Photo: Mark McCarty

Focus On... Eddie Knowles

When Eddie Knowles, the new vice president for student life at Rensselaer, walks across campus, he enjoys talking informally with students, sometimes going so far as blocking their path on the sidewalk and compelling a conversation.

“It usually confuses them a little at first. They try to avoid my eyes. But I want to know how they’re doing. I work at that. I will not allow myself to be vice president for student life and keep a minimum of contact with the students,” he says.

As a 24-year veteran of Rensselaer, Knowles has witnessed a transformation in the way the university relates to its students. When he arrived in 1977, as assistant dean of students, he doubled as coordinator of programs for minority students. There was no vice president for student life and no representative for students on the cabinet.

Today, in Knowles’ words, students constitute a major part of the university’s “core business,” and the first-year experience of students (as well as faculty and staff) is a key component of the Rensselaer Plan.

“The new emphasis on the first-year experience is not just about restructuring student orientation, and it doesn’t mean we are ignoring the other years a student spends here. We’re creating a continuum of opportunities to make substantial, broad changes in the way the university relates to the students,” Knowles says.

Raised in West Harlem in New York City, Knowles, 55, attended Bronx Community College, then Lincoln University in Oxford, Pa., the oldest black college in the United States. Among its alumni are former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, poet Langston Hughes, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.

At Lincoln, Knowles began his association with musician Gil Scott-Heron. In his seven years with Heron, Knowles cut four albums, including the politically charged rap precursor Small Talk at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Simultaneously, Knowles worked as an administrator at Bronx Community College and earned a master’s degree in adult and higher education from Columbia University.

“I’ve always worn a number of hats,” Knowles says. “I am a university administrator and for more than 30 years I have been a professional musician. The two paths in my life work together very nicely.”

Indeed, Knowles leads another professional life at Rensselaer—one equally popular with students. As an adjunct associate professor in the arts department, he teaches Introduction to Afro-Cuban Percussion. The class fills up every semester, and Knowles has to turn some students away.

“The classes run from 7 o’clock to 8:50 in the evening. From a therapeutic point of view, at the end of a long day, there’s nothing better than playing the drums and working with students,” said Knowles, who has four children and four grandchildren, and whose wife, Christine, is a psychiatric nurse and case manager for a health-care consulting firm.

“When we say ‘Why not change the world?’ we mean make it a better place,” says Knowles.

“Culturally, at Rensselaer, we’ve reached a place where it’s important for us to have a significant involvement and influence with students. You don’t produce leaders without nurturing them, and we won’t change the world without leaders.”