History
The Institute as it is known today began as a result of an 1891 merger between the Rochester Athenaeum, a literary society founded in 1829 by Colonel Nathaniel Rochester and associates, and the Mechanics Institute, a Rochester institute of practical technical training for local residents founded in 1885 by a consortium of local businessmen including Captain Henry Lomb. The name of the merged institution at the time was called Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute (RAMI). In 1944, the university changed its name to Rochester Institute of Technology.
The Institute originally resided within the city of Rochester, New York, proper, on a block bounded by the Erie Canal, South Plymouth Avenue, Spring Street, and South Washington Street (approximately 43°09′09″N 77°36′55″W / 43.152632°N 77.615157°W / 43.152632; -77.615157). Its art department was originally located in the Bevier Memorial Building. By the middle of the twentieth century, RIT began to outgrow its facilities, and surrounding land was scarce and expensive; additionally, in 1959, the New York Department of Public Works announced a new freeway, the Inner Loop, was to be built through the city along a path that bisected the Institute's campus and required demolition of key Institute buildings. In 1961, an unanticipated donation of $3.27 million ($25,431,715 today) from local Grace Watson, for whom RIT's dining hall was later named, allowed the Institute to purchase land for a new 1,300-acre (5.3 km2) campus several miles south along the east bank of the Genesee River in suburban Henrietta. Upon completion in 1968, the Institute moved to the new suburban campus, where it resides today.
In 1966, RIT was selected by the Federal government to be the site of the newly founded National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). NTID admitted its first students in 1968, concurrent with RIT's transition to the Henrietta campus.
In 1979, RIT acquired Eisenhower College, a liberal arts college located in Seneca Falls, New York. Eisenhower was not economically viable and graduated its last class in 1983.
In 1990, RIT started its first Ph.D. program, in Imaging Science, which is also the first Ph.D. program of its kind in the U.S. RIT subsequently established Ph.D programs in five other fields, comprising Astrophysical Sciences and Technology, Computing and Information Sciences, Color Science, Microsystems Engineering, and Sustainability. In 1996, RIT also became the first college in the U.S to offer a Software Engineering degree at the undergraduate level.
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“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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