Located west of Boston in a former manufacturing town that stockpiled ammunition during the Revolutionary War, a hundred-fifty year old technical school draws the best and brightest students from all over the world. Classes are taught at a very fast pace during a short span of seven weeks. Undergraduate students earn either an A, B or a C, and there is no grade point average. Additionally, if a student underperforms they don't fail the course. They get an "NR" which means "No Record." Courses that students receive the latter designation don't appear on transcripts and can be retaken. There is an emphasis on projects in lieu of exams and summer internships are undertaken for credit. The school boasts of high job placement after graduation with starting salaries as much as $20k more compared to other institutions. It's not a school for jocks or artists. It's a school for my people, that is, geeks.
I first heard of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) back when I was in the engineering program at the University of Rhode Island. One professor we all hated was from WPI. I had him for a one credit lab. He was fond of four question, multiple choice tests which he gave to upper class students. His exams included the instruction to "show no work." Just pick a letter, miss two, and you failed. I met with him during office hours only once. After I asked for clarification on a topic, he questioned whether I belonged in the program. At the time I was a junior with a 3.9 grade point average. A year later I graduated magna cum laude.
One of my friends learned that WPI had a policy of never failing students and allowing them to retake a course for a better grade. In my school, a state university, if you tanked a class it was on your record forever. So here we were being harshly judged by a professor who graduated from the Worcester School of Mulligans. On top of that he had us perform and write up five experiments for one credit. He instructed his TA to grade our reports based on word choices. For some reason he disliked the term "utilize," and if you wrote that word in lieu of "use," you lost 20 points.
When we learned that he was going to add a sixth project which involved the Nusselt number, a non dimensional number in fluid mechanics related to the heat transfer in the boundary layer, someone snuck into the lab at night and overturned the experimental apparatus. The next day in class Professor Do-Over was livid. He berated all of us demanding that the perpetrators of the "Nusselt Affair," as it came to be known, come forward. I can still see the crimson bald spot on the back of his head as he paced back and forth while shouting a string of adjectives laced with obscenities to describe the vandals. That afternoon Professor Redo found his car turned 90° in his parking spot such that the front bumper was inches from the building and the back was up against a dumpster. The TA taught his class for the rest of the year.
In theory the grading policy at WPI appears to benefit the students, but in practice it allows professors to pile on the work since no one ever actually fails. If poor grades were recorded on official transcripts, students would be more apt to demand fairness from their professors. Some instructors are exceedingly inflexible. I read online a student's request for leniency was denied by her professor after she was a victim of a violent crime. Another professor told his freshman class,
"You might have heard rumors about me. That I'm very strict, that I expect you to work hard, that I don't take excuses, that I don't care if your whole family dies, you'll either do the work, or I'll fail you. I'm here to tell you all of that is true."
Students accept abuse from professors because they know in the end they won't actually fail. Some students espouse the idea to "just ignore grades" because the only mark you shoot for is "not an NR." In addition to being extraordinarily rigid, some professors at WPI teach exclusively with YouTube videos created by teachers from other institutions. Imagine spending $70,000 a years for a degree from Khan Academy.
The grading policy certainly benefits the endowment. Each time a student receives no record for a required course, they are rolled back seven weeks. No record means no credit, but it does not mean no cost. The longer a student stays at WPI the deeper in debt they become as they chase the dream of a lucrative job offer. Many students report having to take five years to complete their course of study. Most NR a couple of classes each year. The professors do their part to increase funding by routinely tanking students who believe the system is in their best interest.
The students at WPI are highly intelligent. The majority are fervently supportive of the administration. The campus is often described as "a-political," but I think "apathetic" is a more appropriate word. You'd think these highly capable, well informed young people would figure this out, but intellect does not equate to experience. One lesson they haven't yet learned is to always beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Recently while on the campus I witnessed this firsthand.
As a parent of a WPI student I received the first email from President Laurie Leshin in mid September informing me that three students had passed away. The families of two of the youths disclosed that they died of suicide. They were not freshman. I was shocked. When I talked with my son, he said that everyone knew why this had occurred. The most stress is felt by students who are deepest into the system. As they take and retake classes their progress slows as their debt grows. Not every student has supportive parents willing to continue to shell out money for their kid to toil away in school.
The worst part is that the students most susceptible to this are from lower income families. This doesn't seem to bother the administration all that much as they move forward with their plan to increase the size of the freshman class. For the past few years the number of students at WPI has increased with little expansion of services and infrastructure. Most students who paid for a meal plan can't get food on campus between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm. The pressure on the system continued to mount into the second term when in early November I received yet another email indicating that a student had died. On the day the campus was shutdown for a mental health break, a young man committed suicide.
The response from students was meek at best with many backing the administration's fervent assertion that this was all the result of the pandemic. Students were perishing and the administration was concerned about liability. A few organized a protest which was promptly brought under the auspices of the administration wishing to partner with student leaders to come up with a solution. Leshin met with students. She welled up. She vowed support. They hugged.
On the day of the protest, I drove to Worcester bent on listening to students to learn if what my son was telling me was true. He wasn’t able to attend since his instructor decided to hold class during the protest. A group of about a thousand students gathered on the quad. One of the leaders instructed us to form up in a line as we would be marching in silence past the administration building. I surmised Leshin negotiated that we march quietly to ensure that their message didn't get out especially around prospective students touring the campus. The organizers initially wanted students to wear clothing with the WPI logo crossed out. That devolved into all black attire. When we marched past the administrative building an employee held up a small, handwritten sign that read,
"We love you."
We settled in a large room set up with tables and chairs. As the space filled, a woman took to the microphone and instructed the students with an open seat to raise their hand. Then she requested anyone who could stand should do so such that others could sit. Everyone but me vacated their seats. Since that didn't work, she tried to get more tables set up by having the students push all the furniture forward. When the students dutifully complied, she barked at them to all stop and then warned everyone to be more careful.
This was supposed to be a protest. The last time I was spoken to so condescendingly I was in 5th grade. One of the student leaders opened up with a brief story of his struggles with mental illness. Next was President Leshin who blathered on a good fifteen minutes, stroking the students into submission. She referred to how hard "the past 20 months had been" in support of the idea that these tragic events were the result of the pandemic, and not the lousy tenured teachers playing TEDx videos in the classroom. She concluded with the familiar theme which even she described as corny,
"I love each and everyone of you."
Next an invited faculty member took the mic and chronicled her lifelong struggles with mental health. When she was six years old she was diagnosed with a mental illness. Relying on her memoirs, she chronicled her many diagnoses and subsequent medications. She went on through to expulsions in high school, troubles in college, marriage, births, grad school, all laced with copious therapy, drugs and outrage. When she finally came in for a landing, twenty minutes had expired.
Next on the agenda was the student input forms which were on each table. The woman who orchestrated the seating debacle returned to the mic and began spewing instructions such as
"Someone take notes, but take turns so everyone gets a chance."
and
"Don't let one person dominate the conversation. We want to hear from all of you."
And my favorite,
"We are going to spend no more than seven minutes on each question."
Okay. With five students at my table that leaves 1 minute and 24 seconds for each of them to express their views. As we put our heads together to tackle the problem of students killing themselves, we were instructed to move to the next question. A sophomore at my table recalled the loneliness he experienced at WPI when he was cut off by the moderator. This happened twice more after which I asked,
"Are they always this way here?"
"What?" a junior asked.
"Telling you what to do and when to do it."
A young man from California majoring in chemical engineering said,
"That's the way things are done around here."
I was dumbfounded. This was supposed to be a student organized protest against insufferable policies that led to tragedy, and these kids were being told what to do by an administrator. After rifling through all the questions, they offered the opportunity for a representative from each table to come up and summarize our findings. No one from my table volunteered. As I listened to a series of brilliant students weigh in thoughtfully, I was hesitant to offer my perspective. I asked a student seated next to me if he thought it would be appropriate for me to address the crowd to which he reasoned,
“You are the only parent here.”
I queued up behind a young woman. She fist bumped me before taking the mic. I smiled behind my mask. When she finished I said,
"I'm a parent. I'm the one who pays the bills around here. My son couldn't attend because he’s in class. I tried to get him to come over afterwards, but he said that he has only 15 minutes for dinner, then he has to study the rest of the night."
The students clicked their fingers. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I surmised it was a sign that they understood my message. I expressed my concern that I didn't think COVID was the culprit but instead an aggravating factor.
"Something is amiss here,”
I surmised before concluding with my belief that you can not consult your way out of this. Hiring another expert to meet with stressed out students won't alleviate the burden they are under. Many of the students expressed that too many professors treat students unfairly, don’t actually teach, assign an excessive amount of work and lack compassion. Maybe the administration ought to address these concerns first.
People with real mental illness want to be anonymous. They seek a normal life, not one in the spotlight. I suspect that students at WPI are under so much pressure that they don't have time nor the desire to seek help especially when doing so will only exasperate the stress of their workload. Throughout this ordeal the only moratorium on academic requirements was a single day of campus wide fun activities and a three day extension of the break in between terms. They ended up extending the second term by four days to make up the time. In the end it doesn't matter since I don't think a day of corn hole on the quad was going to do anything to stem student suicide.
Until the administration acknowledges the role they played in the deaths of those four students, nothing will change. My recommendation to the students of WPI is to occupy the administration building and effectively shutdown the school. It will require mass participation and solidarity as well as a leader willing to put their future on the line to save the life of another student.
What is needed now is not taught in any school. Someone must search their soul for the courage to come forward and unite them before this happens yet again.
Editor’s Note: Sadly, four more WPI students died after this was posted.
