This is a period of significant change for the Institute. One common rationale given for some of the changes that have recently been made is that similar but better-known schools—our “peer and aspirant group”—do things the same way. The problem with that thought, though, is that the underlying premise has not been questioned enough: Is it, in fact, worthwhile to be like these other schools?
RPI already has an outstanding reputation in industry—we have a history of turning out students who are very good at solving “real world” problems. Those same students are generally also better at working in teams because the academic atmosphere promotes cooperation, not competition, between students. Group activities are stressed throughout the undergraduate program, and the school has won many awards for curriculum innovations. In short, what recognition we currently have is based on our uniqueness—how we differ from other schools, not how we are similar.
On the other hand, there is no question that the school has been mostly rudderless since the death of George Low in 1984. The RPI community definitely needs something to aspire to and trying to achieve the notoriety—and the accompanying research dollars—of these other universities is a laudable goal.
However, it is the opinion of this newspaper that mimicking the practices of other institutions is not the way to go about doing this, and a large portion of the student body appears to agree. A fair number of people come to this school precisely because RPI is not MIT, or Carnegie Mellon, or Stanford. Despite all of the talk of apathy and bitterness, many students are still quite proud to leave with a degree from RPI—more so than if they had received the same degree elsewhere.
If the goal is to enhance the Institute’s reputation, we should do so by continuing to stress the ways in which we are unique—there is nothing noteworthy in being a clone of MIT.
