Another update on the RIT pres­i­den­tial search (I guess I’ve offi­cially begun the par­tic­i­pa­tory part of my study on cit­i­zen journalists):

Your Sen­a­tors failed in their attempt to have the Senate hold a post-​visit ses­sion to dis­cuss the mood in their col­leges and poten­tially take action on this matter. Two of the Senate’s Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee voted against hold­ing such a meet­ing. As Wade has noted, Pres­i­dent Simone expressed that he felt such a meet­ing was a good idea.

I first heard about this on RIT’s AAUP dis­cus­sion board, and this excerpt from an e-mail pro­vides more details. I can’t artic­u­late how frus­trat­ing this news is. Pos­si­ble rea­sons for this could include that the Senate is con­cerned that they will have to work with whom ever wins and that they might end up sup­port­ing the wrong horse. Or, per­haps some felt that if the Senate backs Dr. Destler, it might lead to chilly rela­tions with the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion (the gen­eral opin­ion on campus is that Dr. Wat­ters is Pres­i­dent Simone’s pick for the posi­tion). Or there could be those on the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee that simply don’t want the voice of the campus heard.

If it is any of those rea­sons, what occurred was an act of cow­ardice, a dis­tinct lack of spine. We are in the midst of a crit­i­cal time in RIT’s his­tory and lead­ers of our Aca­d­e­mic Senate has shied away from the respon­si­bil­i­ties of their posi­tions. Its dif­fi­cult to see how we as a campus can move for­ward when our lead­ers retreat from this most impor­tant of discussions.

Kudos to Pres­i­dent Simone for encour­ag­ing that debate to take place. Kudos to every­one who has par­tic­i­pated in the var­i­ous sur­veys and writ­ten e-mails. Get involved in the debate, even if it isn’t going to take place in the Aca­d­e­mic Senate! We have to lead, as our rep­re­sen­ta­tives have chosen not to.
Here are things you can do:

• RIT Fac­ulty, com­plete the survey that the Aca­d­e­mic Senate has pro­vided. Note that you are able to express com­ments in this one.
• Alumni, e-mail RIT’s Board of Trustee’s with your thoughts on the candidates.
• Get the word out! Get the debate going on and off campus. Alum’s, we’ve main­tained con­nec­tions, send out the call to e-mail the Board to people in your cohort. Fac­ulty, con­tact former stu­dents and get them involved!

——————-

Two part­ing points:

1. Why all the effort? One, I believe in RIT and want to see it con­tinue to improve. Two, I believe in Rochester NY and want to see it improve as well. There’s a lot at stake here for both areas. As the Rochester Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle puts it, what’s at stake is [t]he future of one of the area’s most impor­tant insti­tu­tions. Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy is the area’s largest four-​year higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion with nearly 13,000 under­grad­u­ates and 2,300 grad­u­ate stu­dents. It also is among the area’s 10 largest private-​sector employ­ers, with close to 3,000 full- and part-​time fac­ulty and staff.
2. There could be one more read­ing for the Aca­d­e­mic Senate’s choice: they felt that if they decided for Destler it might hurt his chances. Even if this hypoth­e­sis were true, the choice is still wrong and acting out of fear. This needs to be dis­cussed and regard­less of can­di­date, we need to take a stand.

Thanks to the pre­vi­ous post on RIT’s search for a new pres­i­dent, I’ve had a notice­able jump in traf­fic. Thank you to every­one who e-mailed, left com­ments, or talked to me in person about the points I raised in the last post. More impor­tantly, thank you so much to every­one who has taken the time to send a note to RIT’s Board of Trustees.

For those new to the site, the short ver­sion is this: RIT is in the process of pick­ing a new pres­i­dent. There are con­cerns that the Board of Trustees may lean towards Dr. James Wat­ters, RIT’s CFO. He’s the wrong choice for all the rea­sons listed in my pre­vi­ous post. I am asking anyone con­nected with RIT, espe­cially Alumni, to com­mu­ni­cate to the board that they feel Dr. William Destler, Provost of the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land, is the cor­rect man to lead RIT into the next stage of its development.

I truly believe that if enough alumni, stu­dent, fac­ulty and com­mu­nity voices are raised, the right man will be offered the Pres­i­dency here at RIT.

In the mean­time, if you are still unsure about the sit­u­a­tion, or need to see more opin­ions as to why Dr. Destler is the right man for the job, take a look at the following:

• A two part inter­view with Dr. Destler con­ducted by an inde­pen­dent fac­ulty pub­li­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land (Part 1) (Part 2). You’ll find that while Destler may not always give the answer the inter­viewer wants to hear, he’s always open to dis­cus­sion, will­ing to admit when he’s wrong, and honest about a number of Uni­ver­sity shortcomings.
• Com­ments from RIT’s Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sors public dis­cus­sion board:
  • ProfRay: Dr. Destler is a well rounded and accom­plished leader whose capac­ity to manage the inter­ests of a large and diverse research insti­tu­tion make him emi­nently qual­i­fied to bring his vision, per­spec­tive and abil­ity to our Insti­tute. He will be able to grow this place finan­cially and con­cep­tu­ally. I gen­uinely believe RIT is on the verge of achiev­ing crit­i­cal mass with regard to its unique attrib­utes and its over­all iden­tity. Destler has the capac­ity to syn­er­gize RIT, lead­ing us to greater promi­nence both nation­ally and globally.
  • longRITer: I greatly admire Dr. Wat­ters – his vision, his busi­ness acumen and his abilty to bring together talent to get jobs done. A uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent needs these skills. My con­cern is that RIT will move more towards busi­ness excel­lence while fur­ther losing sight of its aca­d­e­mic mis­sion. The col­leges will become cost cen­ters rather than cen­ters of schol­ar­ship. That the phys­i­cal plant will be beau­ti­ful while the campus slips fur­ther from its aca­d­e­mic mis­sion. It is clear to me that unless we reverse this trend, the campus will never move to great…. I went to Wednesday’s forum expect­ing Dr. Wat­ters to be dynamic. He had the home­team advan­tage – yet, his pre­sen­ta­tion and responses fell short…. The crowd was elec­tric at Dr. Destler’s pre­sen­ta­tion. The crowd for Dr. Wat­ters gave him every chance to pull it off. It didn’t work. It would be great to prac­tice pro­mot­ing from within the ranks of RIT. I am con­vinced that noble idea is too risky this time.Dr. Destler impressed me at the open forum. He comes closer to the kind of aca­d­e­mic leader I believe RIT needs. Some of his ideas for RIT and some of the pro­grams he has imple­mented at Mary­land are moves in the right direc­tion in my opinion.
  • TAD: Dr. Destler seems to me to be mar­velous choice for the posi­tion that I see as that of uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent. His back­ground has allowed him to gain vast expe­ri­ence in the class­room, in research, in lead­er­ship and man­age­ment of aca­d­e­mic units from the depart­ment level up to the uni­ver­sity level, as well as in fundrais­ing. He would def­i­nitely bring an infu­sion ???fresh blood??? into an admin­is­tra­tion that seems to me to have become rather inbred with inter­nal pro­mo­tions, which many of us view as having become a bit of an ???old boy???s??? net­work (no gender issues implied)…. Having been on the fac­ulty at RIT for almost a quar­ter cen­tury, I have always found it pecu­liar that we have never seen a person from tech­ni­cal field (sci­ence, math, engi­neer­ing) appointed to any posi­tion in the tower. Need we be reminded of the ???T??? in RIT? Some may argue that RIT is not a tra­di­tional insti­tu­tion and there­fore the tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic path to the top is anath­ema in a leader. Let us not make a deci­sion here just to show the world that we are icon­o­clasts. In order to direct the course of RIT inso­far as new direc­tives and pro­grams, the person at the helm will need to have more than a pass­ing famil­iar­ity with the role of tech­nol­ogy in our cul­ture and soci­ety. It seems to me that the choice between these two can­di­dates is an obvi­ous one.

Again, if you’re inter­ested about the future of RIT, join the con­ver­sa­tion. We all need to be dis­cussing this! Or take action. Make sure to com­plete the Aca­d­e­mic Senate’s Survey (note: it’s a dif­fer­ent survey than the one on the main RIT site and allows for com­ments) and e-mail your thoughts to our Board of Trustees!

Think about it, dis­cuss it, and act!

Let me pref­ace this by saying that I hope I’m wrong. I’m writ­ing this to vent a con­cern and hope that in some little way it might help.

The Rochester Insti­tute of Technology’s eighth pres­i­dent, Albert Simone is retir­ing at the end of this aca­d­e­mic year. Over the last few days, the two can­di­dates for his posi­tion, Dr. William Destler (cur­ricu­lum vitae), cur­rently the senior vice pres­i­dent of Aca­d­e­mic Affairs and provost at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land (Col­lege Park) and Dr. James Wat­ters (cur­ricu­lum vitae), RIT???s senior vice pres­i­dent for Finance and Admin­is­tra­tion and trea­surer of the Insti­tute, met on campus with stu­dents, fac­ulty, staff, alumni and trustees.

One of these men is emi­nently qual­i­fied for the posi­tion. One isn’t.

Unfor­tu­nately a number of signs sug­gest that the better man will not get the presidency.

(Before I go on, if you know what I’m talk­ing about and want to have an effect on the sit­u­a­tion, e-mail your feel­ings to the RIT Board of Trustees – RITBOT@rit.edu- I’ll repro­duce this link at the end too.)

I’m not minc­ing words, I sup­port Destler. From what I can tell, so do a large amount of the fac­ulty and stu­dents. In his two days on campus he showed him­self to be a smart, straight shooter with a strong vision for RIT. We, includ­ing the most cyn­i­cal of my fellow staff mem­bers, had the same reac­tion: He get’s it. We resepect him. We’re will­ing to work to his vision.

From an aca­d­e­mic stand­point, Destler’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions are solid. While his school is in the sci­ences, he comes from a family of human­i­ties schol­ars. A mechan­i­cal engi­neer, his PhD and post doc­tor­ate work was con­ducted at Cor­nell. Drestler rose through the ranks at Mary­land, start­ing as a pro­fes­sor and advanc­ing to the role of Provost. He’s served as the head of PhD com­mit­tees and authored and coau­thored a large number of papers.

In admin­is­tra­tion and fun­dras­ing, he’s no slouch either. He helped bring a sig­nif­i­cant number of endow­ments to Mary­land (includ­ing nego­ti­at­ing the naming rights for the their sports arena with Com­cast). He also spear­headed the devel­op­ment of a number of mul­ti­dis­ic­pli­nary pro­grams at Mary­land as well.

Destler sees RIT as a place where he can make a dif­fer­ence. In an open dis­cus­sion he explained that he had turned down a lead­er­ship posi­tion a “Big 10″ school for the chance at the RIT pres­i­dency. The reason why? He felt he really could make a pro­found dif­fer­ence here, some­thing that wouldn’t be pos­si­ble in the other set­ting. Destler believes that RIT can develop into a prag­matic research insti­tu­tion, focus­ing on the R&D needs of busi­nesses that, due to the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate, can no longer afford to con­duct this work inter­nally. He also empha­sized the role of the human­i­ties and arts play in this type of prob­lem solv­ing. He acknowl­edged that for all it’s blus­ter, RIT has a lot of “maturing” to do, and now is the time to do it. In short, he had a vision that got all of us excited.

But, like I said, I don’t think he’s going to get the job.

His com­pe­ti­tion is RIT’s CFO (in spirit, if not in title). Dr. Wat­ters may be an excel­lent Trea­surer, but he isn’t the leader we need (I’m still trying to figure out if he’s even a true leader). He isn’t an aca­d­e­mic. By that, I don’t mean to infer that his PhD is in Higher Edu­ca­tion Admin­is­tra­tion isn’t a legit­i­mate degree. Rather, beyond a total lack of pub­lished schol­ar­ship, he’s never held a full time teach­ing posi­tion or gone through the tenure process (which we sus­pect is one of the rea­sons that the Board of Trustee’s likes him). His class­room expe­ri­ence is lim­ited to adjunct­ing. While this might not seem like a big issue, the fact is that he is lack­ing an under­stand­ing of the life and pres­sures that a sig­nif­i­cant number of his employ­ees lead. And while I am new to the teach­ing game, I cannot artic­u­late how much my per­spec­tive on things has shifted as I’ve made the tran­si­tion from adjunct to vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor. Nor can I think of any major uni­ver­sity headed by some­one who hasn’t gone through this process.

Wat­ters lack of aca­d­e­mic ground­ing isn’t the only issue. His talks to the campus were any­thing but inspir­ing. He reg­u­larly used the words “training” and “educating” inter­change­ably. While this might seem like a picky note, it con­cerns me deeply that he sees RIT’s role as train­ing people. I’m sorry, voca­tional schools train. The job of the uni­ver­sity is to edu­cate. Does that mean that we shouldn’t pre­pare people to enter the sphere of indus­try? No. But given the choice, I’ll take edu­ca­tion over train­ing any day.

Wat­ters also dis­cussed that he felt the job of a uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent is to be a CFO (which is trou­bling because his cur­rent job is to be the CFO). In his opin­ion it’s the provost who should over­see aca­d­e­mics on campus. The prob­lem with this naive view is that the Provost is ulti­mately beholden to the pres­i­dent. This is not a power shar­ing arrange­ment. As has been demon­strated by the often chilly rela­tion­ship between our cur­rent provost and pres­i­dent, in mat­ters aca­d­e­mic the President’s word car­ries the day. For a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date to deny that will be the case seems igno­rant at best and disin­gen­u­ous at worst.

He also dis­played a dis­tinct lack of vision. Where Destler con­tin­u­ally built upon a the idea of fos­ter­ing inno­va­tion on campus, Wat­ters vision was to “continue the 135 points of excel­lence plan.” I’ve been here for a year and have no idea what the “135 points of excel­lence plan” is. And any vision that is artic­u­lated across 135 points is, quite frankly, too unwieldy to exe­cute anyway.

In the end, Destler’s mes­sage is RIT has come a long way, but to reach the next level we have a lot of work to do. Watter’s mes­sage was, we’re very close to our goal and our pri­mary prob­lem is that we are not mar­ket­ing the school well enough.

Uti­mately, Wat­ters is a “Carp.” Please note that this is a com­par­i­son between him and Kodak’s former CEO, not the fish. As a former Kodak employee, I see a number of com­par­isons between him and Dan Carp. Both were indi­vid­u­als who, while good in finan­cial roles, were lead­ers with­out vision. They are “company men” through and through, chosen because they were known com­modi­ties. And at points where a bold vision was nec­es­sary, they were con­tent to play care­taker and hope for the best. And I truly believe that as Kodak ulti­mately suf­fered under Carp’s lack of deci­sive vision (par­tic­u­larly in the dig­i­tal space) so RIT will suffer under Wat­ters. And much like Carp, given how young he is, I expect that Wat­ters will stay in his post for far too long.

So the choice seems clear. But the prob­lem is that I expect the board will go in the oppo­site direc­tion and choose Wat­ters. This is in part because Wat­ters has been groomed for years as Simone’s heir appar­ent. At his open campus forum the board member who intro­duced Wat­ters referred to him as “eminently qual­i­fied for the position” (an intro­duc­tion that Destler did not receive). Much of Wat­ters pre­sen­ta­tion was about how he would work with the board as opposed to the staff. He joked with board mem­bers during his talk. I couldn’t help but feel that we were all sit­ting in on a “boys club meeting.”

And that leads the crux of the issue. Over the last decade, inten­tion­ally done or not, an almost adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship has formed between the fac­ulty and the board. The rum­blings I hear is that the board would prefer a so-​called “business straight shooter” as opposed to a “woolly academic.” Per­versely, there is a strong chance that they would reverse the campus pick for these rea­sons (some­thing that has hap­pened a number of times during the last year).

The sad part is, such a choice would be so Rochester – choos­ing a known and safe com­mod­ity over a vision­ary (see the exam­ple of Carp). And while in the end Wat­ters wouldn’t hurt RIT, I don’t think he will help it. I think that under his reign, we will remain what we are today: A solid regional uni­ver­sity des­per­ately trying to con­vince our­selves that we’re top tier — all the while shying away from the hard work that it takes to make those words a real­ity. In other words, the curse of smug­town continues.

Like I said, I hope I’m read­ing the tea leaves wrong. And even i I’m right, I wish I really felt like there was more that I could do about this decision.

Update: There is some­thing that can be done. E-mail your feel­ings to our Board of Trustees – RITBOT@rit.edu!

This is a cau­tion­ary tale of curios­ity gone awry.

If you’ve been fol­low­ing this , you know that I’m await­ing word on whether or not I have been accepted to a PhD pro­gram. To this date I’ve heard noth­ing. So, draw­ing a naive allu­sion to the famed cat, one might say that, as far as I know, I’m both accepted into and rejected from all of the pro­grams. Seems simple enough.

How­ever, thanks to the mar­vels of modern tech­nol­ogy and my own tin­ker­ing nature, I’m now even more con­fused about my quan­tum status at Cor­nell University.

You see, a few days ago, I paid a visit to the Cor­nell site to see if they had any more infor­ma­tion up about dates. There was noth­ing there to speak of. So I did some poking around on the grad­u­ate admis­sions page. One of the links there is “Accept an Offer of Admis­sion Online.” Being the pos­i­tive (and impa­tient) thinker I am, I fig­ured “what the heck, might as well see what’s there.” A click or so later, I find myself at Embark, Cornell’s online appli­ca­tion tool. This pass­word pro­tected web­site is how I sub­mit­ted my appli­ca­tion in the first place. And it’s request­ing that I log in.

So I faced a deci­sion: do I log in and pos­si­bly find out my status? Or do I wait to see if I get a big enve­lope or a skinny envelope?

Curios­ity (or per­haps temp­ta­tion) got the best of me, I logged in, and was asked if I want to accept the offer to attend Cornell.

This dis­cov­ery has launched me into a existential/systems dilemma. Had I just gotten noti­fi­ca­tion that I’ve been accepted to Cor­nell? Was the system “smart” enough to have that record on hand? Or had it been designed with the fun­da­men­tal assump­tion that only people who had been accepted would follow that link? Did the pro­gram­mers not envi­sion some­one like me?

As much as I wish this was con­fir­ma­tion of an offer, I tend to think it’s prob­a­bly a “dumb” system.^[1] Con­sid­er­ing that my noti­fi­ca­tion note from Chicago was dated Feb­ru­ary 26th, there a good chance a final deci­sion has yet to be made at any of the pro­grams. And even if the deci­sion has been made, typ­i­cally com­puter sys­tems are the last ones to know. But more than any­thing else, I don’t want to work myself up and then get crushed.

So, for the moment I remain both accepted into and rejected from all of the pro­grams. Only I’m just a little more so at Cornell.

—-

^[1] – The irony that, once again, I’m twist­ing on the end of ques­tions about Machine Intel­li­gence isn’t lost on me. Just as with my work on bots, the crux of all of this is a ques­tion of whether or not the machine knows as much as I give it credit for know­ing. Oh well, while these sys­tems may be toying with my emo­tions, at least I didn’t give my credit card out this time.

Notice any­thing funny out­side the office window?

A deer decided to bed down today out­side the office of Pro­fes­sor Williams and Vogl. We’re not quite sure how long it was there for. It must have felt the row of small hedges gave it some pro­tec­tion from the ele­ments (and the stu­dents). As for us pro­fes­sors, clearly aren’t per­ceived as a threat by any­thing — my stu­dents could have told you that.

As I was leav­ing the house this morn­ing, and step­ping out­side into the sunny 2 degree weather, I grabbed a couple quick pic­tures of the after­math of yesterday’s snows. This is the most snow we’ve had on the ground in quite a while. Again, noth­ing like to 10 feet + of snow cur­rently bury­ing north­ern New York. Still, it’s not an insignif­i­cant amount at all for Rochester. On the left side of the pic­ture you can see the area where Dre made a snow angel last night.

Here’s a panoramic view of our little piece of Hamp­ton Lane in Pen­field. It doesn’t do the piles of snow at the end of our dri­ve­way any justice.

That’s it for now. Some more research blogs are coming. And still no word on Grad programs.

Valentine’s day has come, and almost gone, here in Rochester and was marked with the first true “blizzard” we’ve had in quite a while. While we’ve gotten off light com­pared to places like Oswego, over the last 20+ hours almost a foot of snow has fallen on the imme­di­ate area (more in some places). RIT can­celed night classes, effec­tively clos­ing the campus at 6.00pm. Here’s a shot of my walk out to the car at 4.00pm today:

As far as my car itself, I found it par­tially buried by the snow that had fallen since I arrived on campus around 8.50am:

For Dre and myself our out­side day ended in much the same way as it began: shov­el­ling the dri­ve­way. And it was lit­er­ally the same amount of snow at 5.40 (yes, it took me more than an hour to make a nor­mally half-​an-​hour com­mute) as there was a 7 this morn­ing. One big dif­fer­ence how­ever was Dre’s deci­sion to make a cel­e­bra­tory snow angel at the end of shov­el­ing this evening. I opted not to join her.

Before I got home, I did make a stop off for sup­plies at the local Weg­mans (it still took me about an hour to get from RIT to Pen­field). Thank­fully, that gave me one last chance to take a few pic­tures of the Valentine’s dis­play there. Weg­mans, well, went a little over the top this year. More than a little. A lot. While from the out­side things look normal:

Once you got inside, things got crazy. The fol­low­ing panorama of the Valen­tines dis­play doesn’t quite do it enough jus­tice. The entire center island was all flow­ers with two florists pulling together last minute bou­quets. To one side was can­dies, to the other side choco­late cakes. Yes­ter­day, they actu­ally had one of the chefs (yes, our super­mar­ket has floor chefs), in a tux, pass­ing out choco­late cov­ered fruit.

But in my opin­ion the cat’s pajama’s was this ice sculpture:

Yup, Wegman’s Ulti­mate Choco­late Cake (which while quite good is no where near “ultimate”) was com­pli­mented by an ice sculp­ture “vase.” If there was any ques­tion before, it’s been laid to rest, Wegman’s is no longer a store, it’s a shop­ping expe­ri­ence. Take that Whole Foods!

But Dre and I were not swayed by this crass con­sumerism. We opted for a quiet dinner (we went out for our night on the town dinner last week­end). And, pro­vided we’re dug out by the week­end, we’re plan­ning a date for Sat­ur­day night.