Unity of Purpose

Enclosed in red on the image below is the 275-acre RPI main campus.
The building in blue is Troy High School, which happens to be adjacent to the eastern side of campus.
Go ahead and click on the picture to get a better look.
Troy High School is a pretty impressive building. Actually, it's massive.
It houses about 1200 students during the day.
















RPI has 6,000 students on our almost 300 acre campus.
Take your finger and pinch troy highschool.
Fit 6 of those buildings within RPI's boundaries.
You'll notice that you could probably fit a dozen more.

A student at Troy High School spends the exact same amount of time in that building that an RPI student spends on campus. 4 years of study. Same amount of life.

Think about the drastic difference between what gets accomplished from one 4 year period to another.
High School students spend much of their time not wanting to be there.
College students spend much of their time wanting to graduate.
But year in and year out, a highschool doesn't accomplish anything material.
It educates teenagers and that's it.

Research universities, on the other hand, teach students and then develop new ideas, grow industries, and file patents.
RPI owns a 1200 acre industrial park a few miles down the river.
There are 70 corporate tenants and about 2400 employees in that industrial park.
It has absolutely nothing to do with undergraduate education.
But RPI, as a college, is able to support it.
Because it has a unity of purpose.

Every RPI student has a personal objective: to complete the degree that they are working towards. But in the process, they fulfill a secondary objective: to grow the university and spread its reputation.
Universities are entirely self-perpetuating. Successful graduates donate money to the institution, growing it and causing more students to invest their careers into it.

Look back at that map.
That's 275 acres you're looking at.
I walked around about half of the campus tonight. It took me about an hour.
It really gave a sense of how enormous the place is. Many of the buildings are incredibly impressive. EMPAC is that funny looking white blob in the very lower left of the map. That's 7 stories tall. It's a pretty big building.
Its entire purpose is for audio research and performance.
In order for an organization to spend so much money and resources on something of that nature, there needs to be an intense unity of purpose.

But walking around the campus, this thought came to my mind: Its all such a waste.
Here we have the cutting edge of mankind's splendor. 6,000 students and hundreds of professors saying that they are a part of this body and this is what they have to show for it. It's incredible.
But that purpose that we're all unified in is pretty lame.
RPI exists for RPI, and to a lesser extent, for the furthering of mankind through technological innovation and whatnot.

That's a lame purpose.

Imagine if those same people with the same resources could be unified for the purpose of nothing more than to bring glory to God.
What would the academic campus look like?