Last week, The Polytechnic staff editorial discussed secrecy and openness in student government. It was a topic worth discussing, since so much from music service negotiations to Union renovations (and class gifts) has been kept secret. There is, however, another group that conducts secretive business on this campus, and they very much love their privacy: the RPI administration.
As a member of the Poly staff over the past three years, I have been privy to a lot of information that many preferred I had not been. This ranged from what should have been simple things like the cost and proposed layout of the east campus athletic project to expansion proposals for RPI over the next 50 years, as well as internal bickering among faculty and student governments.
As News Editor, I tried to include this information in my articles to try to bring as much information to my readers as I could. In doing so, two things happened: a few of my sources told me that they had been forbidden to talk to me anymore, and I was threatened several times by high-level members of the administration that I would face unspecified consequences if I did not back off.
I have always thought of RPI as a kind of corporation, and myself and every other student, alumnus, professor, and employee as a stockholder in that corporation. We all have an interest in seeing the organization grow and prosper, but as equal partners in the venture, we deserve as much information as possible concerning how that growth will occur.
In my experience, however, many administrators at RPI do not feel this way. I have seen vice presidents send e-mails screaming about leaks on the most insignificant issues. I have been lied to by vice presidents. I have seen vice presidents berated for giving me information to be released to the campus. I have heard of uncountable back-door deals to kill various projects and proposals after supporting them as recently as the nascent mid-term grading effort, and just as many stories about administrators giving the details of a proposal, followed by “but don’t tell The Poly!”
RPI has not always been this way. In looking through documents and speaking with alumni from decades ago, you begin to see that a distinct trust in the rest of the campus existed then that does not now. Nearly every freedom that students have, such as the way our judicial system is structured and how the Union is run, was developed years ago with trust in the students in mind. Some of these have been chipped away in recent years, but that is a topic for another editorial.
I understand the need for some confidentiality in business dealings, but at the same time I and many other students have felt more and more that the administration just sees students and faculty as a source of income and as an impediment to their progress. We are a part of this school every bit as much as administrators are; more so, even, since we will still be connected to the school after we leave, while it will just be a bullet-point on an administrator’s resume. We deserve to know as much as we can about what is going on.
No good reason exists for this change. I have to assume that the administration believes that students and faculty today cannot handle the responsibility they could years ago, and I would counter if you expect less, you will get less. Give us a chance to show that we can handle the responsibility of greater involvement in the school’s future, and we will.
