Rochester Institute of Technology - Techmila / Ramikin Yearbook (Rochester, NY)

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There is something very precious which is being neglected here; education is being forfeited for train- ing as an end in itself- intellectual and spiritual growth, and the various risks they necessitate, are shunned like the plague in return for security in the material sense Anti-intellectualism is rampant. The liberal arts (i.e.„ ‘'General Studies”} requirement is seen by many a necessary but troublesome evil whose only function is to get in the way of one's major Clearly, something is wrong. A person who commits himself to higher learning is remiss in his responsibility to himself if he neglects the education of his whole person The re- sult can be little but soulless competence and mind- less specialization, This is an Institute of Technology in every sense, and as such it has the potential to become a vital part of the American educational and social system But it is run and attended by people of narrow vision, two-dimensional technocrats who cannot or will not see tlhe social implications of the technology that is both father and child to RIT There is nothing esoteric about this. Flanked on one slide by a neon junkyard of quick-food joints, shopping plazas and asphalt sprawl, and on the other side by the rolling farmlands characteristic of upstate New York. RIT's very environment seems to be meta- phorically pointing up the dilemma it faces A before and after, if you will, of the progress' that our tech- nology has wrought. And yet, as one administrator likes to say. RIT is an uncommon people’s university, something different Maybe something new Well, let s see. From the out- side the campus strikingly resembles a factory functional, heartless, and with lots of parking lots too. Internally, though, we are faced with something else again. It has become de rigeur to harp on the ubiquitous red brick, but that is missing the point. There are more subtle things about the RIT environ- ment which are far more toxic Essentially, the architecture is geometric, redundant and monolithic Any architect worth his blueprints knows that one's living space inevitably bears upon one's mental and 4

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AN AMERICAN PLACE by Andrew Franklin Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in college than in old-age homes. —Bob Dylan In searching for RIT's place in the landscape of American education it becomes apparent that it is situated, for the moment at least, squarely in the mainstream. The liberal arts institutions which have for so long been the great cutting edge of higher learn- ing are now finding themselves losing students, money, and credibility The shift has been increasingly towards vocational schools with a direct line to a career in the outside world, and RIT's academic premise is essentially just that As such, it is becoming a uniquely American place At first glance, nothing seems particularly wrong with this It may be said with some degree of accuracy that liberal arts universities have over the years lost much of their promise: they have failed to fulfill their self-imposed responsibility of providing people with the tools to live a fuller life Rather, it seems contemporary education is running a race it cannot win. With embarrassing attempts to second-guess the kids to maintain some semblance of rele- vance, it has forsaken its sense of purpose and become a rootless political entity without its tradi- tional foundation. It seems ironic that the major casualty of the upheaval that many schools experi- enced in the sixties was this foundation, sacrificed in the battle whose very mission was to restore it It is very plain that RIT lost that battle as well, but for a completely different reason; it was neverfought here RIT has much to gain in the current state of af- fairs: more students will be applying {including many that would never have thought of doing so a few short years agol. and significantly, more positive reinforce- ment will be generated that the course we are follow- ing is a viable one That is the unfortunate aspect of it, because it is very possible indeed that just the op- posite is the case Let us examine what we have here. This is no simple task: Once one gets beyond being over- whelmed by the bricks and other superficialities, it is nearly time to graduate and leave, To compound the problem, RIT is for all intents and purposes only a few years old: like a child, it is still in many way featureless. Nevertheless, as the years pass, a pattern inexorably emerges, The RIT student body is largely the end-product of the American dream of material wealth, security and conformity. It is, in its own way and in its own context, striving for that same dream itself With the exception of a meager handful of iconoclasts, (now there's a vanishing species for you!), the RIT student has proven himself quite willing to be processed on The assembly-line of vocational training, to become an eminently employable product to be consumed in the marketplace of an economic society. 3

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physical attitude Therefore, it is fairly safe to say that after spending enough time on campus, you run the risk, for this and other reasons, of being stifled and linear in your thinking, and having your physical senses cramped and deadened. The dormitory towers rise like headstones over ridiculous concrete quads, the quartenmile walkway is like a bad joke, insistently railroading us across to the academic side. where the various colleges of RIT stand, insular, in the shadow of the “Administra- tion tower. And everywhere you look, on everything from report cards to garbage cans, the RIT Graphic Mark, like a little swastika, constantly reminds you just whose thumb you are under. There is no sense of dance to it, no poetry of form. It is all very depressing. Which just brings us back to our original thesis It must be noted here that the bulk of the responsibili- ty in dealing with RIT'sranfied educational atmosphere lies not with any administrator, but with the student himself He is the one who must decide whether his is to be a party to his own frontal lobotomy There are ways to respond to this, and still re- main true to the more viable notions that RIT has committed itself to. There is an opportunity to really innovate here, to mold into exciting new forms the raw materials available to us. For example, would it be a bad idea to upgrade and energize the Humanities program into something that could be an integral part of each student's learning? Must it be so difficult to breach the walls that divide RIT's colleges? The frag- mentation and compartmentalization which exists is absurd and counterproductive. Realistically, RIT academia engenders the antith- esis of the Renaissance Man; ideally, however, the realization of the renaissance vision, a symbiosis of Science. Humanities and the Arts, is here at our fingertips. Failure to integrate the disparate elements of RIT's academic landscape, and failure to begin softpedalling its more mercenary aspects would be a defeat of nerve and will. Rejection is always an act of self-denial,