For those of you who know me, you'll know that I can sometimes be very 
critical of various aspects of my alma mater, RPI, from some of its athletic 
programs to the way the Institute treats its students, staff, alumni and its 
neighboring community. For that reason, I want to pass along some 
information that I recently read. RPI has established a new program called 
the Gulf Coast Visiting Scholars program. Under this new program, a 
relationship has been built with Tulane University and Xavier University of 
Louisiana that allows up to 100 students from these two universities to 
enroll at RPI for the fall semester and have the cost of tuition, room and 
board and fees waived. In addition, any students local to the Capital 
District area who were enrolled at Tulane or Xavier may enroll at RPI with 
tuition waived. This is in addition to the $35,000 donated by RPI to various 
rescue and relief organizations operating in the Gulf Coast area and does 
not count the money being donated and raised by various student 
organizations.

I'm not promising to be any less critical of the Institute in the future, 
but I thought it worthwhile to pass along this information when the 'Tute 
was doing something praiseworthy.

This note is being sent to both the RPI Sports list as well as Hockey-L. For 
the benefit of the Hockey-L list administrator who will no doubt be ready to 
chastise me for posting something with no discernible hockey content, let me 
say that I got this information from the RPI student newspaper, the 
Polytechnic, while I was on campus this week to drop off my check and 
application for my RPI hockey seasons tickets. This will be my 36th 
consecutive year as an RPI hockey season ticket holder.