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We couldn't resist...

$1,598,247

(approximately)

Or, the full tuition of 41.94874 students.

That’s how much Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, our beloved President, received in compensation for the fiscal year running 2007-2008. That’s the highest in the nation among university presidents.   This made a big news splash today because of a report published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The story was picked up by The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Huffington Post, All Over Albany, and many more media outlets, because it far exceeds the median average salary of college presidents, which is currently $358,746.

The Chairman of the RPI (well, technically Rensselaer) Board of Trustees also released a statement today on behalf of the board, defending their decision to set her salary at such a high rate, claiming that “Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson’s leadership embodies prescient vision, meticulous strategic planning, and persistent implementation.”  We’re not sure about that, but we do know one thing: Sam Heffner has a thesaurus with some pretty good adjectives.

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Share Uncategorized Dr. Jackson, economy, GM, media, salary

The thinker-in-chief is due to visit Troy next monday!

Well this is big news. It seems that on Monday, the capital district will be getting a special visit from a certain “commander-in-chief”. The big O (that’s Obama, not Oprah) will be in Troy at HVCC around 11am to give a speech on the “emerging economic and high tech jobs in the region’s economy“. HVCC’s opening of a solar energy training center at the Luther Forest Technology Campus will certainly be mentioned. Secret Service agents have been spotted at Albany International scoping out the site for the presidential visit. It would have been awesome if Dr. Jackson could have pulled some strings and gotten him here for a bit. She is on PCAST after all. No word on whether or not the appearance will be open to the public. We’ll be sure to keep you posted!

More here, and Times Union here and here.

Share Uncategorized economy, hvcc, Obama, politics, Troy

To our pleasant surprise, we were recently contacted by Jason Gorss, RPI’s Manager of Media Relations. He has volunteered a link to the text of Dr. Jackson’s speech from earlier today that she made to the tenured and tenure-track faculty. It is a press release, so it is to be taken with a grain of salt, but for the institute to reach out to people (especially a blog which has been around for not even two months) with information is good news. We hope this is the beginning of much more transparency within the institute. This being said, there were very little details released. Judge for yourself, but it seems to be a whole lot of vague media PR.

No one wants RPI to be more successful than the editors of this blog, and its painful to see the institute and it’s community take a hit as a result of the economic downturn. We’ve been posting email after email in an attempt to increase information coming from the institute.

We have posted the text of the speech below. Here’s a link to it on RPI’s site.

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Share Uncategorized Dr. Jackson, economy, faculty, layoffs

Well, I guess The Notorious B.I.G. was wrong. At least recently… As I’m sure you all know, the economy is officially in a recession. The federal government is bailing out American automakers, and even countries like Canada are getting in on the bailout action. Want to know something that is apparently recession proof? (Hint: it isn’t our endowment.) Alcohol. People will tend to buy cheaper alcohol instead of the pricier stuff during hard economic times. (Bros, can you go cheaper than natty light? Water?)

How does this economic situation affect RPI? Well, according to the email that Dr. Jackson sent out to the Rensselaer Community:

… we have determined that it will not be possible to reduce the budget sufficiently without reducing our recurring compensation expenses, which make up half of the Institute’s operating budget. Staffing reductions will be necessary. We would prefer to rely on attrition, but it will not be adequate to meet our financial objectives. Each vice president and portfolio owner has examined their respective operations for reductions in staff, in a way that will enable greater efficiency, improved performance, and elimination of redundancy.

We will manage the required staffing reductions as compassionately as possible…

At least they’re firing people compassionately?! The institute laid off 98 employees this past week.  No faculty positions are expected to be cut though, so that’s (relatively) good news for us students. But I can’t imagine being laid off right before the holidays. I would have hoped that RPI would have valued their employees a bit more to find the money in other places.

The biggest thing that I wish for in this situation is more information. I don’t know how many students know about this since most of us have headed home for winter break. The school has said very little publicly about the matter. This leaves us to look in the paper and read other blogs for information? The real way to combat any rumors is open communication. At least then we can all hopefully understand the reasoning behind the decisions.

Hopefully this will be the last that the economy hurts the RPI community. I’d like to not get forwarded another email in the coming months saying that some professors are being let go “compassionately.”

Our hearts go out to the those who have been affected by this situation during the holiday season.

EDIT 12/28: A number of facebook groups have spring up voicing concern with the issue.

Full email below.

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Share Uncategorized economy, employees, layoffs