Career Education and Student Success
 The Student-centered Research University
 Leveraging Difference
 Value, Affordability & Return on Investment
 Organizational Agility
Here is a sample of some of the goals that we believe will be
difference makers in our upcoming Strategic Plan:
 100% of RIT undergraduate students will have an
experiential learning experience relevant to their degree
program and designed to provide skills and competencies of
growing importance to employers.
 RIT will launch 50 student-run startup companies per year.
 RIT will earn a distinguished reputation as a research
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university through its focus on specific interdisciplinary
research areas selected on the basis of current internal
strengths, emerging areas of global need, and external
funding opportunities. Among the areas that could meet these
criteria are Digital Media; Global Resilience; Accessibility
and Inclusion; and Advanced Design and Manufacturing.
 RIT will enlarge its graduate portfolio through adding
professional and research-focused programs in STEM fields
and in the arts, bringing the graduate population to 30% of
the total student population.
 RIT will be the most globally engaged private university in
the United States as measured by the breadth and size of its
international populations served both in the U.S. and abroad.
 RIT will be the largest producer of female and minority male
STEM graduates among all private colleges in the U.S.
 RIT will eliminate the achievement gap between minority
and majority students, becoming a model of inclusive
excellence for all students, faculty, and staff.
 RIT will become the university that best utilizes educational
technology to reduce costs, improve access, and achieve
desired learning outcomes.
 RIT will be the university with the best placement rate and
return on investment of all private universities in the United
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States.
RIT has all the ingredients to realize these goals. While the
future holds surprises for us, we are confident that the route
mapped within this strategic plan will allow us to emerge as a
world-class university. Yes, the plan is ambitious, even
audacious. But it is very achievable.
We have a busy weekend planned for you. We encourage you
to mingle with faculty, administrators and staff. Enjoy yourselves
at some of the signature events, including a presentation in the
Gordon Field House by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the Emmy-award
winning chief medical correspondent for CNN. And tonight, our
men’s hockey team faces off downtown against Boston College, a
5-time national champion. That’s right, we scheduled them for our
homecoming (pause for laughter). You will see 10,000-plus loyal
Tiger fans. Let’s fill the arena with a sea of Orange!
Thank you for being a part of our family and sharing this
special weekend with us. We hope that you will leave here feeling
a stronger connection to RIT and to each other.
Thanks again and have a great weekend!
I would be happy to take your questions and comments now.
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One note: Please use the microphones that we have in the
audience. It helps those who are hearing impaired and also
helps the interpreters.
(Go to Question and Answer session with Audience)
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