RIT Greatness Through Difference: 2015-2025 Strategic Plan

Collection — Folder: 1

Identifier: RITArc-0645

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The twenty-nine page color report begins with highlighting RIT's origins in the 1800's with a timeline illustrating significant events through the decades. The outline of the plan follows:

The Power of Diversity The Future

The university that was born of an unlikely institutional marriage; that welcomed women into its 19th-century technical classes; and that combined curricula in technical skills, the arts, and the humanities was a university destined to understand the creative power of diversity. The RIT of the future will be powered by an intellectual and social diversity unmatched within higher education—a diversity that distinguishes its academic and research portfolios, its population, and the multiple modes of learning, thinking, and knowing practiced daily. In the coming decade, RIT will intentionally assemble and leverage its many forms of diversity in order to invent and discover new solutions, new programs, new kinds of graduates, and the highest levels of stakeholder satisfaction.

Imagine the new questions that might be asked, the new solutions posed, and the innovations achieved by a team of glass artists, imaging scientists, and physicists.

Imagine the new courses and research projects emerging from the collaboration of a biomedical engineer, a materials scientist, a three-dimensional designer, and a physician assistant student.

Imagine a team of architecture students, history professors, and photographers collaborating with our Kosovo students and faculty in the repair of ancient war-damaged monuments in Pristina, Kosovo.

Imagine the job offers received by an RIT student graduating with a double major in biotechnology and philosophy, extended membership on a funded research team, demonstrated competencies in innovative thinking and intercultural relations, and a one-year co-op with Amgen.

Imagine RIT as a model civil community in which all difference—from ethnicity to nationality to sexual orientation to political persuasion to socio-economic level—is leveraged as an engine to solve seemingly unsolvable world problems.

Dates

Creation: 2015

Creator

Rochester Institute of Technology (Organization)

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open to researchers.

Biographical / Historical

Embedded within the unusual circumstances of RIT's origins was a set of principles that would become the shaping credo of the young institution: the innovative potential of unlikely partnerships - between and among institutions, individuals, and disciplines; the importance of educating students to do as well as to know; and the propulsive power of difference. This practicality, attention to student needs, and taste for doing things differently would fuel the many early instances of multi-disciplinary integration, cooperation, and risk-taking of the institution's first 100 years. And they would account for RIT's 20th-centruy reputation as an innovative university whose programs, partnerships and practices were increasingly the first of their kind in higher education.

Source: https://www.rit.edu/president/strategicplan2025/ Retrieved Jan. 2016