VICE NEWS: “America’s Highest Paid College President is Dragging Her School Into Crippling Debt”

From VICE NEWS:

“The real issue is that RPI is in terrible financial shape and students are getting shortchanged,” former RPI physics professor Jim Napolitano, a 1977 RPI alum who worked at the school for 22 years, told VICE News. He said Jackson had also stripped the faculty of their influence, when the school’s provost suspended the Faculty Senate in 2007 after staff held a no-confidence vote to express their dismay with her leadership.

The school is now in $828 million of debt – three times what it was when Jackson entered in 1999, Moody’s Credit Ratings show. The money has been borrowed to build impressive new facilities, grow and enhance graduate research, and strive towards other goals in Jackson’s ambitious Rensselaer Plan – but Napolitano and other former staff members told VICE News that undergraduate classes had grown in size, with professors pushed to increasingly focus on research as more undergrad students enrolled in the school.

Yikes.