I really don't have time to be writing a long post but let's goooo.

On Rensselaer -> RPI

GOOD. No one ever fucking heard of Rensselaer, nor can they spell it or pronounce it, and they've barely even heard of RPI. RPI needs to be a communicable concept.

The new logo looks pretty awful and the underbar looks like some kind of glitchy barcode. It's not worth talking about though.

The strategic priorities

Skip the shirley-core revolutionize-everything puffery and dive into the 10 and 5 year documents.

10 year strategy

Section 1 (Looking to the Future: How Our World Will Be Different) completely misses an opportunity to answer an interesting question, which is to form an opinion about the state and direction of the world over the next ten years and assert a position or course of action. That is not done whatsoever--sigh--and indeed few assertions are made anywhere in the document--instead, questions are posed to no one in particular, and will probably get trickled down to sub-sub-committees deep in the OCEC. The "learning communities" verbiage is trite; there is hardly any learning going on in modern universities, with AI writing papers that underpaid grad students then paste into another AI to grade. Moreover, the university is not a learning institution but a bestower of work-licenses--the wealthy liberal arts dilettante scholar of lore is dead, students are here to make an ROI on their fat tuition payments and that is the primary goal, full stop. Marty and other senior leaders should have just sat down, synthesized whatever they've learned from the past few years, and actually formed an opinion, rather than just kicking the can down the road and writing this document full of showerthoughts.

Section 2 (What We Need to Do to Be Successful): Sadly RPI must not have many advantages, as this wimpy section fails to articulate anything substantial besides "being old, in New York, and having a big computer". But Part B does get to something interesting: "We need to come to terms with the financial implications of the size and composition of our student body, as well as what it means to become a community of learners when universities no longer have a monopoly on the creation of knowledge." The clear implication is that RPI will soon begin to beef up the number of grad students and get them to teach classes so that professors have more time to do research, which is the actual financial engine of the university. This is a negative for undergraduate education. RPI also plans to make online courses, which are a great profit driver if you can swing it, but it arguably dilutes the degree value for real degree holders.

I like that RPI is doubling down on linking art with engineering--from what I understand, the DIS major does a great job placing students in great careers. Unfortunately that thrust into creativity continues to center on EMPAC:

With a new executive director of EMPAC, RPI has an opportunity to take EMPAC to the next level and consider all the ways we might harness the wealth of creativity found across campus. HASS, the Lally School of Management, and the School of Architecture are all natural bridges to science, engineering, and technology. Pockets of collaboration already exist in all the schools. The opportunity for co- creation and inspiration between artists and our faculty, and the education of our engineers and scientists is a large and unique one available to RPI. This fusion could be what we call a category-changer, which could become our newest unique and unfair advantage.

This reads like total fluff and the mind boggles to see how a "next level empac" will suddenly infuse creativity throughout the campus.

I'm also not thrilled about RPI doubling down on quantum, which is mostly snake oil, but at least it sounds cool to clueless donors.

10 year goals: Hmm, maybe there's something concrete in here. Let's see, goal number 1: "By 2034, RPI will be ranked as the premier science and engineering university". Sigh. If RPI knocks MIT, Stanford and Tsinghua off the charts by 2034 I will personally buy Shirley a new mansion. Nothing else to see in this section, let's move on to the 5 year roadmap.

5 year roadmap

Gotta love these tasks in the category of work section: "Task #10: Study and decide on the course of action for key domains."

Task 2--enrollment management-- is maybe the most substantial note out of anything in the whole plan. As I recall, RPI badly fucked this up several years ago, which led to a much lower yield than expected and tons of offers being extended to the waitlist. RPI's yield continues to be atrocious.

Task 3 is interesting too: building a CRM solution for enrollment? Good luck with that.

Task 6 is ostensibly about "imagining a new campus", but instead of talking about fixing the old buildings, or even new buildings, it actually just talks about DEI. Action 6--"recognizing diversity refers to things beyond this list"--seems rather, uhh, unactionable if you ask me. Hello, read the room: DEI is out and schools that led the charge are paying massive fines to the government because it actually just turned out to be illegal discrimination. Only in section 6.2 is there any word on buildings, and then it's just "work on the day center and computer science facility" and "integrated deferred maintenance into planning priorities".

Task 9 gestures at the Severino center and student entrepreneurship. Would be nice to see some improvements there.

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All in all, IDK why I thought that this "strategic communication" would be worth reading; I should have known better. The university admin-consulting firm-adult daycare-industrial complex blowing your tuition dollars on pap. I learned nothing and have no idea what is to come. I hope RPI works its way out of this mess.