News by Topic: Staff

Normally lined with exhibits showcasing the talents of RIT faculty, students, and alumni, three RIT galleries are instead outfitted this semester with the desks and technology necessary to meet the academic needs of hundreds of first-year College of Art and Design students. The University and Bevier Galleries inside Booth Hall and the William Harris Gallery in Gannett Hall have been transformed into creative classrooms.

Students, faculty, and staff who have returned to the RIT campus can’t help notice the numerous changes in place to help people keep safer during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they may not know how much thought went in to make those changes, and the work that occurred—and continues to occur—in classrooms, residential areas, offices, dining facilities, bathrooms, and common spaces.

The New York Times talks to Enid Cardinal, senior advisor to the president for strategic planning and sustainability, about RIT's wastewater sampling program to detect coronavirus.

The Image Permanence Institute at RIT has received a grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for an unprecedented research project designed to identify the most cost-efficient and environmentally responsible methods of preparing paper-based collection objects for transit and display while maintaining preservation standards.

Keith Jenkins, vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion, provided an update to the community on Tuesday about the university’s efforts on antiracism and social justice. Jenkins said that he and university leaders spent the summer engaging with students, faculty, staff, and alumni groups to generate a list of roughly 100 ideas of ways RIT can do more on these fronts.

RIT welcomes a record number of first-year students today as classes begin in a semester that will look like no other due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new students were welcomed Tuesday afternoon during an online convocation that featured several speakers, livestreamed without an audience from Ingle Auditorium.

RIT’s Wallace Library has reopened this fall with new protocols that enable students, faculty, and staff to take full advantage of the library’s resources as safely as possible.  

A team of RIT researchers has been working to blast-clean some 360 door handles from buildings across campus to restore the surface copper. Copper has been found to have antibacterial properties that can kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.

More than 80 first-year RIT students from underrepresented populations began their college careers early and from home this summer. The students participated in the Division of Diversity and Inclusion (DDI) Summer Experience, a five-week program held virtually for the first time this year to help students successfully transition to college.

Changes are in place at 21 locations on the RIT campus that will serve thousands of breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners to students, faculty, and staff members returning to campus. Online ordering, cashless checkouts, reduced occupancies, outdoor and spaced-out seating, and increased cleaning protocols are all new features offered by RIT Dining in response to COVID-19 precautions.

WXXI’s “Connections” program features Tina Chapman, director of Diversity Theater.

The unexpected transition to remote learning during the spring semester challenged faculty across RIT to experiment, create, and deploy new methods of instruction to ensure student success. As the university gears up for in-person and online classes—or a combination of both—faculty members are applying a wide range of lessons learned from the spring to keep academic momentum moving forward in the fall.