Editor's Note: Transparency

Dear RIT Administration,

We are all members of RIT’s community: tens of thousands of people who live and work on this campus in a brick city that we call home.

We are, in essence, citizens of this city. As citizens, we deserve to know more about the decisions and processes that impact our school, our home and our lives.

Transparency is an essential component of any community — especially that of a college campus. A lack of transparency creates a deficiency in trust, stifles creativity and precludes universal consensus.

Though lack of transparency is often perceived that way, this is not to say that all cases are malicious. But they can be. Either way, it creates a fundamental problem.

Students are the largest piece of this community. As tuition-paying and contributing members, we deserve to know about what decisions are being made and why.

We deserve to know about and to be involved in these decisions. Student input can help compose and direct ideas towards a more universal direction.

Tell us why you make the decisions you make. Tell us what’s going on. Tell us what you’re planning. If you don’t, we have to assume that you’re not listening — and sometimes you aren’t.

If you don’t know how to reach us, tell us that too.

Students have a right to know what is happening at their university, and they have a right to a voice, too — whether we’re talking about a new building or a new tiger.

We need transparency not just because we want it, but also because it is fair. A university led in pieces cannot move forward. Every step we take as RIT, dots or no dots, is only possible with public and consistent transparency.

In order to do that, we all need to have a voice, a hand and perhaps a foot in those steps we take. We should not, and will not, be dragged along through change that lacks our representation.