I have had the privilege of being a faculty member at RPI for 15 years. I am a professor of mechanical engineering and recently completed three years of service as Director of Core Engineering. During these 15 years, I have graduated 20 Ph.D. and 32 M.S. students, so the views I express come from what I consider a balanced career at RPI in both education and research.
Experiences throughout life have always confirmed that balance is the key to success. In athletics, whether one is hitting a golf ball, rowing, shooting a hockey puck, or running with a football, in order to excel, the athlete must be in balance. For the last three years, I have met with incoming freshman and their parents, and have always stressed to the students the importance of balance in their lives: intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual. That balance helped get them here. That balance will help them thrive at RPI and beyond. Everyone knows how easy it is to get out of balance and how it can lead to failure and discontentment. The same is true in engineering. Today, practicing engineers need a balance between analytical skills and experimental-hardware skills; these skills are complementary, and RPI has a reputation for stressing this balance in its undergraduate engineering education. This leads me to ask the question “Is RPI, as a university, in balance?”
What is a university and why do students pick one university over another? A university is a place of learning, mentoring, and growth—intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual growth. While some universities have better athletic programs, better student facilities, better physical settings, the main reason a student chooses one university over another is the faculty and students at the university. The faculty and students together form the core of the university. Together they are the strength of the university. Together they flourish and become a force for good in this volatile world.
Faculty at RPI teach and mentor undergraduate and graduate stu­dents. Teaching is a calling, not simply a job, and a source of great joy. Research plays a fundamental role in this educational mission, as faculty and students work together to solve problems, to enhance society, and further the state of the art. Research also helps to shape our undergraduate curriculum. In years performing research with practicing engineers, primarily at Xerox and Procter & Gamble, I have learned how engineers work, think, solve technical problems, comm­unicate, work in teams, lead teams, and address ethical and societal issues. This has shaped the upper-level mechatronics program at RPI, and is now shaping the freshman engineering renaissance. Research and education, primarily under­graduate education, are comple­mentary. The research helps shape our undergraduate program and gives exciting opportunities to the under­graduates, while the under­graduate program prepares the students for the practice of engineering and graduate educa­tion and research. For a university with a dual educa­tional mission—under­graduate and graduate—such as RPI, there must be a balance between the two for the university to be vigorous and thriving.
RPI is out of balance. The overwhelming emphasis at the university is on research. While there are pockets of excellence in undergraduate education on campus, I believe this emphasis has been at the expense of our undergraduate educational mission. In under­graduate edu­cation, there must be a commit­ment to excel­lence, but also a sacrifice of self to the mission of the department, school, and univer­sity. This sacrifice must be encouraged and acclaimed. The goal is to provide a mentoring, nurturing environment for all our undergraduates; this takes enor­mous effort. The uni­versity has lost that commit­ment, maybe not in words, but certainly in practice, and as a result has gotten out of balance. It is only a matter of time until the university loses its vitality.
Fifteen years ago, I chose to come to RPI because I felt a sense of family here; we all could be successful together through hard work and mutual support. Unfortunately, the situation on campus is contentious and there is very little meaningful dialogue taking place between the administration and the faculty. The university has become a dysfunctional family. It should welcome contrary points of view; they are inevitable and desirable. In our own families, we listen to each other, give careful thought to each other’s views, and come to decisions that allow the family to flourish as a whole. It is imperative that the uni­versity finds ways to grow as a family and lead the world in balanced education.
Kevin Craig
Professor MANE
