Led by Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon (who made a preliminary visit in October), the team was composed of members from Drexel University, Rutgers University, Rowan University, Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh University, MIT, and the Stevens Institute of Technology. The eight team members’ visit comprised of several different schedules in which they met with administrators, trustees, students, faculty, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and staff members. A few team members also visited the Hartford campus, which their exit report called “a great idea” and “brilliantly run.”

The team’s report to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education will build on the self-evaluation report RPI submitted earlier and will lead to the next steps in the process in which the MSCHE will send the final report to RPI. President Jackson will then respond, and re-accreditation will hopefully occur.

In his exit report, Cohon identified three levels of “issues” the team could report on. They range from suggestions (non-binding minor concern) and recommendations (non-binding concerns that carry more weight), to requirements (necessary issues to be resolved before accreditation). He then indicated that accreditation was very much a pass/fail phenomenon, and RPI had passed and received only suggestion-level issues for evaluation. To finish his report, Cohon stated that “there is a lot of work to be done, but even the administration’s harshest critics approve of The [Rensselaer] Plan overall.”

In the financial area, the team expressed some concern about the substantial risks RPI was taking with its finances and noted that the budgetary tightening necessary could “cause strain in some areas while we wait for investments to pay off in areas [like biotechnology].” The recent downgrade by Moody’s Investor Services of RPI’s debt rating to A2 -a continued negative outlook—and the Institute’s 193 percent increase in debt from 2001 to 2005 are indicative of the risks RPI is taking in its investments as it finishes several large capital projects and begins planning others.

In the same vein, Cohon mentioned that the “unprecedented speed of change” at RPI would cause some upheaval in terms of faculty and staff as Institute processes and goals change as outlined in the Rensselaer Plan.

In particular, the team noted a lack of two-way communication and dialog between different areas of the Institute, but noted that this phenomenon is “common in environments of ‘unprecedented change.’”

Earlier this year, Barbara Shipley, a communications consultant from Ruder Finn hired by the Board of Trustees, made similar observations and is supposed to make her findings known later this spring.

Lastly, the team made reference to an undergraduate application pool that has been “flat for the past 20 years.” Despite the 20 percent increase in applications this year, the team indicated that overall, enrollment management could use improvement and endorsed President Jackson’s decision to create a top-level position for enrollment management.

Now that the self-evaluation report and the team visit are complete, the job of the Middle States Steering Committee, chaired by Professor Don Steiner, is essentially complete.

The process of accreditation does not make necessary the implementation of anything but requirement-level issues, so the decision to pursue or not pursue the recommendations lies with RPI. Steiner indicated that he has “definite interest in following up on the recommendations” and wants to see the issues “dealt with in an open and collegial fashion rather than a top-down decision process.”