Welcome Back Address – Fall 2013
Bill Destler
First of all, welcome back to the beginning of another academic year. I
believe that this coming year will be one of the most important in the history
of RIT, for reasons that you already are aware of. Our 3 year journey to a
semester calendar is finally at an end, and this year we will find out what
works and what doesn’t, and we’ll learn what we didn’t think of at all. For
all of the hard work by so many of you that has brought us to this point, I can
only offer my heartfelt thanks. There will still be adjustments to be made
once we gain experience with the new semester calendar, but I believe that
we have laid a strong foundation that we can build upon in the years to come.
And Genesis, our new student information system, is also up and
running, and while this has been a challenging and often frustrating exercise
for so many of you, we are likewise in your debt for your hard work and your
patience. I don’t know if this project will ever be really finished, since
complex information technology systems are almost always a work in
progress, but again your hard work has put us in a position to ultimately
benefit from this transition. So again, to all of you who contributed to this
immense project, heartfelt thanks.
Now usually I spend a good deal of my annual welcome back address
reviewing our accomplishments during the past year, but this year I’ve
decided to spend this brief period with you to talk on a more personal level
about what’s on the horizon and what we need to do collectively to sustain
RIT’s strong positive momentum.
As you know, when I first joined the RIT family I established a number
of very specific goals around student application numbers, retention and
graduation rates, fundraising and alumni engagement, etc., etc., ad nauseum,
and the initiation of new academic programs needed to fill out our curricular
offerings. I did this because in many ways we were not performing in these
areas at the level of the best private universities, and while these metrics do
not by themselves define greatness, greatness cannot be achieved without
competitive performance in these areas. After six years, I am pleased to say
that RIT has made real progress in all of these areas, and as a result we are
beginning to successfully compete for the best students, faculty, and staff.
This is important because I believe that in the next year or two RIT will
move from a national ranking in the “regional – North” category to the
“national university” ranking category. We actually do not get to choose
which category we are ranked in. As soon as we begin to regularly produce
20 PhD degrees or more on an annual basis, and this year we will probably
clear that threshold, our Carnegie classification will change and we will be
ranked against the best colleges and universities in the nation and the world.
Now many of you know that I think college rankings are more of a
problem than a solution and that I think they are for the most part trying to
force very different colleges and universities through a single evaluation
filter. Why North Carolina A&T should be compared to Princeton is a
mystery to me, but I know that we are going to be ranked by various print and
on-line outlets whether we like it or not, so we should at least be prepared for
this change. So let’s think about how we can turn this lemon into lemonade.
And given all that, where do I think we should aspire to be ranked? I
truly believe that if we continue on our present path, a ranking in the top 100
universities and colleges in the U.S. is a realistic goal. When you think about
it, RIT wasn’t even called RIT until 1949; we didn’t offer bachelor degrees
until 1954; we didn’t produce our first Master’s degree until 1960; we didn’t
occupy the current campus until 1968; and we didn’t grant our first Ph.D.
degree until 1993. There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the
U.S., and we could be ranked in the top 100??? I guess that really would be
lemonade.
What will it take to get there? We need to continue on our path to
extend our geographic reach in our recruitment of the most talented students,
staff, and faculty. We must continue to grow our reputation as a place where
innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship flourish, we must continue our
efforts to diversify our student, faculty, and staff populations and exploit
NTID’s presence on our campus, we must continue to get RIT’s name out
there across the country and around the world, we must continue to be seen as
a place where students and parents get a real return on their investment, and
we must continue to develop as a place where the best and brightest come to
find their futures.
Let me give you a few examples of both the progress we have made
and the challenges in front of us:
Probably the one university with which we share the most
undergraduate applicants is RPI. Twenty years ago, only a small fraction of
RIT enrolled students would have even been offered admission to RPI. And
twenty years ago, our chances of enrolling a student in competition with RPI
were only about 1 out of 3. Last year, we won almost half of these
competitions, and RPI was ranked 41st in the last U.S. News national
university rankings.
And we continue to attract an increasing number of truly exceptional
students. One of this year’s freshmen is only 13 years old, and has already
completed two associate degrees at community colleges. And one of last
year’s freshman students, Adam Munich – well there’s a story to be told
about Adam:
Adam Munich has truly been a pain in the butt. In his first year at RIT,
he got into trouble for cracking our IT security systems just to show us how
easy they were to break into, and he took on several self-directed engineering
projects in our various labs and shops by mostly breaking our rules and
borrowing material and equipment wherever he could find them, sometimes
without asking. One of his projects was an advanced Tesla coil which he
wanted to demonstrate at Imagine RIT, but, since it operated at 18kV, we told
him he could not turn it on for safety reasons. I guess we showed him!
Well, actually, he showed us. His Tesla coil won the Engibous Prize at
the Texas Instruments Analog Design Contest and Summit, including a
$10,000 cash award! The awards panel at TI was astonished at both the
sophistication of his design and the innovation he showed in actually
producing a working model. And they were even more astonished to learn
that he was a freshman!
Adam has quite honestly attributed a fair amount of his success to his
quiet circumvention of our various rules and regulations. I think in the wake
of this experience we need to be willing to ask ourselves whether we are
getting in the way of talented students like Adam or recognizing their
potential and finding ways to support them. As a result, I have asked Adam
to work with us to help create a kind of student “skunk works” or
“hackerspace” that would support student-directed projects more effectively,
and one of my goals for this year is to create such a space while ensuring a
reasonable level of accountability and safety.
Frankly, as our students get better and better, these are the kinds of
challenges we will confront in meeting their needs.
As for national visibility, there are roles for all of us to play in this area.
Last year, for example, our men’s lacrosse team went all the way to the
Division III national title game. It is difficult to communicate the kind of
pride that kind of achievement engenders in RIT alumni and friends. And
this year, our men’s hockey team will play Michigan and our women’s
hockey team will play Vermont during Brick City Homecoming weekend.
These are both State flagship universities and national hockey powers, and
they are coming to RIT.
We will not meet our goal unless we have a faculty renowned for their
scholarship, creative activity, and pedagogical innovations. One example is
NTID Prof. Todd Pagano, who was named U.S. Professor of the year by the
Carnegie Foundation, one of only three to be accorded this honor. And our
various academic departments and programs are increasingly appearing in
various national rankings both on-line and in print.
Our organized student team activities, such as our wonderfully
successful Formula SAE and Mini-Baja teams, can also communicate the
excitement of the RIT experience. And last year a team of RIT students won
the national cyberdefense competition.
These are just examples of how we are increasingly sending a national
and international message about the emerging greatness of RIT. To reach our
goal, we will need more of the same on a regular basis.
And in the area of pedagogical leadership, we are being challenged as
never before. Earlier this year, Georgia Tech announced an experimental
MOOC-based on-line computer science Master’s degree for a total tuition
cost of $8,000. Will this be the new model for higher education? And if so,
how will we respond? Our new Innovative Learning Institute is organizing a
variety of new on-line programs, but what the market will respond to in a
positive way is still unknown, and we must remain both creative and flexible
if we are to compete. And if we do not compete, we may be left at the
starting gate.
And while we take great pride in the 95% placement rate among our
graduates, we must continue to control costs and maintain access to an RIT
education for students of modest means. Although our students are getting
better year by year, many are still the first in their families to attend college
and many more require significant financial aid to attend. The days in which
we could raise tuition and fees annually at 2-3 times the rate of inflation and
expect to receive significant added revenues are over.
One area in which there is an opportunity to control costs is in our
health care benefit program. I have no intention of reducing our health care
benefit package, but we are working with our alliance partner, the Rochester
General Health System, to see if they can offer a tiered health care plan that
would be equal in quality and lower in cost than our current offerings. If that
is possible, the plan will be added as an option to our current offerings and
any savings in the new plan would be shared with RIT employees. In
addition, we are working with RGHS to open a walk-in clinic on our campus
to serve students, faculty, and staff, and to serve as a training opportunity for
our allied health care programs.
Finally, I truly believe that RIT is poised to become a national leader in
the education of a truly diverse student body. Recent support programs
developed by our Multicultural Center for Academic Success for graduates of
urban high schools, most of whom are African American or Latino, are
already beginning to reduce the retention rate gap typically seen for such
students compared to students from suburban backgrounds. And our Future
Stewards Program for Native American students is becoming a national
model, with retention and graduation rates for these students actually
exceeding our campus average. Taken together with the remarkable success
of NTID in moving deaf and hard-of-hearing students to meaningful careers,
we have a chance to become a best-practice institution in an area absolutely
essential to the future economic success of our nation.
All this and much more lies in front of us, and I am confident that the
same collective efforts that have brought us to this point will continue to
carry us forward in the years ahead. I cannot promise you that the hard work
is over, but I can promise you that it will be worth it. Very few individuals
have the opportunity to participate in the kind of transformation that RIT is
undergoing, and that transformation, if we continue to make the kind of
progress we have been making, will be your legacy. Thanks so much for
your support, your hard work, and your dedication to our students. I am so
proud to have the honor of serving as your president.