Welcome back to campus! I hope each and every one of you had a chance to rest, relax, and maybe even experience better weather than what we’re currently experiencing in Troy.
As we reach the home stretch in my time as Grand Marshal, I am pleased to report the incredible progress we have made in improving the quality of our teaching assistants. Working on this initiative has been a classic example of how people can come together and overcome opposition in pursuit of a just cause. Last month, a task force of students, faculty, teaching assistants, and administrators drafted a report which identified the serious shortcomings in our system. To their credit, many top institute officials have listened to our concerns and have already begun taken action implementing higher standards for TAs this semester. I am very excited about this and the improvement it will have on the education we receive at RPI.
But as I zoom out and assess just what it took to get here, I’ve found this was about more than just the teaching assistants at RPI.
The true lesson in all of this, of course, has almost nothing to do with the problem we were up against. It was about the ideas we were up against. I believe I have spent enough time making arguments in favor of these reforms and I’m confident RPI will be a better place for them, and that history will judge us for doing the right thing. Some people fervently defended the status quo last year, and suggested that any reforms with regards to this issue were indicative of ignorance, and would be unreasonable. These are powerful, scary words. No one wants to be ignorant or unreasonable, because in reality, almost none of us are. In this case, we were lucky: the right thing to do was also the popular thing to do. But the specter of being deemed anything of that nature can be frightening enough to make people remain silent when they should speak up, for fear that their beliefs, no matter how rooted in logic they may be, will earn them similar scorn.
This is more than just the idea of burning people at the stake for heresy or chasing them out of their field of study for putting forth an unpopular theory. It is about convincing us to feel we are wrong before we have even let a word out of our mouths. After enough time, even the most reasonable people can start believing that they, too, are wrong for fostering otherwise good ideas.
To this, I point to one of my favorite films, V for Vendetta, which posed the delightful question: “Is that what you really think, or is that what they want you to think?”
Arguably, one of the most important lessons you may learn in life—especially as a budding engineer or scientist—is the integrity and the courage it takes to defy the rest. The grasp for logic and science that is instilled within us is devoid of value if it isn’t accompanied by the courage to use it. The world is a better place thanks to the countless men and women who have come before us and acted in science—and logic-driven defiance. In postulating that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that the world consists of tiny particles we can’t see, that all men (and women!) are created equal; people risked scorn, persecution, and even death. We are so very fortunate that they did, though, because we are better off for it.
Good luck with your semester and remember to contact me if you want to join in the pursuit of truth. As a big “X-Files” fan and at the risk of being nerdy, creator of the show, Chris Carter, really did sum it up well with the tagline, “The truth is out there.” We just have to find it. Em-ail me at gm@rpi.edu or drop by my office in the Student Government Suite if you have any questions, comments, or ideas.
