Last Tuesday night at The Stute’s general body meeting, a couple of people were talking about the general state of Stevens, more specifically the lack of input students have in Stevens’ completely campus-altering 2012-2022 strategic plan. The underclassman in the conversation remarked that Stevens’ small school dynamic was a key reason for their application to Stevens. The upperclassman explained that this lack of student input was a recurring theme, and hallmark trait, of Stevens. At this time, another upperclassman chimed in, lambasting the idea that Stevens is becoming a “technology” university versus a straight-up engineering school—this was the last push that compelled me to pen this editorial.
If you’re in the College of Arts & Letters, especially if you are a visual arts and/or music and technology student, you’ll know that there have been significant changes in the past four years. For the music students, this means a state-of-the-art recording and production studio. In the art department, this equates to a renovated lab and studio, and a program with more substance than it has had since my entrance to Stevens in 2012, and probably before.
Of course, I have a bias as a Visual Arts and Technology and Science, Technology, and Society dual degree student—I’m a humanities guy at what is widely conceived as a trade engineering school, more or less. Now, Stevens is shifting from the Institute of Technology to the Innovation University, increasing enrollment drastically by 2022, and accepting more non-engineering students than ever. With that, as my anonymous student stated in the first paragraph, will come a shift in school size. What is now a manageable, tight-knit campus with dorm, academic, and administrative buildings all along Wittpenn Walk will become a fragmented campus with more buildings, varied dorm locations, and a slew of new and relocated facilities. As a result, the school will become larger, both in terms of raw enrollment and the intangible campus feel.
To me, this is fine, both because I’ll be graduating this year and I’m open to change. Without change, nothing will ever progress forward. Sure, some iterations of change will be failures, but you can’t improve anything without pushing forward, iterating through change, and tweaking for the future based on historical trends. Saying “get over it” is not the right response to this, but “understand this is a reality” is a valid one, and is what I would tell those steeped in the anti-change mentality for Stevens.
For example, yesterday I was part of a presentation for President Farvardin and the president of Bell Labs, Marcus Weldon. I and a fellow “art tech,” along with the program’s director, Jeff Thompson, showed some of our work, focusing on one project that we felt strongest about. This anecdote isn’t about me or my project, but seeing the raw enthusiasm that Weldon had for Stevens’ paradigmatic identity and operational shift made me ecstatic. Moreover, President Farvardin’s conviction about Stevens’ future as the technology university was encouraging as a non-engineer. This doesn’t mean that engineering is dead and irrelevant, because we all know that isn’t remotely true.
When students perceive Stevens’ transformation as an attack on their identities (usually engineers), they are missing the key point: engineers aren’t being short-changed, but other majors are being given better opportunities. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time.
