President Shirley Ann Jackson first unveiled the changes that will constitute the restructuring at the Spring Town Meeting held on March 17.

The changes are three fold: implementation of the Clustered Learning Advocacy and Support for Students initiative, extension of the types of programs and support provided through the Office of the First-Year Experience to all students, and the creation of a Student Life Arts program.

“The idea is we are transforming our view of what Residence Life at Rensselaer means to us,” explained Vice President for Student Life Eddie Ade Knowles.

Accompanying the reorganization, many new positions will be created, including two that will serve to oversee branches of student life: assistant vice president for the student experience and assistant vice president for student life. While the national searches to fill these positions will begin this spring, they will not be rushed and will take time to complete. “We will move efficiently, but still take care with the search,” explained Knowles. “It’s about hiring quality people.”

The cornerstone of the CLASS program will be the addition of residence cluster deans to the residence halls, who will live in the dorms and work to create living-learning communities. These Deans will hold workshops and be available to provide 24-hour support, such as counseling, for students. They will be able assist students with both academic and personal problems.

Resident assistants or resident directors that currently aid students in the residence halls will not be supplanted by this change, and the plan will instead “strengthen programs with RAs,” explained Knowles.

The benefits will not be restricted to students living in residence halls. The position of associate dean for fraternity and sorority affairs will be added to provide support and hold programs like the residence cluster deans, but will specifically be targeting students in greek life. Similarly, an associate dean for off-campus student living will be hired to support, in the same manner, RPI students living in off-campus housing.

The over-arching idea behind this program is to have dedicated staff provide support for all students to improve student life. “Wherever our students live, we see it as our obligation to provide support and programs to make sure our students are taken care of,” stated Knowles.

The Office of the First-Year Experience has held programs such as Student Orientation and Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond to support students in their freshman year. The second major change involves building on these programs to support all students throughout their academic careers at the Institute.

This will primarily be done with the addition of class deans. A class dean will be assigned to each undergraduate class, which will keep the same dean throughout its time at the Institute.

By adding these class deans, similar support to what the first-year experience has provided will be brought to undergraduates for the years beyond when they are freshmen.

This will not just benefit undergraduates, but will support graduate students as well with the addition of a dean for graduate students. This dean will perform the same functions as the class deans, but will focus on graduate students instead.

Additionally, an assistant dean for internationalizing the student experience will be hired. With the growth of the study-abroad initiative in recent years, this dean’s role will be to provide support for students in their time studying abroad, and will essentially evaluate what students will need during their time at those other institutions.

The final new initiative is the development of the Student Life Arts program. This accompanies a growing focus on art at Rensselaer, as evident in the opening of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center later this year and the recent renaming of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences to the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

As a student life-led arts initiative, this program will look to generate more arts programs and showcase student art while simultaneously increasing interest in and support of art throughout the student body.

Jackson stated that these changes will result in “new programs to enrich student life which leverage our current success in the first-year experience in living and learning initiatives and the arts to transform the overall undergraduate student experience.”