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I'd have used some lyric from Helen of Troy, New York instead if I could find any of the George S. Kaufman play online past the title ``Cry Baby''. Before my point, some frivolity from the RPI Mac Users Group list --
This is the gulag Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There is no stockade, no guard tower, no electronic frontier. Only a public safety officer prevents stealing. Punishment means exile from prison to the city of Troy. In Troy, nothing can survive. Work well, and you will be treated well. Work badly, and you will die. -Adapted by Robert Otlowski.
The point of this self-indulgence is I overlooked yesterday was ten years to the day that I first set foot in Troy and in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Today would be ten years since I made the pilgrimage to the VCC, a church (honest; ask ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
oliver_otter or chipuni) and got my computer account. Despite the self-esteem problems university and city have, it's a marvelous school in a fascinating city; though I've spent eight winters there -- and one in Singapore -- I'd move back if I had a job.
Most wonderful to me, besides my supportive and kind department, is the legacy from former president George M. Low, onetime head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. He left the school much of his documents, including an incredible array of NASA documents, technical and popular. My favorite was an early paper which reported that to be useful, a paper must be easily understood. Over the CII bridge they've built a wonderful little museum with stuff from early space shuttle models to autographs from nearly every moon-walker to the week of Peanuts strips where Snoopy went to the Moon.
Also they had an albino squirrel. (If she's died I don't want to hear it. Every delivery van knew to go very slow on the green-room campus, lest an unfortunate incident cost him his life.) There's rumors of baby albinos, but I never saw any. Allen B. DuMont -- who perfected the cathode ray tube -- also graduated RPI, and I feel a bit disloyal using LCD screens, but CRT laptops don't cut it.
The school changed a fair amount while I was there, much of it to my eye draining its distinctiveness -- merging the Hole in the Wall pizza place with Chiripa's; replacing the popular Puckman mascot with the hated red hawk (market research said they proved Scarlet would be popular; they failed to reckon with the official icon looking like a chicken wielding a Snickers bar, as well as the fact people like Puckman); dumping those pesky complicated Unix workstations for non-technical Windows computers; the fading of the Hockey Line -- but school spirit was always a very hard-to-define thing. I think mostly the spirit consists of people sulking that there isn't any school spirit. But this is the school that brought us, all those years ago, Drop Squad, devoted just to, well, dropping stuff down the CII stairs, and putting the pictures up on the web. Maybe it had to be 1996 to make sense.
Remarkably, any time, day or night, you can find Blade Runner being shown to the public somewhere on campus.
I'll never forgive them for killing Zmail.
They also somehow got the idea I wasn't a student in the spring of 1998, and managed to screw up my student loans by telling Sallie Mae this over and over while not telling me of their decision. They still haven't fixed it, either; the registrar believes if they ignore me long enough I'll be less angry.
A wonderful bit of folklore I've never been able to substantiate holds that in the late 60s/early 70s, when schools were finally admitting it was possible to have women and men attend classes together, RPI went to repeat its regulations against admitting women, only to find that they'd never had any prohibition against women attending -- just no women ever applied (outside special World War II courses). Today, though, RPI boasts a student body of over six thousand students, nearly more than 60 of them female.
Trivia: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was the first school in the United States to require laboratory work for science and engineering students. Source: A history of physics in its elementary branches (through 1925) : including the evolution of physical laboratories, Florian Cajori.
Currently Reading: Bio-Futures, Edited by Pamela Sargent. Tales of biotechnology applied to people as only the mid-1970s could collect.
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As some wag wrote over 40 years ago...
Date: 2004-08-24 10:38 am (UTC)In a field of rye.
Stands and old abandoned outhouse,
Known as R.P.I.
Looks like you moved into Troy about the same time I left it. I wish I were still there myself. The job I has at the Troy Public Library was the best I ever had. Now, 10 years on, I doubt I'll ever work in my chosen profession again.
Re: As some wag wrote over 40 years ago...
Date: 2004-08-25 03:48 am (UTC)Yup, almost exactly the same time. Someday we should figure out why Troy is a accumulation point for furries, when they don't particularly mean to gather.
The Troy Public Library, for any who might happen to travel in the area, is a wonderful building worth a visit on its own. It was built in the 1890s, it's cramped and a bit overstocked and quirky in construction, with everything from a videotape of an amazingly tension-free Go-Bots movie to a Civil War squadron's battle flag. It's eccentric in all the right ways. And since they power-washed the Russel Sage campus downtown is about thirty percent less dingy.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-24 09:13 pm (UTC)RPI was hell, but it was always my hell. Up until the last couple years, anyway. By which time I'd sort of graduated already a couple years before, pending being able to assemble my now-scattered thesis committee just to make it official, and was studying in Kalifornia. I think the school spirit can be summed up in being mad at the school. (Indeed, in my undergrad days there, it was rumored that the abuse heaped upon the students and faculty by the administration was intentional. Everyone was united by a common enemy, so the environment was cooperative and friendly among the students and professors.) When Roland Schmidt paid some ad agency somewhere around a million dollars to design the "Rensselaer with a grey bar under it" logo, everyone was upset. Likewise when several years' class gifts turned out to be useless ornaments pretty much mandated by school officials, with little to no input from the classes they were ostensibly gifts from. When the beloved Crinatoid sculpture went away (not really the school's fault; it was on loan, and the artist wanted it back, but the administration made no attempt to change said artist's mind). Then the change from Puckman to the chicken (I was actually there early enough to remember The Swarm, who predated Puckman, who was himself a forced change from on high, because The Swarm was "too aggressive.")
Honestly, I probably would've gone back too, if they had a faculty slot for me. At this point, though, I have more of a life here than there. Some day, I'll go back for a visit...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-25 04:03 am (UTC)You may be right about the administration deliberately breeding anger ... certainly it's the easiest explanation for their ability to be petty in the most irritating ways. It's got to be only the steady influx of new students who keep the student body from giving up altogether. But -- certainly in my department at least -- the sorts of rivalries and factions notorious in academia were unknown. (Of course, we were all sulking at the engineering department for teaching some weird moon-man version of vectors that isn't right and doesn't make sense, a different common enemy.)
This was certainly after your time, but wonderful all the same -- you know the little discs on the side of the pedestrian bridge by Public Safety? The RPI one was long ago changed to the Dumb Greybar. Some students made their own plywood bullet (the older, beloved RPI logo, which was, well, the letters RPI in Geneva Bold, with the outline of a red circle) and started putting it up.
While they were there, Public Safety wandered by, and the officers suspected them of stealing the logo -- so they detailed the students while they got out the ladder and wrenches or whatever and put it up on the bridge to stick.
Took the administration a week to find out about it and get around to ripping out that bullet.
My last RPI experiences ended up kind of like yours, just going off to Singapore for big chunks of the year, without telling them any, eventually just going to campus to meet some administrative obligation or to check out books from Folsom. (Folsom library is an odd concrete scupture, each floor of which is larger than the floors below it -- does it go without saying it was designed in the 1970s? -- and it has been accused of being a Metroplex-type Transformer.)
The last thing I was really angry with them about, apart from their screwing me with the student loans, was changes to the graduate student policy in which grad students will get two years of teaching assistant life and then be turned over to their advisor's grant-writing ability. Apparently somebody thinks there's big money to be made in pioneering the inverse Voronoi problem, and perhaps there is, but we're not going to see any of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-24 11:17 pm (UTC)Regarding the albino squirrel pups... it seems possible. If one albino squirrel was running around, it's likely that the albino gene was hidden elsewhere in the squirrel population.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-25 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-25 04:06 am (UTC)Is it that long? I'd had the idea it was closer to six or eight years. I forget when Alby was first spotted; I think it was '97 or '98. Certainly she looked all right, as squirrels go, in early 2003 -- last time I was on campus for any significant stretch -- and she has got the unanimous protection of the student community.
On the other hand, there certainly are hawk-class birds in the area ...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-25 04:15 am (UTC)See, there've been reports of several albino squirrels at once, but I never saw more than one at a time. However, Alby seems to have concentrated (this is meaningless to anyone who doesn't know the campus, but you get the idea) around Amos Eaton and that impossible-to-remember building in front of it1, and I did a few times see an albino squirrel way the heck over by the Troy building. That's only several hundred feet away, but I never saw an albino that far from Amos Eaton the first several years.
Redskins ... yes, that's a bit of a troublesome name. The intercapitals are a bit obnoxious and the sooner society gets over this fad (and the acronyms fad) the better, really. I wonder if some marketing magazine concluded that ``red hawks'' are The Thing in the mid-90s, though ... there are fads in that as with everything else.
1 It really does exist in some mental obfuscation trap. People who've been on campus for years can be told its name and not recognize it; they get told ``the building in front of Amos Eaton'' and name the Greene building, which is past that one.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-26 04:00 am (UTC)Baylor had a logo change, while I was there, from our very 1950's 'Stencil bear' to the more modern Censored Block Bear (http://www.laughinghyena.net/LogoServer/college/BaylorBears6.GIF) (Either vastly improved over this old one (http://www.baylor.edu/graphics/index.php?id=18312).) We also gained the interesting distinction of being the first NCAA school to have a multilingual logo: One version said "Baylor Bears", the other, with slightly additional red tones, said "Los Osos de Baylor".
And apparently, It's about to change again. (http://baylorbears.collegesports.com/genrel/081304aab.html) Egads. At least the interlocking 'BU' logo has been the same for ages. That's the side-of-the-helmets one.
Oh, and there's a school seal (http://www.baylor.edu/graphics/index.php?id=18311) and standard 'wordmark' (http://www.baylor.edu/images/sitewide/site_logo.gif), but.. we're NCAA Division 1-A, who cares about anything that's not on a liscensable uniform?
--Chiaroscuro
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-27 03:36 am (UTC)Actually, I kinda like Sailor Bear, but then when I was running a campus newspaper I lead the drive to replace the masthead with the paper name and the school seal all in Bodoni, a very classy (I thought) and 1950s design. (The punks who came after me changed it to all-lowercase, wasting the perfectly good Bodoni R's, and then went to one of those wussy fake-faded-typewriter typefaces.)
I believe RPI's seal includes a slide rule, but nobody notices it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-25 06:18 am (UTC)Before the official files were available, it took my boss in ETS all of five minutes to recreate it in Photoshop.
Actually, in the original version the dots over the "i"s were square, but the consultant claimed that later polling found that round dots would appeal more to women. (That version of the logo can be seen on the top of this newsletter" (http://www.sas.it.mtu.edu/urel/ttopics/acrobat/september/091898.pdf), which coincidentally has an article about why they felt they needed a new logo.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-26 03:36 am (UTC)See, the logo is fine by itself apart from evoking vaguely the auto parts store I used to buy replacement antennas for the Chevy Celebrity from. As for changing square dots to round ones to attract more female students I think ha ha ha hahaha ha hahaha ha ha hahe eheeeeehahehee ha ha hahahahehehehehe hehe heheeeehehe hoo hoo wha hahaha he he hoooooo wahaha ha haheeheeeeehahehee ha ha hahahahehe hoo hoo hoo hoo hoooooo he he he he he heee (cough) ha ha haaa (cough). I'm sorry, we were (heeheeeeeeee) ... ahem.
The old Hercules Powder Company renovated its logo in the late 70s to a dopey abstracted sphinx with the company name in a neat custom font beneath it. In the late 80s that was too stylish, apparently, so they updated to a brand new dumb logo, a square with HERCULES written out in Helvetica. A couple years later they spent a quarter million dollars for the bold new concept of replacing the square with ... a rhombus.
I really want to get in on the company logo scam.
I find interesting the article comment that MTU wanted to change its logo so that people would not have any confusion about what ``M'' was referred to there. RPI has tried justifying its not-accepted-by-any-student-or-faculty change to Rensselaer on the grounds that the ``R'' gets confused for other schools, particularly Rochester. They also tried for a while to make the school ``Rensselaer University'' on the grounds that a ``Polytechnic Institute'' sounds like a place you go to learn refrigerator repair. The ``University'' change is a total non-starter, though, so they make do with suppressing the whole ``PI'' part when they can.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-26 06:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-27 03:41 am (UTC)I love the world.
I mean I really, really love it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-26 09:57 am (UTC)--Chiaroscuro
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-27 03:40 am (UTC)See, I'll grant that extremely tiny touches can make artwork perfect; I just don't believe logos and the such are given enough attention for anybody to notice. They're not art enough. Also the difference between perfect and not-quite isn't substantive enough in this context, so far as I can tell.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-27 11:00 am (UTC)--Chiaroscuro
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-28 06:06 am (UTC)Well, perhaps. I'm inclined to think tinkering on that level really means ``I have to change something so I can prove I'm in charge, but I don't have the time or resources to think of something myself'' was thought by a department head.