Barbara Ripley, the Ruder Finn communications consultant retained by Chairman of the Board of Trustees Samuel Heffner ’56 to identify problems with internal communications at RPI, presented her preliminary findings to the Faculty Senate last Wednesday.
“We have been involved in this project to examine and understand internal communications within the Rensselaer community,” Ripley said in introducing her research. “The goal was to gain an understanding, with an eye toward improvement, of how internal communications works at Rensselaer.”
She went on to describe that communications problems are an inevitable result of fast-paced change at established organizations. As a result, Ripley believes evaluation of the tools of communication is a necessary part of any movement toward change.
Since July, Ripley has met one-on-one with 59 faculty, staff, and administrators around both Rensselaer campuses. The individuals she met with ranged in experience from 50 years at RPI to less than one year, and the questions covered a range of the interviewee’s opinions on communication. “How do you receive information,” “what do you consider the most effective form of communication,” and “how would you improve communication?” were among the questions asked. The “informative, constructive, tangible” results of those interviews formed the basis of her research on the campus.
While Ripley said that the majority of her suggestions to the campus will be presented at a meeting this spring, she did elaborate on several sources of communications problems on the campus. She said some respondents felt that information was more commonly pushed out rather than discussed and that most information came down from the leadership without any established avenues for “bottom-up” communications.
“Our insights are that the faculty don’t know how it works, or if it works, or whether it is supposed to work,” Ripley explained.
Chair of the Faculty Bruce Nauman retorted that he had many times heard of President Shirley Ann Jackson saying, in response to complaints about the effectiveness of such communications, “You can have your say, but you can’t always have your way.” He then questioned whether teaching the Board of Trustees and the president to “hear better” was going to be a part of the process, but Ripley said that her suggestions were going to be presented at her later talk.
Town Hall meetings were referenced by many interviewees as great places to find out what is going on on campus, but Ripley said that many of those also felt that that setting was not conducive to an interactive dialog.
Afterward, many members of the Faculty Senate voiced displeasure with the presentation, saying that it lacked any sort of specifics and did not address what could be done now to improve communications. One member said that the only thing Ripley did was the only thing that all consultants do—ensure that they are invited back.
