Transcription by Bernadette Colarusso, photos by Blake Huovie.

General RPI Questions

Poly: What do you currently see as being the Institute’s greatest strength?

Jackson: Its students, its faculty, the people here. The university is a people-intensive place so it always starts with the students. Also, the legacy at Rensselaer. Interestingly enough, it’s a university that was created for a certain purpose and it remains true to that purpose. It may sound corny, but it is to educate those who would apply science to the common purposes of life. That remains at the root of the education we provide, but it also shows up in things like the architecture competitions and things like that. So, those are the things I think are very important. And then we have fabulous alums. I think we have to do a better job with having our current students understand who has gone here and what they have done when they left … today as well as dating back one hundred and eighty years.

Poly: On the other hand, what do you currently see as our biggest weakness or area to improve on?

Jackson: Well, I don’t tend to focus on weakness. I don’t care for those terminologies. It’s always to me their strengths and relative strengths. If there was anything, I’d just like to see people be happier, more upbeat, and appreciate that this is a special place and that the people in it are special.

Poly: Going on that, it is said that people love to hate RPI. What do you think people are so negative here?

Jackson: Well, I’m not sure that I think people are so negative, because … you [only] hear from people who have something they want to talk about. When I go around and talk with students just randomly, I actually don’t hear all of that, and I don’t think they’re putting on because they are talking with me. Because I can run into students who don’t want to talk and don’t [share any of their issues with me], I think—and our students are pretty straight forward so—I don’t see it as that way. But it’s a tone and maybe that’s because of what you hear; [there are] those who want to write to the editor or whatever and then get it published. That’s not to say there aren’t things that can be improved. If you think about the fact that our actual retention statistics have gone way up, it says that more students are choosing to stay here and to graduate, so that tells me something. But, I would like to see us have a more upbeat tone, but that’s different than saying I think people are really unhappy.

Poly: Why do you think people are so resistant to creating that upbeat tone?

Jackson: I don’t know that they’re resistant. I’m just saying because what we’re really talking about is what we see reflected in the media, and that’s you guys. So, you should actually tell me. Honestly, you should tell me because I know you; you can see certain things that you feel that you hear and then they get reflected in The Poly. But then, it’s different then what I may be hearing when I go around and talk to people.

Poly: Since you’ve come to RPI, you’ve definitely accomplished quite a few things. Is there anything that you haven’t been able to accomplish since you’ve been here that you have wanted to?

Jackson: Well, you know, one always has the list in the drawer, but I’m just trying to stay focused on what we already have underway to successfully complete it, to keep making things better. I’d ask people to read the different portfolios to get the sense of what they thought we have accomplished. And, I want to share some of them with you. We’ve redone the first floor of the library and expanded and renovated the café; the BarH dining room, the Rathskellar, bathrooms in the Colonie apartments, landscape improvements. It’s interesting; students talked about wanting the campus to be more beautiful, and we’ve done that. Now, some people think you shouldn’t spend money on flowers. I happen to think you should. We put in the Haviland fountain; we improved the area in the freshmen quad. I think private place is important. And, I could go on, but basically we’re trying to make the place welcoming and provide a lot of alternatives for things you might do, but we’re not done yet. We have the athletic village; we have to finish EMPAC. And even as we do that we’re always doing renovations and that’s something you should keep in mind. The renovation of West Hall was a multi-year project, but when it’s done, it’s going to be fantastic.

Poly: How would you answer someone who said long-term investments that may benefit the campus in the future are adversely affecting the community now?

Jackson: Well, I want to tell you this much. You see this room we are sitting in? Students who were students here ten or fifteen years ago pushed ahead this Union, renovated it, and enlarged it. This room, it certainly wasn’t here. As students, you should always watch your university, what will be your alma mater. If the Institution is moving in the right direction and it’s getting stronger, that’s going to make your degree more valuable because in the end. What you want is a good education while you’re here and a degree that means something where you end up. There are those who put up with aggravation and dislocation when the Union was being renovated. This was renovated our first year and students lived without a student Union at all for over a year, but here you are now.

Greek Life

Poly: What is your feeling on the necessity of making the greek system dry? Do you feel this is the ideal way to create or teach responsibility to students, and do you think this is really a way to make RPI into a model of excellence?

Jackson: It’s interesting that you bring that up. The greek system is interesting. I believe that it is an important option in student life, but it’s not going to be the choice of every student. The greek organizations are given a lot of autonomy. Most of them don’t have an older adult living in the houses. So, the question becomes: What is the balance? You could ask, “why do you have to drink?” If you wish to have young people, other brothers or sisters living in the houses who are not 21 years old, then what are you going to do? Secondly, there are a lot of related issues that we are talking about. For example, rush. Can you have a dry rush? You have students who are coming straight out of high school and they’re immediately rushed—brought into parties where liquor is freely served. Are you keeping all these freshmen from drinking? Do you feel it’s your responsibility to keep them from drinking? So, I think the answer is not just an answer from me; I think it’s an answer for the greeks as well. It’s a serious issue and it relates to the question about the safety and health of the student. Charles, what do you say?

Carletta: I think we ask our undergraduate students to take on too much responsibility and it pops up in the greek system. We ask them to live in a house that they have to take care of; their parents don’t even ask them to do that. We ask them to take care of arranging diets, and we ask them to excel in their studies and engage in some kind of a social atmosphere that is safe for everybody involved. In my view, that isn’t why people come to Rensselaer or to Harvard or anywhere else. They come for opportunities of learning and this is one of them, this experience is just one of them. The problem is that it has become so encompassing to try to do all that without any assistance that it’s overwhelming and unfair to the student leadership in each of the greek houses.

Jackson: Having said that, I think that the greek houses offer a unique opportunity for students to learn leadership in a community, but perhaps we kind of left them out on their own. So, the question is, where is the middle ground? I think we’re working our way through that but we have had some successes and we’ve had some situations where people could be hurt. I have to tell you that I have great difficulty, but I think we are trying to find this balance. We are trying to find this balance of whether we’re asking too much from the students on their own in these houses, and what we might do to help them so all these things come up within that context. I think you find that the Student Life Division has a point of view about it that may sound hard, but it comes out of a series of experiences related to drinking over multiple years. I think that’s kind of what’s driven this perspective. But, I would like to see the greeks remain, I think functioning the viable parts of university life; recognizing that they’re not going to be the choice for everybody. Students come to college with many interests these days and different ways they want to live. Our challenge is how we accommodate all of these under an umbrella that none the less creates a community, a community responsibility with everybody.

Undergraduate Education

Poly: For decades, this campus has always debated over whether the focus should be on undergraduate education or research. What are your thoughts on where you think we are now, and how do you feel about this argument in general?

Jackson: Well, have you read The Undergraduate Plan? The Undergraduate Plan on the academic side has three folds—basically, that every undergraduate should have a research experience; that every undergraduate should have an international experience; and that we should flush out and give more meaning to and create more opportunities in terms of living/learning community and integration with them. And, the ultimate integration of living and learning is actually when you do research. What is research, really? It is looking at a situation, a problem, a puzzle that you are a priori don’t know the answer to. So, it’s different than your textbook learning where somebody’s worked out the answers somewhere. But, now if you leave here and you go to design and the next jet you don’t know. You think you know what you want it to be, but you don’t know all of the intricacies of what that airplane is going to be. So, it’s a fairly open-ended thing that you have to learn to bring to closure and that’s what research helps you do. Or, if you go out and you are looking at why—and this happens all the time, people are treated for certain cancers. And the cancer goes into remission, and then it comes back as some little spot and the next thing you know it’s out of control, and none of the treatments we know can stop it. That is a very open-ended division, and some of our students are going to work at situations like that. So, it’s very important to be able to look at really, really complex problems and issues—whether it’s designing an aircraft that can fly five hundred feet or figuring out why, when a cancer returns after you’ve done radiation and chemotherapy, why it rages out of control. And, you are all the bright ones and you’re the ones that are going to work on some of these problems and so, there is no difference between education and research if you do it the right way. That’s what our goal is. In fact, we would be doing you a disservice if we didn’t have faculty here who are working at the leading edge of what they could do, and if we didn’t try to engage you in that. That’s the way the world is, the world is changing very fast and your fields are changing fast. The knowledge base shifts from the day you start studying and the day you get your degree.

Poly: Would you say then it is the responsibility of undergraduates to involve themselves in more research?

Jackson: Well, I think it’s our collective responsibility to expose undergraduates to research and I would like to believe that it would be exciting for the undergraduates.

Future Planning

Poly: Looking at The Rensselaer Plan, some of it was a five-year timeline some of it was a ten-year timeline; we’re about 60 percent through the ten-year plan. Over the course of the six years, what lessons have you learned or discoveries have you made from being on campus that you feel should influence the next great move and change, like The Rensselaer Plan?

Jackson: Well, I think The Rensselaer Plan is really meant to be an evergreen plan because the themes that it lays out are very broad, but the specifics are all going to be a function of the time of the means and of the leadership at the given time and what people collectively want to do. So, I think for now we’re striving to get to a certain level relative to new degree programs both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, new support systems for students, and new facilities. We’re continuing to grow, and we’ll always continue to grow. There are always going to be new directions people want to go in to. I can’t totally predict what they are, but we do believe that biotechnology is very important to this century. We think there’s the opportunity to create a social and cultural impact in that field—an impact that plays off of what we are as an institution. Beyond that, I’m ready to let it ride; lets see what comes next.

Financial Status

Poly: Given the recent drop in the bond rating, our recent withdrawal from the endowment, and the increases in tuition and living costs on campus, how would you say RPI is doing on the financial level?

Jackson: We’re doing fine because we manage our resources very carefully and very tightly. The truth of the matter is that the draws are investments in The Rensselaer Plan and Rensselaer Plan initiatives. That is how we have managed our money to ensure that we can provide the kind of education that we provide, that we can refurbish the facilities and build new ones, and that we can move in new directions. And, the bond rating can drop as long as you are in a certain category; we are still in the “A” category and, in point of fact, it has had no effect on our cost of bond. In fact, the rating agencies like The Rensselaer Plan and the fact that we have a plan; and they say this. We actually follow the Plan, and they see the results of it coming out. So, they understand it as an investment in the future of Rensselaer and it’s an investment that we have to make. The Board of Trustees actually approves this all the time; everything we do has the approval of the Board, and all of the board members have contributed to the capital campaign—they’re putting their own money on the line. If they didn’t believe in what we were doing, they wouldn’t do that. Universities’ bond ratings go up and down all the time, depending on what the overall structuring of their finances. One tries to, as I said, not fall below a certain rating, but within that things shift all the time.

Poly: There seems to have been a lot of criticism from some of the faculty on the decision to raise the facilities overhead on federal grants to 60 percent, saying that it creates an undue burden for the funding of those projects. Are there any plans for lowering the overhead in the future, or perhaps reconsidering it?

Jackson: It makes no sense to talk about lowering the overhead. The federal government has a structure that is meant to allow you to recoup some of the costs of your infrastructure, through the overhead return. And, they do a very critical and careful analysis of whether or not your request vis-à-vis your overhead makes sense and can be justified. So, the overhead rate does not affect the competitiveness of a proposal that you put in. Our overhead rate does not differ from that of other research universities; maybe you can find some that are somewhat lower and some that are higher, but in the end, we sort of ride with the pack. It is a mechanism for helping to offset what it costs to provide more class facilities.

Carletta: Can I add to that? The United States relies on its research institutions, its universities to conduct basic research. Now you have to get that done somewhere and in this country, we use universities as opposed to private laboratories. We used to have a lot of private laboratories, but there are fewer and fewer of them today. So, in essence, the importance of university research labs is critical to the way we engage in science in our country. The funding structure they put into place to make this all happen is what we call the “overhead rate.” In other words, they allow you to invest percentages of a grant into making sure that the underlining structure is in place and works.

Jackson: It’s meant to support many things.

Carletta: But, that’s the basic framework by which the federal government funds basic research at every research university in the country. And so, it’s difficult when you hear someone say, the overhead rate is too high. Every university strives to get the government to give it as much overhead as it can. And, we are, as Dr. Jackson said; we’re competitive with everybody in our league. We’re in the top league now, Rensselaer is a first rate research university.

Jackson: But, you know, if you look at other places, the amount of overhead money that we actually bring in here is not that high; I mean it’s growing, but, in point a fact, there are two things you should keep in mind. One is that many of the other research universities, my alma mater included, bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in pure overhead. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and then it’s all overhead rates that are not unlike ours. Then the other is that, the actual overhead rate is never the nominal rate. The overhead rate we are talking about, which is about 60 percent, is on federal grants only and it’s on what are called “modified.” The modified total direct cost base. So, you do not collect overhead on all the categories of cost that a grant pays for. The actual overhead on the total grant is always less than that 60 percent; it’s 60 percent on the modified total direct cost base. Secondly, there are many grants—things from the State, things from other sources that carry much less overhead, like ten or fifteen percent or nothing. If you actually looked at a blended rate, it’s not very high.

Poly: There’s a huge variety of prices and costs of living off campus, in light of that, are the 5% increase that we’ve been seeing year to year on campus housing, do you think those are sustainable?

Jackson: The housing, students have a choice other than the requirement that freshmen live on the campus; we don’t require a student to live in the university housing. There are apartments available off campus and some students live in fraternities and sororities, so it’s a choice that people have. Now having said that, we have been working very assiduously to improve student housing; building new, renovating the existing housing, creating more amenities, creating more hospitality venues; having the robust information architecture a network, as well as providing more activity and things on the campus. I happen to believe that a big part of college life, residential college life is to participate in campus life. Then for as hard as you work there are other dimensions to how you grow and what this experience should be. So, I believe we’re doing a good job with the…what we charge so to speak to improve life here. But, it’s kind of like, you get on the train where you get on the train, which means that when you get on the train you don’t know where all the other stations that the train has gone through really look like. So, if you weren’t here six years ago then you don’t know what all the res halls, other things or whatever might have been like or what support services there may have been or not been; because you get on the train where you get on the train. So, we’ve been working the whole time to improve a lot whether it’s the food, the food service, the options, the hours as well as the physical menus themselves. And so, Claude’s has a lot of things on his plate, things that I’ve put onto his plate sometimes, but we’ve been working on it and it takes a lot to support all that. But having said all of that, our costs are right in line with all of our tier with institutions. And, you could say ours is excellent but more than somebody else’s, well somebody else’s is excellent or more than ours. We pay attention to that, so that kind of the outlook we have about it.

Poly: One of the major parts of The Rensselaer Plan dealing with research and education was the recruitment of constellation professors, why do you think we’ve had such a problem in recruiting those constellations? Could you pin it on one thing or is it a group of things?

Jackson: The environment is competitive. The kind of faculty that we wish to recruit into those positions are people who are at the top of the game; they tend to be quite happy where they are. It’s not necessarily easy to do in particularly when you want to try and recruit them all as a group. But, we have hired some stellar faculty as senior constellation professors. We’ve filled the future chips constellation completely but we’ve hired one hundred fifty faculty by the time we’ve finish our current hiring plan over the last five years and thirty four of those have gotten early career awards from the National Science Foundation. If you talk with people they will tell you that’s astounding. We have hired excellent faculty and we’re beginning to blossom and so, and that actually helps us relative to ultimate constellation recruitment. So, I don’t see it as a problem, if we weren’t able to hire anybody then we have a problem.

The rest of this interview will appear in next week’s issue of The Polytechnic.