History of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
[9] Van Rensselaer gave Eaton permission to lecture at towns along the way, clearly a precursor to the founding of an institute of higher learning.
[11] This unconventional mode of instruction was inspired by the original intention to make the Rensselaer School a place to train students in teaching what they had learned; as van Rensselaer wrote to Blatchford, he wanted the school's graduates "to qualify [as] teachers for instructing the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics, by lectures or other-wise, in the application of experimental chemistry, philosophy, and natural history, to agriculture, domestic economy, the arts, and manufactures.
It drew graduates of older institutions such as Amherst, Bowdoin, Columbia, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Union, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale.
Important visiting scholars included Joseph Henry, who had previously studied under Amos Eaton, and Thomas Davenport, who sold the world's first working electric motor to the institute.
"Here and there unquenched flames illuminated desolated spaces, and great beds of fire glowed among the blackened walls of the destroyed buildings.
[22] The observatory was named in honor of the Proudfit's son, an RPI student in the class of 1877 who died in a tragic stagecoach accident at the age of 19.
On November 10, 1875, the trustees accepted a proposal by the Proudfits to build an observatory in his honor, noting that the gift was "not only a valuable contribution to science and learning, but also an appropriate memorial to their lamented son".
It therefore occurred to me to obviate this objection by making the frame-work of wood, of the greatest lightness consistent with the requisite strength, and covering it with paper of a quality similar to that used in the manufacture of paper boats; the principal advantages in the use of these materials being that they admit of great perfection of form and finish, and give extreme lightness, strength, and stiffness in the structure ...Prof. Greene contracted E. Waters & Sons, a firm in Troy known for boat manufacture, to work on the project.
[32] Named president in 1901, Ricketts liberalized the curriculum by adding the Department of Arts, Science, and Business Administration, in addition to the graduate school.
[17] After fires completely destroyed what was then RPI's Main Building in 1904, the administration and trustees decided to move the institute further east up the hill.
This was the first instance in American history that alumni of a single city raised money to erect a building on a college campus.
[35] Many an admissions tour has told prospective students that Russell Sage hated three things: (1) philanthropy, (2) higher education, and (3) women.
[citation needed] He was not averse to loaning money under the assumption that it would be paid back in full, but he loathed the idea of philanthropy for its own sake.
During the planning for the White dorm extensions, Olivia Slocum wrote President Ricketts stating that she would offer $100,000 for the construction of a dining hall.
Fifty surplus metal military barracks, each housing twenty students, were arranged into a trailer-park like camp over a mile from campus, nicknamed "tin town".
The year 1961 saw major progress in academics at the institute with the construction of the Gaerttner Linear Accelerator, then the most powerful in the world,[40] and the Jonsson-Rowland Science Center.
J. Erik Jonsson, a Rensselaer alumnus of the class of 1922 and co-founder of Texas Instruments, along with his wife Margaret, did much to improve the appearance and facilities of RPI.
Their first major contribution came in 1961 when they gifted the institute and led to the construction of the Science Center, on a twenty-acre site of land that the school had just purchased from the Catholic Seminary in 1958.
A small charge was set up to be detonated by a phone call that Mrs. Jonsson made ... thus the term "dial-a-bomb" came to be the description of the event on April 15, 1975, at eleven o'clock.
In 1980, several researchers and graduate students who wished to start a company approached the administration and asked for a place to set up a small lab.
[42] Shortly thereafter, RPI invested $3 million in pavement, water and power on around 1,200 acres (490 ha) of land it owned 5 miles (8.0 km) south of campus.
A graduate of MIT, Jackson had held physics research positions at Bell Laboratories and Rutgers University, and had most recently served as chairperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
[43] However, the program has persisted, and remains an integral part of life at RPI, with many courses requiring that a student bring their laptop to class.
About two months later, President Jackson announced via email that there would be Institute-wide layoffs due to "the global and national economic crisis, and its impact on endowments.
[50] As students prepared to depart for spring break, which took place during the second week of March, the Institute warned against international traveling and taking cruise ships.
[55] RPI’s decision to continue charging full tuition resulted in a class action lawsuit that, as of December 2020, was scheduled to move forward, despite the Institute’s efforts to have the case dismissed.
[63] The Institute imposed many safety measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, including a mask mandate, social distancing, contact tracing, and scheduled testing every two weeks.
[65] In addition to these COVID-19-related difficulties, the Institute was also the victim of a massive cyberattack towards the end of the Spring 2021 semester that caused the cancellation of final exams and resulted in the Institute shutting down the campus network, leading to outages of major services such as RPI’s LMS (Learning Management System), SIS (Student Information System), and the RPI email service.
[66] With the development and widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the administration began requiring all students to receive them starting with the Summer 2021 semester.
[65] Dr. Jackson stepped down in June 2022 and was succeeded on July 1 by Martin Schmidt, an RPI alumnus and the current provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
