For Release: IMMEDIATE
January 12, 2004

Statement of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson Regarding Today’s NCAA Division III Reform Vote in Nashville, Tennessee

Today we saw perhaps the most important reaffirmation of the Rensselaer men’s hockey team in its 100-year history.

The NCAA Division III membership has voted to accept an amendment to its reform package that will allow Rensselaer, and seven other affected institutions, to continue to offer grants-in-aid to Division I athletes, in our case, our hockey players. This is an affirmation of a main tenet of the NCAA philosophy: to protect and support the autonomy of each member institution.

Our men’s hockey team can now continue to recruit the high-level student-athletes that Rensselaer attracts. The vote also allows us to launch our plan to move our women’s ice hockey team to Division I status. Our women’s program has shown that it can compete at the highest level in Division III, and it is time to move up. This move is also in the interest of gender equity in our athletics offerings.

The plan to elevate women’s ice hockey has been under consideration for quite some time. To put it into action, we are drafting a timeline for the process, which includes application to the ECAC Division I women’s ice hockey league. At this time, the league includes the schools our men’s hockey team faces in league play: Brown, Clarkson, Colgate, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, St. Lawrence, Union, Vermont, and Yale.

Proposal 65 and the Division III reform package, together with all of the actions we are taking under The Rensselaer Plan , have compelled us to re-examine the role – and positioning – of athletics at Rensselaer. Our men’s hockey players are proof that our students can compete at the highest level of inter-collegiate athletics, while succeeding in the classroom. We believe our women’s team will do the same.

There are numerous people to thank for the positive outcome of the NCAA vote: our colleagues at Clarkson, Colorado College, Hartwick, Johns Hopkins, SUNY at Oneonta, Rutgers University-Newark, and St. Lawrence, the institutions we worked with closely on amendment 65-1. We are especially grateful for the strong support of thousands of Rensselaer alumni, students, faculty, staff, hockey players past and present, and fans from the Capital Region and around the world. We could not have prevailed without them.

As the saying goes, “It’s a great day for hockey.” It also is a great day for Rensselaer athletics.
 
 
Contact:
Theresa Bourgeois
(518) 276-2840
bourgt@rpi.edu