EnvE major rich with possibilities
To the Editor:
The world is in dire need of well- trained professionals equipped to handle the plights of the last two millennia of human self-education. Hazardous chemicals, accumulating emissions, resource destruction, and other daily mishaps that occur from mis-engineered technologies and situations are piling up.
Even the corporate mainstream news outlets have these awful occurrences oozing from in between the lines of their stories. RPI must have some difficult times getting their hands on this information if it expects to drop its undergraduate bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering.
How do the leaders of this institution expect to be on the leading edge of the educational front if they abide this decision? The number of students in this program is remarkably low, but responding to a stimuli by cutting it off is what plants do when they get too much sun, not what top-notch, superbly educated innovators do.
We find the problem, assess the needs, and implement a solution. We don’t have enough environmental engineers enrolled in this program; the world needs EnvE’s and so the American-based educational institute of RPI needs to supply them; let’s spread the word about RPI’s strong and thorough environmental engineering program.
I hope that The Poly can be a useful tool in keeping alive a world necessity that RPI has the ability to fully supply. Thank you for your time.
Marc P. Santos
DSIS ’10
EnvE considered crucial
To the Editor:
Who will fix our drinking water infrastructures in the next five years? Who will repair our failing energy delivery systems? Who will remediate the thousands of superfund sites around the country? Who will deal with our wastewater? Or find solutions to our food and agriculture systems? Who is going to deal with any of these vital issues? These are the challenges of tomorrow, today and the future, simultaneously, and environmental engineering is one of the core programs at RPI offering a valid approach to addressing these problems.
This is a plea for understanding—understanding how critical right now is for securing a means to empower our youth toward making a transition toward a sustainable future. My name is Christopher Kennedy and I am a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Environmental Engineering program and I cannot even imagine my life without having been through this program.
Why not change the world, you say? How can an institution ask this question without offering to its students the core knowledge of how earth’s processes are interconnected to everything we do and everything we use in the world. For engineering is at its core, an integration of how the technologies and processes of the world impact and shape an environment and its citizens. Our environment, to be exact; the environment that every single person on this planet is apart of.
Sustainability, go-green, eco-chic, the buzz words are everywhere, everywhere you look, environmental issues are front page news! With a world facing a myriad of crises all connected to a singular focal point—ecology—how can any accredited university provide a balanced education about our role in shaping a healthy co-habitation with the land, air, and water we all share, without providing the tools and resources for the leaders of tomorrow? The environmental engineering program facilitates just that.
I truly think that eliminating the environmental engineering program from RPI is an utter shame, an outrage for a university supposedly reaching toward a new plateau of research and international recognition. How can an institution eliminate the one program that should be expanded and looked at as an opportunity to begin to address the top engineering challenges of our future? What we need right now in the world is an environmental engineering pedagogy, because it provides students tangibility amid a world of abstract ecological and sustainability concepts. We need an ecological engineering pedagogy because it bridges the sometimes large gaps between science, application and the people, organisms and places that are affected thereafter. Please, students of RPI, band together and realize the importance of this resource at such a crossroads in our relationship with the Earth. We need leaders who understand the systems that we all rely on for our food, our water and everything in between. This is a plea for understanding, a plea that I know you will all answer in one form or another.
<b>Christopher Lee Kennedy
ENVE ’05</b>
First Amendment ‘trampled’
To the Editor:
With its refusal to reopen the “Virtual Jihadi” exhibit, Rensselaer’s administration has trampled the First Amendment into the mud.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press do not encompass what the administration feels is right or good, it encompasses all ideas. Ideas are not actions; they are not inherently dangerous. Only when they are suppressed and made taboo do they become fodder for extremists and for those lured by the forbidden.
Ideas need the free and open flow of discussion and commentary in order to prove their worth or lack thereof. For more than two centuries, America has abided by this ideal—it is our country’s currency of thought, and its value is immeasurable.
Why should any American institution of higher learning suppress ideas? Doesn’t this make us more like those we call terrorists, suppressing that which we don’t want to hear?
Students at Rensselaer are intelligent, inquisitive, and can be trusted to argue the pros and cons of the “Virtual Jihadi” exhibit and make their own judgments. In this area, they do not need the administration to stand in loco parentis. These are skills students at Rensselaer—and any college or university—must learn in order to participate fully in society. Stop preventing them from honing their own judgment.
Rensselaer’s administration should reopen the “Virtual Jihadi” exhibit immediately and apologize to the artist for taking away a constitutional right.
Laurie Creasy
GRAD
Exhibit should be embraced
To the Editor:
This year, the theme of the RPI art department’s iEAR Presents is “Art and Islam.” I would guess that the RPI College Republicans didn’t know that. More significantly, I would wager that they don’t care. As a Ph.D. student in the School of Architecture, I certainly appreciate that we have an art department. I also appreciate the uniqueness of the department with its emphasis on technology. I appreciate it because I understand the value of art as fodder for creative thinking and problem solving, among other things. However, the College Republicans clearly do not share my sentiment. For example, despite the engineering feats in acoustics, civil engineering, and other fields that have informed the design of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, despite the current involvement and future promise of outstanding architects, engineers, and yes, artists, the College Republicans have the audacity to suggest on their blog that EMPAC is among “deviations from the mission of the Institute.” It is in the context of this fundamental failure to understand how initiatives like EMPAC enrich RPI that the College Republicans attempt to censure our art department.
It’s not that I can’t understand how the planned exhibit of Wafaa Bilal raised eyebrows. I understand the concern of the alumnus who writes a letter to President Shirley Ann Jackson posted on the blog of the College Republicans in which he points out that terrorism is never justified, even by those who may be impressionable because of difficult circumstances such as instability in Iraq. But who said that the artist was conveying that impressionable young people were justified in committing violent acts? The purpose of Bilal’s exhibit was to shed light on a situation of particular relevance that he is uniquely suited to comment on. Why shed light? One argument could be that in order to effectively root out terrorism, we need to know as much as we can about the people who are becoming involved. We need to know the difference between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, between insurgents that are recruited from groups that have tension related more to power struggles than to religion, and so on. If Bilal was a reporter writing on these issues, surely there would have been a better reception. However, this artist wants us to experience the harsh reality of terrorist recruiting methods and propaganda in a more direct and personal way. A news report is just not the same.
There is no mystery about the timeliness of iEAR’s theme this year. Too often we see the words Middle East and muslim to be homogeneous in the same way that some see the words Western and Christian as homogeneous. I am proud of our art department for recognizing that there has likely never been a time when it was more important for us to peer into the vicissitudes of existence of our neighbors in the Islamic world. I am ashamed that the RPI College Republicans prevented this from happening simply on account of artistic ignorance.
<b>Bobby Gibbs
GRAD</b>
Open letter to Institute President
To the Editor:
This is an open letter to President Shirley Ann Jackson.
A university’s caliber can, in part, be measured by its commitment to free speech. This benchmark reveals the willingness of an institution to nourish critical thinking skills and sustain intellectual diversity. If a university encourages its alumni to change the world, as Rensselaer does, it must carve out an environment in which students can taste the free inquiry that is essential to achieving that goal.
As The Rensselaer Handbook outlines the Institute’s commitment to the protection of unpopular ideas, I am confident you understand why free speech is crucial to the quality of education at our Institution. Unfortunately, I cannot confidently say that administrative policy has reflected such an understanding.
Particularly troubling is the removal of Wafaa Bilal’s “Virtual Jihadi” from campus. The work’s message greatly contributes to the ongoing national discussion on the issue of domestic security, while its controversial presentation provoked passionate emotional responses. If any work was to qualify for free speech protection as part of the Rensselaer community, it was that of Bilal. Instead, Bilal’s project was removed from campus due to its controversial political content. This disregard for the Institute’s commitment to free speech deeply betrays Rensselaer’s educational mission.
It may surprise you to know that this incident is only one of the many free speech conflicts Rensselaer has witnessed in the past year. For example, the website of the RPI College Republicans was suspended by the Dean of Students Office for statements regarding Bilal’s work. Last fall, I was approached for assistance by a student when the same office shut down a department-approved art project, which involved public criticisms of faculty. Last year, the office attempted to intimidate a student into removing a video from the Internet that harmlessly poked fun at the Institute. Faculty members have been instructed to remain silent to their students regarding the faculty governance crisis.
The Bilal incident was not isolated. It was a single component in a larger recipe for educational disaster at Rensselaer.
As president, your goal has been to transform Rensselaer into a world-class institution. However, as a chef would say, the quality of a meal is not judged by its garnish, but by the quality of the ingredients. Similarly, Rensselaer can build any number of EMPACs and ECAVs to look more pleasing to the world. By not protecting the essential academic ingredient of free speech, however, we can only be a second-rate institution at best.
I urge you to meet with campus leaders to organize a community gathering, in the style of that which followed the Virginia Tech tragedy, on the topic of the Institute’s commitment to free speech. We must bring students, faculty, and top administrators together to discuss these issues as equals in the community. If we are to preserve both the Institute’s reputation and the concept of free speech, such a gathering is a necessary first step in working towards a larger solution.
<b>Austin Randazzo
PHYS ’08</b>
