Rice Magazine Issue 15 by Rice University

| At Your Servery

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| Titanic Belfast

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| The Apostle of Stoke

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| Raid the Archive

The Magazine of Rice University • No. 15 | 2013

F O R E W O R D

Rice Magazine No. 15

SOME THOUGHTS ON SHADOW AND LIGHT

Remember No. 100? In the fall issue’s blockbuster feature titled “100 Things We Love About Rice,” we asked you to complete the list by sending your own favorites. And send them you did, via email, handwritten letters and, notably, sheaves of typed pages with photocopies. You also sent a few things emphatically not loved about Rice. Fair enough. We appreciate the time you took to respond to this once-in-a-century list and being a part of our celebration. On Oct. 12, we gathered a new generation who “for this fair day worked and prayed and waited” to witness President David W. Leebron mark Rice’s 100th birthday with a speech that recalled President Edgar Odell Lovett’s inaugural address on the same day, a century before. We have included President Leebron’s speech in its entirety in this issue, a souvenir of a moment in time that perfectly linked our founding aspirations, a century of hard-won achievements and a bold vision for the future. Our pictorial wrap-up begins on Page 22. Later that weekend, this time under starry skies, crowds gathered again in the quad. We watched Rice’s history play out decade-by-decade in an imaginative, jaw-dropping light and sound performance. The show, intriguingly titled the Spectacle, opened with a moment of pure magic as the shadow of an owl in flight swept across the buildings. Curious? Go online (ricemagazine.info/134), then read the behind-the-scenes account of how it all happened by senior media relations specialist (and former rock band lighting designer) Mike Williams. Speaking of centennials, as the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking approached last spring, we received a letter from alumnus Eric Kuhne ’73. Kuhne, whose firm CivicArts is based in London, had helped design a new museum about the Titanic, one that aimed to reclaim Belfast’s shipbuilding heritage and revitalize the city center. At the museum’s entrance, the word Titanic is laser-cut into a 13-foot-high steel sign. The sun also writes the name in shadow on the plaza. We asked Houston native and freelance writer Steven Thomson, who happened to be in London working on an urban studies degree, to write the story. It was a process that led Kuhne to take a few trips down memory lane with his alma mater, even reconnecting with some of his former professors. When Seattle-based freelance writer Corinne Whiting pitched a story last spring about an alumnus who completed a news-making climb in the Sierra Nevada, we jumped, commissioning a brief profile of Ben Horne ’02. We were delighted to discover that another alumnus, Shay Har-Noy ’04, was also in the group that achieved the first winter ascent of Peter Croft’s Evolution Traverse. Just after Whiting turned in a draft last July, she received frightening news. Horne and another friend, Gil Weiss, were missing while climbing in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca range. A formal search confirmed the worst fears of their families and friends — an avalanche had claimed the lives of these two experienced climbers. Whiting, who is from the same town as the Horne family, continued with the story, which expanded into a feature about remembering a young man whose inspirational light lives on through the stories and memories of loved ones. We hope these stories touch you as they have touched us, and we wish you a happy and healthy 2013.

Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president Editor Lynn Gosnell Creative Services Jeff Cox, senior director Tracey Rhoades, editorial director Jenny W. Rozelle ’00, assistant editor Erick Delgado, associate director of design Dean Mackey, senior graphic designer Jackie Limbaugh, graphic designer Tommy LaVergne, university photographer Jeff Fitlow, asst. university photographer Contributing Staff Jade Boyd, news and media relations Jeff Falk, news and media relations Amy Hodges, news and media relations Mike Williams, news and media relations Freelance Contributors Andrew Clark David Gusakov Kelly Klaasmeyer Steven Thomson Corinne Whiting The Rice University Board of Trustees James W. Crownover, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Keith T. Anderson; Laura Arnold; Subha Viswanathan Barry; Suzanne Deal Booth; Robert T. Brockman; Albert Chao; T. Jay Collins; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Lawrence Guffey; James T. Hackett; John Jaggers; Larry Kellner; R. Ralph Parks; Lee H. Rosenthal; Charles Szalkowski; Robert M. Taylor Jr.; Robert B. Tudor III; James S. Turley; Lewis “Rusty” Williams; Randa Duncan Williams. Administrative Officers David W. Leebron, president; George McLendon, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource Development. Rice Magazine is published by the Office of Public Affairs of Rice University and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. Editorial Offices Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 Fax: 713-348-6757 Email: ricemagazine@rice.edu

Lynn Gosnell lynn.gosnell@rice.edu

Features

Through the Sallyport 4 Read all about running a servery, the 100th commencement speaker, Guam’s spider problem, campus drama and other research news.

Sports 41 Women’s soccer scores a record season.

22 16 Unsinkable City

Alumnus Eric Kuhne ’73 is at the helm of Belfast’s new Titanic museum that showcases the city’s shipbuilding heritage and anchors an ambitious urban redevelopment plan.

By Steven Thomson

42 The Rice Media Center hosted “Raid the Archive: The de Menil Years at Rice,” commemorating the centennial as well as the Menil Collection’s 25th anniversary. 43 And the Grammy for best opera recording goes to …

22 Highlights From the

Centennial Celebration

Our Centennial Celebration last October was filled with “the joy of high adventure.” Please enjoy these pictorial highlights and links to the remarkable events and programs that launched Rice into a second century. Read the full text of President David W. Leebron’s centennial speech.

36 The Apostle of Stoke

Alumnus Ben Horne ’02 is remembered with deep affection by Rice friends and family. Among Horne’s favorite quotes is one by climber Anatoli Boukreev: “Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve; they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”

Arts

Bookshelf 44 Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Walter Cronkite shares the shelf with an examination of religion and race co-written by sociologist Michael Emerson, Justin Cronin’s “The Twelve” and a roundup of books by Rice alumni and faculty.

Parting Words 36

By Corinne Whiting

Cover: (Top) President Edgar Odell Lovett gives the inaugural address to open the Rice Institute, Oct. 12, 1912. Behind Lovett is the newly dedicated administration building that would one day bear his name. (Bottom) David W. Leebron, Rice’s seventh president, marks the 100th anniversary of Rice University, Oct. 12, 2012, in front of Lovett Hall. Photo by Jeff Fitlow. President Leebron’s address begins on Page 25.

46 Can you complete this owlsome crossword puzzle? 48 Alumnus Glenn Fuller ’50 traveled from Minneapolis to Houston for Rice’s centennial. And then …

Letters

More Things We Love (and in some cases, do not love at all)

Editor’s note: We received a smattering of feedback following our last issue of Rice Magazine. Here are some of your comments.

10 More Things I Loved About Rice

First, I loved your centennial issue. However, many of the items on your list

didn’t exist during my time at Rice, from 1950 until 1955. I owe a great deal to Rice, for a fine professional education that allowed me to prosper for almost 40 years as a practicing mechanical engineer, mostly designing large magnets, both resistive and superconducting, at physics research laboratories and one private corporation. Other faves of our era: ■ Bum’s Rush — This was a hallowed blast sponsored by the Rally Club. ■ Freshman/sophomore (hell) week — This was a favored institution of sophomores, though not perhaps of freshmen who, when caught, were hauled off in the dark and deposited at various lonely and often remote sites, where they were obliged to find their way back by whatever means they could. ■ Paul Cochran’s ’54 iconic yellow 1954 Rice Campanile — It’s a classic! Cochran’s wit is sprinkled throughout as appropriate — or not.

I was quite impressed with your ‘ginormous listicle.’ (Are you sure it is not a

lead-in for listerine popsicle?) Super article, seriously. Keep up the good work. Bob Winship ’52

(Bob Winship recently published an essay on Mark Twain’s autobiography in The Texas Review, a biannual literary journal.)

I enjoyed the last issue of Rice Magazine. It covered many events, etc., which

were not around when I attended Rice. It omitted some, such as the following: ■ In 1943, Rice joined a larger number of universities to admit and house Naval cadets. The program was known as V-5 (for aviation cadets) and V-12 (for line officers). This benefited the university, and it introduced many students from out of Texas to Rice. ■ Naval students were required to attend year-round. Rice went with a trimester school year to meet this requirement, which lasted for nine trimesters, resulting in Rice having two graduations in 1946. Ed Sharp ’49

C.R.L.S. officers, 1957

■ Fondren Library — This is where we often studied and sometimes

fired spitballs at other students. ■ Women’s literary societies — These were Rice’s equivalent of

sororities. ■ Slime parade ■ Rice Senior Follies ■ Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society melodrama ■ Kay’s Lounge on Bissonnet ■ I have interpreted No. 64 regarding college associates differently.

We bonded closely at Rice, both through classroom association and as my roommates, on the fifth floor of East Hall. I roomed with Kneel Ball ’54, Crayton Walker ’54, John Lyle ’54 and John McClintock ’55 — a dear friend from earlier days. We styled ourselves as ‘apes’ and tended to behave accordingly, especially by ape-walking in the Roost and elsewhere. In fact, some 58 years later, we still convene every two years, most recently at John Lyle’s in Prescott, Ariz. John Stewart Alcorn ’54

Navy initiation, 1943

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Letters Policy Are you shocked and appalled? Do you beg to differ? Is there more to the story? Good. We celebrate the university as a marketplace of ideas. We want to hear from you. Please send us your note, letter or email, which we will edit for clarity and space considerations. If your letter or note elicits further responses from our readership, we may print those, too. After that, dear readers, you’ll have to take it outside. Our contact information is listed by the editor’s foreword.

■ KTRU motto: “At 50 watts, less powerful than your average toaster.” ■ Steam tunnels — an acquired taste. ■ Owls from the chemistry building tower dive-bombing girls on their

way back to Jones. ■ The Fondren stacks. ■ Beer team practice in my dorm room. ■ Before RUPD officers, there were the Pinkies.

In the spirit of things fair and balanced, I would like to see a list of some

things unloved about Rice. (Just like the Higgs particle, such a list might exist.) At the very top of any list of things I didn’t love about Rice would be the oppressive heat and humidity in the new, but unair-conditioned, Will Rice dorm rooms in the late 1950s. Charles Walpole ’60 Will Rice College

Richard Pulley ’68 Will Rice College

Here are some of my favorite features of the Rice experience that I did not see in the current issue: ■ Navy ROTC students in their summer whites. ■ Rice University and college decals that fit on the inside of car windows, not the outside. ■ The panoramic views from Sid Rich balconies sweeping across the Galleria to the downtown skyline and other points east. ■ Intimate lunches with favorite faculty members at Cohen House.

Brian Watson ’84 Baker College

How could you possibly omit my favorite thing about Rice? The Rice com-

munity. When I was there, all the students and all the faculty were interesting people in one way or another, with minds that were going somewhere, much more so than in the world at large. I presume this is still true.

I think you should publish a booklet of this article and supply it to various high schools for recruitment. I plan to take mine to my alma mater. I recall that when I was a student, there was an intramural sports participation rate of nearly 90 percent. It would make a great addition to No. 23.

Mark H. Friedman ’72 Will Rice College

I’m not sure where this should be ranked in the list, but I believe that

student access to professors should be one of the ‘100 Things We Love About Rice.’ My personal example goes back to 1966, when I was an incoming freshman. I wanted to be a physicist, and I was so sure of myself that I was certain I would win a Nobel Prize by the time I was 25. Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, halfway though the semester, I was flunking Physics 101. After the second quiz, I went to the guy teaching the course, Professor Rorschach. He worked closely with me, giving me one of

Hugh Brown ’69 Will Rice College

What a great article! However, there was just one thing I was looking for

and did not find: ‘Hello, Hamlet!’ by George Greanias ’70, Wiess Tabletop Theater’s first production in 1970. A real Rice tradition, performed every four years. The only thing I hate about ‘Hello, Hamlet!’ is that I graduated eight years before George matriculated and missed the seminal experiences. However, I was offered the major role of Richard III when ‘Hamlet’ was produced as a fundraiser for the author’s campaign for Houston City Council. The ‘big time,’ as it were. And, as we all agreed, ‘There is nothing like a Dane!’ Barry Moore ’62 Wiess College

Physics department professors, 1953

Professor Rorschach, 1968

his other physics texts from which I was to work problems. In essence, he became my tutor. Ultimately, I passed the course. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that my freshman physics course was taught by a full professor who was also chairman of the physics department! He not only taught the class of some 100 students, he took time to help those students understand and learn the material. I am absolutely certain that as a lowly freshman I would not have gotten that kind of access to such a ranked professor at any other school. Whenever I talk about Rice, Professor Rorschach’s name comes up, among others. And, by the way, I got my B.A. in physics in 1970 and was on the President’s Honor Roll. Julian A Levy Jr. ’70 Hanszen College

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Bravo!

A selection of honors, awards and notable achievements of students, faculty and staff

The Rice School of Architecture has risen to No. 3 in a national ranking for undergraduate education in the Design Futures Council’s “America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools, 2013,” published by DesignIntelligence. Rice ranked No. 5 in the 2012 edition. Seven members of the Department of Mathematics have been selected for the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The 30,000-member society announced 1,119 fellows from more than 600 institutions Nov. 1. Rice’s new AMS fellows are professors Michael Wolf, David Damanik and John Hempel; associate professor Shelly Harvey; adjunct research professor Michael Field; professor emeritus and research professor John Polking; and the Edgar Odell Lovett Professor of Mathematics William Veech. Pedro Alvarez, the George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded the prestigious Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Prize for excellence in water science research by the National Water Research Institute. “The Clarke Prize is one of the greatest honors I’ve received in my life,” Alvarez said. “It’s an inspiration for generosity, integrity and world affirmation — the idea that the world can be a better place, and we can do something about it by making water safer and more affordable.” Yildiz Bayazitoglu, the Harry S. Cameron Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been doubly recognized for her distinctive contributions to engineering. Bayazitoglu has received the Society of Women Engineers 2012 Achievement Award, its highest honor. The award is presented annually to a woman who has made an “outstanding contribution over a significant period of time in a field of engineering.” She also was elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

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Rice’s 110,000-square-foot Brockman Hall for Physics recently earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. Brockman is home to dozens of experimental, theoretical and applied physicists from the departments of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The building has energy-saving and environmental features that include an energy-recovery system — the largest in a single air unit in Texas — that saves as much as 30 percent of the energy needed to cool the building in the summer. Another green innovation is the building’s dehumidification system, which turns Houston’s legendary humidity into an asset by capturing and returning 100,000 gallons of pure, clean water each year to Rice’s Central Plant.

Brockman Hall for Physics

Rice University President David W. Leebron has been appointed to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I board of directors as a representative of Conference USA. His term is effective through Aug. 31, 2016. Lanny Martin, associate professor of political science, won the 2012 Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for his book, “Parliaments and Coalitions: The Role of Legislative Institutions in Multiparty Governance,” coauthored with Georg Vanberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The American Political Science Association awards the prize annually for the best book on legislative studies.

Rice’s newest residential colleges — Duncan and McMurtry — are among 10 recipients across the country of the American Institute of Architects’ 2012 Housing Awards for Architecture. The awards recognize the best in housing design and “emphasize the importance of good housing as a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit and a valuable national resource.” The awards jury comments noted, “The communal spaces were really beautiful, and for a student residence, they act as magnets and seem to be exactly what residential living should be for college.” McMurtry College Commons

THROUGH THE

Sallyport

Cheering for the Arts

New Kinder Institute survey reveals widespread support for the arts in Harris County We love our football in Texas. And basketball, too. And baseball and soccer and, well, you get the picture. So the results of a new survey on the arts in Houston, conducted by Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, may be surprising. The first Houston Arts Survey revealed that, if given the choice of preserving either the arts or sports, 56 percent of Houstonians would choose the arts, compared with 35 percent who would preserve sports. “The survey participants express broad-based support for investments that will enhance the visibility and quality of the arts in this region, even if it means an increase in taxes,” said Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology and co-director of the Kinder Institute. “The respondents are clear in their belief that the arts are important to Houston, that their

Percent of Respondents

availability and excellence are critical to the area’s quality of life and that arts instruction should be a part of every child’s education.” The study found that Houstonians are more likely than Americans in general to attend live arts performances and that the most important attendance predictors are education, household income and exposure to the arts in childhood. Ethnic background makes no difference at all in attendance rates: African-Americans, Latinos and Asians are just as likely as Anglos to report that they attended a live performance in the arts during the preceding 12 months. “The usual suspects — mainly costs, traffic, safety and no time — were among the reasons respondents do not attend arts performances,” Klineberg said. Americans today are far more likely to access the arts at home through the media than at live performances, but the respondents indicate that “If Houston had to choose between having either excellent music and theater or great sports teams and stadiums, which would you most want to preserve? In other words, viewing or listening to the arts at home is more which would you miss most — music and theater (56%) or sports teams and stadiums likely to increase than to decrease their interest (35%) — if one or the other were to disappear from Houston?” in attending live arts performances. “If Houston is to succeed in the 21st centuMusic and theater Sports teams and stadiums ry, it will need to nurture a far more educated work force, improve its overall quality of life and 100% capitalize on its burgeoning ethnic and cultural diversity,” Klineberg said. “The survey findings 80% bode well for the future of our region.” The 60% study was funded by Houston Endowment Inc. 63% 60% 53% 53% and aided by an advisory panel of leading na51% 50% 40% 42% 41% tional and local arts experts. 36%36%

28%

20%

27% —Lynn Gosnell

0% Male

Female

Never involved with the arts as a child

Involved for two years or less

Involved for more than two years

Read more: ››› kinder.rice.edu/shea

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Running the Resort

An interview with Julie Bogar

How Rice feeds its masses has drastically changed over the years. The Central Kitchen, which used to produce all meals for the colleges and then transport them to each commons, is now home to the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where recipes of a different kind are cooked up. Alumni can surely attest to how things were, as can Julie Bogar, who began working at Rice in 1990 as a residential dining manager, supervising the operations, menus and ordering for the first eight residential colleges. As Housing and Dining gradually opened the four larger serveries (cafeteria-style eateries with professional chefs that are attached to two to three colleges each) beginning in 2002, the management and culinary staff increased. In 2010, Rice restructured its Housing and Dining staff to include four senior operations managers. Their time is divided between residential housing and dining responsibilities. Bogar oversees the South Servery and Sid, Wiess and Hanszen colleges. Describe your average day. I like to view my area as “the resort,” and I’m the manager. I begin my day by walking

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through the servery, checking the breakfast service and talking with students and staff. Another key area that I monitor is the work order system for repairs or services requested by residents in the South Colleges. I make sure they are completed and often follow up with the resident via email. I walk different areas of my three colleges doing visual safety and repair inspections each day. It’s also a good time to interact with the students who might have a particular concern. My average day, free of fire alarms, a broken sprinkler pipe, a college covered in chocolate syrup or a bird flying through the servery, also includes lots of ongoing communication via informal meetings or emails

on issues pertaining to special events, college ambiance projects [projects that improve college public spaces], training, inspections or renovation projects. What are things like behind the scenes in the South Servery? Very organized. Chef Roger [Elkhouri] and Chef Kyle [Hardwick] run a very efficient, structured kitchen, which eliminates guesswork and increases efficiency. This is very evident in our staff’s satisfaction level. I hope they would all say that they enjoy their work and are constantly learning new things. Our newest venture, the Whoo Deli, a retail deli

with custom-designed sandwiches managed by Chef Ahmed [Mihabi], is doing very well and is also part of our operation.

And the Centennial Commencement Speaker Is …

How often do you get to interact with the students? All of the time. Sometimes I eavesdrop a little in the servery when I hear students talking about what they wish they could get, whether it’s a bowl of kiwi or a request for a favorite pie. We are all about customer service. That’s the key to enjoying my job at the resort. I’m also there to make copies for a term paper that’s due in five minutes or to provide props for a costume or help look for a missing passport in the trash. I love interacting with the students, as they are so appreciative of even the smallest things. What’s the weirdest experience you’ve had in the course of your job? We discovered that a snake and a scorpion were being kept in one of the college rooms, so we notified the students that that was against the housing policies and could result in a fine. The roommates claimed that the creatures must have found their way in on their own or were brought by someone else.

How does your job change during the students’ summer break? It gets even busier, and the days fly by. Most of my time is spent contracting and managing projects in my colleges, such as painting, new furniture, carpeting, remodeling, plumbing improvements, etc. I also work with the various summer groups staying in the South Colleges and assist with summer dining.

World-renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will give the commencement address at Rice University’s 100th graduation ceremony May 11, 2013. Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Born and raised in New York City, Tyson was 9 years old the night he saw the Milky Way with “such clarity and majesty” at Hayden Planetarium’s sky theater in Manhattan that he knew he had been called to be an astrophysicist. “The study of the universe would be my career, and no force on Earth would stop me,” Tyson wrote in his memoir, “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist.” “I am honored to deliver Rice University’s commencement address during a year that commemorates President Neil deGrasse Tyson Kennedy’s famous ‘We Choose to Go to the Moon’ speech given at Rice Stadium a half century ago,” Tyson said. “That speech not only established space exploration as a national goal, but it also forged space exploration as a national identity and secured Rice University and Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center (later, Johnson Space Center) as the birthplace of that era. My wife, Alice Young ’79, happens to be a graduate of Rice, in physics, and so this trip will also serve as a homecoming for her.” Tyson wrote in his memoir that his life’s commitment is to bring people closer to the universe, and he has done that by writing books, giving lectures and appearing on television and radio to educate the public about astrophysics. —Rice News

—Jenny Rozelle ’00

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Rice Launches Energy and Environment Initiative The mission is to engage researchers and scholars from every corner of campus to address the complex challenges of energy in the 21st century.

Rice’s new Energy and Environment Initiative (E2I) will draw experts from every corner of the university to work with Houston’s energy industry to overcome barriers to the sustainable development and use of current and alternative forms of energy. Rice Provost George McLendon said E2I is unique among university activities because it recognizes that addressing challenges in energy requires more than just technological solutions. E2I researchers will study energy policy and markets, finance,

“One of the most critical global issues of our time is the challenge of meeting the world population’s escalating need for energy and simultaneously safeguarding the environment.”

—David W. Leebron

and management, as well as the cultural and societal values that underpin and sometimes undermine public discussion about energy and the environment. E2I will be led by a committee chaired by Pedro Alvarez, Rice’s George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The committee members are Ken Medlock, the James A. Baker III and Susan G.

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Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy and adjunct professor in economics; Alan Levander, Rice’s Carey Croneis Professor of Earth Science and director of Rice’s data analysis and visualization cyberinfrastructure (DAVinCI) project; Dominic Boyer, associate professor of anthropology; and William Arnold, professor in the practice of energy management at the Jones School. A national search for a permanent faculty director will begin in 2013. McLendon said Rice will invest about $1 million this fiscal year to start E2I seed-funding programs and establish an infrastructure to link existing activities across departments and schools. Future investments will be linked to research growth. “This is about building a bridge from today’s fossil fuel economy to an all-of-the-above energy future in which all sources of energy are used in concert,” he said. “Building this bridge is as much a political, economic and social challenge as a technical one.” “One of the most critical global issues of our time is the challenge of meeting the world population’s escalating need for energy and simultaneously safeguarding the environment,” said Rice President David Leebron. “Rice’s location in Houston, the global energy capital, uniquely positions us to serve both our city and our world by offering rich insights and practical but innovative solutions to this daunting challenge. Not only will we explore issues related to the safe harvesting and use of traditional hydrocarbons, but also advance the next generation of energy sources, from biofuels to solar.”

HELP FOR

Brain Injuries A nanoparticle developed at Rice University and tested in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) may bring great benefits to the emergency treatment of brain-injury victims, even those with mild injuries. Combined polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon clusters (PEG-HCC), already being tested to enhance cancer treatment, are also adept antioxidants. In animal studies, injections of PEGHCC during initial treatment after an injury helped restore balance to the brain’s vascular system. A PEG-HCC infusion that quickly stabilizes blood flow in the brain would be a significant advance for emergency-care workers and battlefield medics, said Rice chemist and co-author James Tour. “This might be a first line of defense against reactive oxygen species (ROS) that are always overstimulated during a medical trauma, whether that be to an accident victim or an injured soldier,” said Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. “They’re certainly exacerbated when there’s trauma with massive blood loss.” In a traumatic brain injury, cells release an excessive amount of an ROS known as superoxide into the blood. Superoxides are toxic free radicals, molecules with one unpaired electron, that the immune system normally uses to kill invading microorganisms. “There are many facets of brain injury that ultimately determine how much damage there will be,” said Thomas Kent, the paper’s co-author, a BCM professor of neurology and chief of neurology at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. “One is the initial injury, and that’s pretty much done in minutes. But a number of things that happen later often make things worse, and that’s when we can intervene.” In tests, the researchers found PEG-HCC nanoparticles immediately and completely quenched superoxide activity and allowed the autoregulatory system to quickly regain its balance. “This is an occasion where a nano-sized package is doing something that no small drug or protein could do, underscoring the efficacy of active nano-based drugs,” said Tour. “This is the most remarkably effective thing I’ve ever seen,” Kent said. The research was funded by the Department of Defense’s Mission Connect Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Translational Research Consortium, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Predatory Bacteria Scientists ID a simple formula that allows bacteria to engulf food in waves. Move forward. High-five your neighbor. Turn around. Repeat. That’s the winning formula of one of the world’s smallest predators, the soil bacteria Myxococcus xanthus. A new study by scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School shows how M. xanthus uses the formula to spread, engulf and devour other bacteria. Researchers found that simple motions of individual bacteria are amplified within colonies of M. xanthus to form millions-strong waves moving outward in unison. The findings answer long-standing questions about how the waves form and the competitive edge they provide M. xanthus. “When the cells at the edge of the colony are moving outward, they are unlikely to encounter another M. xanthus cell, so they keep moving forward,” said lead author Oleg Igoshin, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice. “When they are traveling the other way, back toward the rest of the colony, they are likely to encounter other cells of their kind, and when they pass beside one of these and touch, they get the signal to turn around.” M. xanthus is an oft-studied model organism in biology, Igoshin said. As a computational biologist, Igoshin specializes in creating mathematical models that accurately describe the behavior of living systems. Such models are useful for understanding the cellular and even genetic basis of emergent phenomena. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The computer modeling was performed on three NSF-funded Rice supercomputers — STIC, SUG@R and DAVinCI — that are jointly managed and operated by Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and Rice’s Information Technology office. —Jade Boyd

—Mike Williams

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Q&A:

Architectronica Architectronica, the Rice School of Architecture’s epic public party, drew more than 1,000 students to Anderson Hall the evening of Oct. 13. Designated the official after-party of the centennial’s Spectacle, the event showcased a complex and visually stunning mix of digital media, all designed by RSA student Joshuah Howard ’13. The elaborate production featured a “custom projection-mapping installation that synchronizes to the music to trigger specific psycho-emotional effects,” Howard said. DJ Vivas Kumar ’14 presided over four hours of music, an eclectic mix of electronica and original tunes. The crowd favorite, Howard said, was a dub step remix of the “Bill Nye the Science Guy” theme. We asked Howard to answer a few questions about the production. How did you end up designing the light show for the party? I have a passion for allowing the digital world to leak out into our own, so when I attended Media Party (the precursor to Architectronica) for the first time in 2009, I began imagining ways to transform the room into a stagelike installation. Over the next two years, I dug deep into the world of audio/ visual production on my own time — not just for Architectronica. Eventually I found a combination of programs that was capable of producing what I had in mind.

When did you start working on the show? The show is in a constant state of development — even during the show I’m changing things around. I wish I had the time to prerecord the audio and video entirely before the event, but that level of production is not the kind of thing I could balance with classes. What is involved in designing a show of this magnitude? Lots. First of all there are other RSA officers that take care of RUPD, security, food and drinks. They take care of the logistics and leave the show and advertising to me. The show itself involves heavy amounts of tech and creativity. How many DJs were there and how did you coordinate with them? There was just one live DJ — Vivas Kumar — though there are plans to incorporate more Rice DJs in the future. During the performances, Vivas controls the tempo for the whole show, so he’s free to speed up, slow down or even drop the beat entirely. His computer sends a tempo control signal via a LAN cable to mine, which then adjusts all my video triggers, layers sequencing, effects and other parameters according to the incoming tempo. This setup allows for us both to jam out

while keeping the whole show coordinated to the millisecond. How would you describe the music this year? Our mission with Architectronica is to provide what the other public parties don’t, which is pretty easy since those parties just puke out top 40s every weekend. We avoid pop music like the plague unless it’s totally reinvented in a remix. What was the general reaction from students? The crowd loved the show. Normally people come to public parties for about 40 minutes and then leave to cool off or get a drink. It was actually impossible to get any more people into the room for most of the night. Do you see yourself working on light and media as a career? I want to continue my efforts in augmenting the real world with digital media, but there are countless ways to do this. I worked with URBANSCREEN (see Page 32) this summer during the development of the Spectacle and plan to go back for another internship this summer. I’m hoping to integrate this knowledge of light and media into my architectural designs, rather than work purely with the elements. —Lynn Gosnell

New Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program Launched Rice University has established a new doctoral program that encompasses several of the 21st century’s emergent research fields in life sciences. The Ph.D. degree in systems, synthetic and physical biology (SSPB) was approved last fall by Rice’s Faculty Senate and is set to enroll its first students in fall 2013. The SSPB program is a joint venture between the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Wiess School of Natural Sciences. “Systems, synthetic and physical biology is a new field that combines experimental and theoretical approaches to solve both fundamental and applied problems in the biosciences, biotechnology and medicine,” said Michael Deem, Rice’s John W. Cox Professor of Biochemical and Genetic Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy. Deem will direct the new Ph.D. program. Read more: ›› › sspb.rice.edu/sspb 10

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OMG! She’s Multitalented.

Rebecca Carrington ’97 doesn’t fit the mold of a typical classically trained and accomplished cellist. For starters, she combines playing the cello with stand-up musical comedy. During those performances, she refers to her instrument, an 18th-century cello, by the name of Joe. For more than a decade, Carrington, who is English, has traversed the globe to perform her unique musical-comedy act. She has performed at the venerable Comedy Store in Los Angeles, at numerous festivals, and on TV and radio programs. Her performances have taken her on trans-Atlantic cruises and to India, but she plays most frequently in Germany and throughout Europe. Now based in Berlin, Carrington spends more than half the year on the road and has performed up to 170 shows in a year.

Carrington accepted and was hooked. Soon she was combining her talents — a thorough grounding in classical music, a love of cabaret and a knack for making others laugh — into a highly entertaining stage act. “If it wasn’t for going to America, I would have never had the confidence to go into comedy,” said Carrington, who won the university’s MasterCard Talent American Collegiate Search in 1996. During her performances, Carrington rattles jokes off with a manic energy, interspersed with cello playing and singing. She oscillates between voices, even languages, switching from English to French and German. Her topic

“Looking back, I’ve always loved making people laugh. But it’s much different than it used to be now that I do it for a living.”

—Rebecca Carrington

“Looking back, I’ve always loved making people laugh. But it’s much different than it used to be now that I do it for a living,” Carrington said. It was during her days as a master’s student at the Shepherd School of Music that Carrington discovered her talent for stand-up comedy. It was also at Rice that she started performing in campus cabaret, including an hour-long show she developed for a P.D.Q. Bach evening at the Shepherd School of Music. While on a trip to New York as a student, a friend dared her to try performing at a comedy club.

matter is diverse, ranging from the idiosyncrasies of the world’s different cultures to song parodies. “I’ve found that in certain areas of the U.S. of A., I only need about three English words per day to express myself,” she begins in a bit during a show’s performance. Carrington then proceeds to use a mocking, ditzy voice to make fun of a woman in California who prefaced every sentence with “Oh my God.” “Oh my God, that is such a beautiful piece of furniture!” Carrington says, referring to her cello.

It can get difficult trying to entertain people through two distinctly different mediums, Carrington acknowledged. “What happens is that you have to come up with ideas about how to arrange things for two different voices. Not only are you just playing your cello on stage. You need to prepare jokes to crack, as well.” She relishes the challenge. Since 2007, Carrington has been joined onstage by her husband, actor and singer Colin Brown. Her CDs and DVDs feature both her solo work and the duo’s collaboration as Carrington-Brown. When it comes to producing material, Carrington writes with her husband, whom she met while performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Brown adds a unique dynamic to Carrington’s performance, whether he is rapping along to her cello riffs or adding a monologue of his own. The duo has won a number of awards throughout Europe. Carrington and Brown will head to New York this year for an entertainment showcase. “We hope to make contacts and to be able to tour in the U.S. That is our goal.” —Andrew Clark Andrew Clark is a freelance writer and law student based in Boston, Mass. He can be reached at andrewclark87@gmail.com.

Watch: ››› rebeccacarrington.com/video.php

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First, Snakes. Now, Spiders. Ecologists have found as many as 40 times more spiders in Guam’s remote jungle than are found on nearby islands. In some places, dense spiderwebs fill gaps between trees in the jungle canopy.

It sounds like something from a horror movie — a Pacific island infested with venomous tree-lounging snakes and dense thickets of spiderwebs. An island where the sound of birds has fallen silent. Welcome to Guam, where brown tree snakes have done untold damage to the U.S. territory since being accidentally introduced to the island in the late 1940s. The snakes’ lack of natural predators combined with access to abundant food sources, in the form of native bird species and small mammals, has devastated native ecosystems.

colleagues are investigating whether the loss of birds led to an increase in the spider population on Guam. Huxley fellows are recent Ph.D. recipients who are appointed to teach at Rice for two to three years. “You can’t walk through the jungles on Guam without a stick in your hand to knock down the spiderwebs,” said Rogers, the lead author of the study, which appeared in the journal PLOS ONE last fall. The results are some of the first to examine the indirect impact of the brown tree snake on Guam’s ecosystem. By the 1980s,

Credit: Isaac Chellman

The ripple effect of this eco-disaster is the subject of a new study by biologists from Rice University, the University of Washington and the University of Guam. Because many birds consume spiders, compete with spiders for insect prey and use spiderwebs in their nests, Haldre Rogers, a Huxley Research Instructor in ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice, and her

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10 of 12 native bird species had been wiped out, and the last two live only in small areas protected by intense snake-trapping. Counting spiderwebs on Guam and on nearby islands in the Marianas Islands chain was the first step in the study. Rogers and study co-authors Janneke Hille Ris Lambers and Josh Tewksbury of the University of Washington and Ross Miller of the University

of Guam found that spiders were between two times and 40 times more plentiful on Guam than on neighboring islands. Rogers has extensive experience studying the ripple effects of the tree snake invasion on Guam. Her first job out of college was to lead the U.S. Geological Survey’s brown tree snake rapid response team, a small group of snake hunters charged with capturing brown tree snakes that manage to get off the island. “When I was [on Guam’s nearby islands] searching for snakes at night, I spent a lot of time thinking about the differences between the forests I was walking through and the forests back on Guam,” said Rogers, recalling her field research. “The spiderwebs were just one difference. The lack of songbirds also make Guam’s forests eerily quiet during the day,” she said. “There isn’t any other place in the world that has lost all of its insect-eating birds,” she said. “There’s no other place you can look to see what happens when birds are removed over an entire landscape.” In future work, she plans to conduct experiments on neighboring islands that still have forest birds and compare those results with observations on Guam to determine the exact links between the lost forest birds and the spider population increases. “Ultimately, we aim to untangle the impact of bird loss on the entire food web, all the way down to plants,” she said. “For example, has the loss of birds also led to an increase in the number of plant-eating insects? Or can this increase in spiders compensate for the loss of birds?” —Jade Boyd

Read the journal article: ›› › ricemagazine.info/131

Religious fraud! Comedy! Satire!

It’s “Tartuffe.”

Jake LaViola ’15 as Tartuffe has a moment with Hayley Jones ’14 as Elmire in the fall production of Molière’s comic masterpiece, “Tartuffe.” The Rice University Theatre Program presented the play at Hamman Hall to rave reviews. “Molière gives us a farce with a scathing wit as he roasts religion, hypocrisy and sexual deceit,” said Christina Keefe, director of Rice’s Theatre Program. In addition to LaViola and Jones, the show starred Qingyang Peng ’15 as Orgon, staff member Alice Rhoades as Madame Pernelle, Tasneem Islam ’14 as Mariane and John Hagele ’16 as Damis. Director: Samuel Sparks. Production manager: Matt Schlief. Costume designer: Macy Perrone.

Photo credit: Claire Elestwani ’15

Everything’s Coming Up Roses Rice has always been lauded for its beautiful landscaping. Now we have one more site to be proud of — the Puddin Clarke Centennial Garden between Sewall Hall and Lovett Hall. According to David Rodd, university architect in Facilities Engineering and Planning, committee members for Rice’s Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum first proposed the idea for the rose garden as a centennial project because Mary Ellen Lovett, wife of the university’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, nurtured roses on campus in Rice’s early days. When Robert Clarke ’63 heard about the rose garden, he generously volunteered to fund the project. “I thought it was a great idea to make the donation in memory of my wife,” said Clarke. “Although she wasn’t an alum, Puddin was very much a supporter of Rice and involved in a lot of things here. It seemed like a nice way to honor her.” Old Blush roses, a China hybrid, were selected because they were a favorite of the garden’s honoree. —Jenny Rozelle ’00

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NotedandQuoted “So when I was running around the world saying, ‘The world is flat! We’re all connected,’ Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the Cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college and, for most people, Skype was a typo.” —Thomas Friedman Nov. 12, 2012, as quoted in an article that appeared in the Rice Thresher, Nov. 16, 2012

“As we look to a future of true energy security by exploiting new unconventional fossil sources, augmented by alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, the only way forward is through a government science policy that includes basic research support and thoughtful regulation. These are necessary if we are to have the energy security we want and the environmental stewardship we need.” —Shirley Ann Jackson Oct. 11, 2012, Centennial Lecture Series

“I was the altar boy of journalism. I was a fact-checker. And that in a way is something I’ve done my entire life. What is true? How can you prove that it’s true? How does it work? My parents were both scientists. I’ve spent my life trying to find out new things and tell people about them.” —Esther Dyson Oct. 11, 2012, Centennial Lecture Series

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“Understanding your complete genome is very key to understanding inheritance. Everyone’s asked the questions: ‘Did I get this trait from my mother or father? Did I give this trait to my children?’ Now we have the tools to start to answer those questions because we can separate the DNA sequence into that from the parental chromosomes. One of the ways we do this … we can sequence a genome from a single sperm cell.” —J. Craig Venter Oct. 10, 2012, Centennial Lecture Series

“History happens, history leaves its traces, and I have to say, I prefer history without preservation.” —Rem Koolhaas Oct. 11, 2012, Centennial Lecture Series

“Rice has excelled in ways that even Lovett could not have guessed. I’m talking of course about Rice’s famous come-from-behind victory over heavily favored Colorado in the 1938 Cotton Bowl. It is at least famous in the halls of the Supreme Court, because until then unbeaten Colorado was led by future Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Despite a stellar offensive and defensive performance by White — he threw a touchdown pass, scored on an interception and kicked two extra points — the Owls prevailed by a final score of 28–14. Not even President Lovett could have foreseen that.” —Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. “A Conversation With the Chief Justice,” Oct. 17, 2012

On Oct. 11, 2012, Douglas Brinkley, professor of history and fellow in history at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House for the Nov. 8 cover story in Rolling Stone magazine. The Obama cover story was Brinkley’s third for Rolling Stone. He also has profiled Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Dylan for the magazine.

Pundit Watch Remember the primaries? The presidential debates? Doesn’t the election season seem like both half a life ago AND something that took up half our lives? No matter in which political tent one camped for the duration, the 2012 election season was both endless and endlessly frustrating. But at least, as ordinary citizens, we could confine our opinions and insights to our living rooms (and Facebook and Twitter feeds). For many of our distinguished Rice faculty, who were called upon day and

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night by the news media to provide topical insight, there was no rest for the weary. The news, after all, is a 24-hour affair. So, here’s a shout out to our hardworking historians, economists, political scientists and more who took the time to explain, correct, analyze and generally provide rational commentary for the American public. They worked from their offices, homes and cars, as well as from the Office of Public Affairs’ television studio in the basement of Allen Center.

Paul Brace

Bob Stein

Notable Rice experts who appeared in the media nationally and locally to discuss the elections include Douglas Brinkley, Mark Jones, Paul Brace and Bob Stein. The graph reflects the number of appearances in the media during the months of October and November.

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A r ch i t e c t E r i c K u h n e â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 7 3 t e l l s t h e s t o r y o f B e l f a s t â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s m a r i t i m e m a j e s t y with the new T itanic museum.

STEVEN THOMSON

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PHOTOS

COURTESY

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KUHNE, CIVICARTS AND THE TITANIC

B E L F A S T.

For a century following the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the tragedy was nary whispered within the Northern Ireland capital that saw the ship’s design and construction. Even in Great Britain, few are privy to the fact that in the early 20th century, nearly half of the tonnage on the seas took its maiden voyage from Belfast’s shipyards. When the Titanic embarked in 1912, Belfast laid claim to the largest shipyard in the world. Yet a sense of self-imposed ignominy after the disaster shrouded the city’s pride as a locus of maritime innovation. With the post-World War II growth of deep port container shipping and surge in air travel, the once robust image of Belfast’s shipyards descended into that of a postindustrial wasteland. Today, following decades of internal political strife and a recent crippling double-dip recession, Belfast is poised once again to embrace its heritage as one of the world’s shipbuilding epicenters. Enter Eric Kuhne ’73, who is leveraging a belief in architecture as diplomacy to help restore the grandeur of the city’s long-abandoned docks. Sitting in the library of his firm, CivicArts, in the architectural hub of Clerkenwell in east central London, Kuhne explained the gradual realization of his vision for a 185-acre urban revitalization of the wrench-shaped peninsula, Queen’s Island — renamed the Titanic Quarter — and its centerpiece, the monumental Titanic Belfast museum. Although the waterfront development will be

the museum’s marine-grade aluminum cladding sparkles. “Most contemporary museums have lost that sense of wonder when you enter,” Kuhne said. Inside the Titanic Belfast, the hum of the 28,000 builders that once occupied the hoists and gangplanks of the Belfast shipyards is restored in an ecclesiastically scaled six-story atrium, crisscrossed by balconies, terraces and overlooks. Above, nine galleries provide the social context of shipbuilding in Belfast, house a ride through a reconstructed shipyard and detail the construction of the RMS Titanic. The project’s monumentality is tempered by documents of individual crew and passengers’ stories, while another gallery offers a critical eye toward the myths and legends that surround the disaster. Hard science finds its place in an exhibit on Robert Ballard’s

Left: Architect Eric Kuhne stands in front of a map of the Titanic Quarter, the 185-acre waterfront redevelopment project now underway in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Kuhne’s firm, CivicArts, designed the project’s urban master plan, which combines residential, business, recreational and cultural elements, as well as parks and gardens. Middle: The Titanic Belfast museum is located on the site of the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Right: Kuhne’s early sketches play with images of ice crystals, a central motif in the Titanic Belfast’s design. Opposite: The White Star Line Titanic sets sail from Southampton, England, April 10, 1912. An architectural rendering of the exterior of the Titanic Belfast museum, which opened to the public March 31, 2012.

years in the making, the museum opened in March 2012, just in time to mark the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. The visceral appeal of the Titanic in the public imagination endures, as evidenced by the museum’s more than 500,000 visitors in its first six months of operation. “We have worked on buildings all around the world, but nothing has gone viral like this,” Kuhne said. Drawing upon the water imagery that haunts the Titanic’s history, Kuhne studied the geometric process of ice crystal formation to conceive the museum’s faceted exterior, which resembles at once jutting icebergs and ships’ prows. The façade mimics the scales of the gigantic gantries system of timber and steel scaffolding built for the construction of the Titanic’s massive hull 100 years ago. When viewed from above, the building takes the form of a compass rose. The building plan also alludes to the trajectory of four centuries of shipbuilding innovation in Belfast: from timber and sail to iron and steam, followed by steel and turbine and culminating in aluminum and diesel. Most poignantly, the building’s height matches that of the storied cruise liner, allowing tourists and Belfast locals to consider head-on the optimism and opulence that the Titanic embodied. Even beneath Belfast’s mercurial skies,

1985 Atlantic expedition to record and recover the ship’s ruins, with a special focus on deep-sea microbiology. The museum, which cost $152 million to build, was funded through a partnership that included Belfast City Council, Belfast Harbour Commissioners, Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Titanic Quarter Limited (a company of Dublin-based Harcourt Developments Ltd.). “I think it’s a human story,” said Tim Husbands, CEO of Titanic Belfast. “The sinking was a disaster, but the ship itself was a fantastic feat of engineering and construction. The Titanic Belfast is about recovering the city’s roots, but it also presents a story that resonates internationally.” No doubt, the museum will far surpass the initial annual target of 425,000 visitors. Almost 70 percent of visitors are from outside of Northern Ireland. While the consensus is that it’s a crowd pleaser, the Titanic Belfast has faced criticism in the architectural press. It recently garnered a nomination for Building Design magazine’s Carbuncle Cup, a reader-nominated award for the ugliest building completed in the U.K. in the last 12 months. On the plus side, the museum also is a finalist for the International Interior Design of the Rice Magazine

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Year award at the Leading European Architects Forum. Unfazed, Kuhne remains confident that the building is succeeding at telling the Titanic story to legions of visitors. “It was a huge backhanded compliment,” Kuhne said. “Very English.” Keep in mind that the museum is merely a cornerstone of the estimated $10 billion–$15 billion Titanic Quarter mixed-use development that will occupy the Queen’s Island area of Belfast. “The local authorities thought we were dreaming at the time,” said Pat Doherty, the chairman and founder of Harcourt Developments, recalling the process of acquiring the vast site nine years ago. “It was a clear site almost in the center of the city with the opportunity to do something very special, and Eric has a magical way of doing things.” Kuhne and Doherty worked with myriad government departments, harbor authorities and investors to make way for the development that’s changing the face of Belfast. Profit-driven inner-city revitalization schemes too often fall victim to blank banality. To break this trend, Kuhne, in his role as the lead concept architect on the project, consulted directly with the very people who had abandoned central Belfast’s blight and violent legacy for surrounding suburban hamlets. “We interviewed almost 100 people and asked them one simple thing: ‘What would it take for you to come back home?’ And they asked for me to build something like their villages in the center of Belfast,” Kuhne said.

“Eric always had a humanistic commitment that has allowed him to abstract his project designs in such a striking way,” said former classmate Stephen Fox ’73, architectural historian and lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture. A dedicated Renaissance man, Kuhne penned a Shakespearean sonnet for the real estate venture to pay homage to the city’s shipbuilding roots: TITANIC BELFAST:

We were the best who worked these hallowed slips Bending iron, timber and steel ’to ships ’Neath gantries and cranes with Biblical names Our sweat, our tears, and sweet salt air did raise Fleets for trade, exploration and mail, Liners, warships, and immigrants set sail — Navigating charts on rhumb-lined seas with Optimism! Opulence! at Godspeed! Four centuries measure our balancing Our will and Nature’s equanimity. Time once again to lead the charge: Belfast’s Sons and Daughters sing songs of these shipyards; Choirs of workers shout across the seas: Once where we built ships, now we build cities!

Left to right: Inside the Titanic Belfast, massive chains denote the scale of the Titanic and its sister ships. Visitors take in a view of the ship as it now rests on the ocean floor. A cut-out steel sign in front of the museum. Children check out the interior galleries. Opposite: A view from the top-floor balcony of a large compass rose that locates the cardinal directions for visitors. Visitors peruse one of nine galleries featuring interactive exhibits on the museum’s opening day.

The Titanic Quarter was then conceived around the idea of seven “villages,” each with their own Georgian square, in which courtyard gardens imbue a sense of safety to public space. When complete, the development will complement new condo blocks with an expanded campus of Belfast Metropolitan College and a bevy of retail distractions. Plans are afoot to incubate a new financial center for Europe, and new media is staking a claim via a cluster of budding film industry studios. Strung together by grand boulevards and a new tramline, each of the villages stands no more than two blocks away from the fresh air of water or park space. “Waterfronts all over Europe and North America are being transformed,” Kuhne said, “but none of them has this level of complexity of mixing new economies with housing, parks and gardens.” Northern Ireland still suffers from a shaky real estate market, so the Titanic Quarter developers are thinking long-term, with a projected completion date of 2030 or beyond. For all of the Titanic Quarter’s beguiling ambition, Kuhne understands the importance of historical context in design.

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This penchant for storytelling through architecture has brought Kuhne’s pedigree from Houston to 32 current projects spanning five continents, all informed by their local context. A new tower complex rising in Kuala Lumpur is ensconced in seven gardens representing the seven civilizations that have characterized Malaysia’s history, while a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Nepal takes its form from the three strands of the pocket of rice that Buddha wore. Kuhne’s studio walls showcase blueprints for a skyscraper in Kuwait that will top off at 1,001 meters — a nod to the region’s lionized collection of folk tales, “1001 Arabian Nights.” While these projects reach for the sky, the story on the ground of the Titanic Quarter is a narrative with big themes — resilience, rebirth and pride in a lost heritage. Eschewing a focus on urban trauma to honor innovation, the Titanic Belfast museum invites visitors to consider the pinnacle of human achievement — as well as hubris — and to launch a new story in Belfast’s history.

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Unsinkable City: Six questions for Eric Kuhne Q: Describe the experience of arriving as a freshman to the School of Architecture. A: I was terrified. I was born in San Antonio and spent the first five years of my life in Texas, so this was a kind of provincial return to the homeland and had all of the dramas associated with it. I’d been working in an engineer and architects’ office in Indiana since I was 14, so I had an exposure to the practical side of the field. On the second day I was at Rice, I went to see the director [of the School of Architecture], Anderson Todd. Andy had a stack of School of Architecture stationery cards along with a beautiful fountain pen and old ink well. He said, “Let me tell you about architecture,” and explained the Vitruvian triad: firmness, commodity and delight. So I said, “Mr. Todd, don’t you think it’s time we reinvent that?” He handed me the pen and I said, “I think an equilateral triangle and those things in balance is good for 2,000 years ago, but we’re at the threshold of a new millennium. So how about we add a fourth element and turn this into a tetrahedron, including volition and meaning?” He just burst out laughing and said, “You’re just going to be nothing but trouble for four years, aren’t you?”

Q: What were some of the challenges you encountered as a student? A: I was shocked because I thought I had a good foundation in architecture, but it was just a foundation in construction. I had to get over that conceit of thinking that I knew more than I actually did. Looking back, Rice was hard — really, reLeft: Bird’s-eye panorama of the Titanic ally hard for me. Elinor Evans, Quarter as viewed from the northeast. who was the first-year design Inset: Eric Kuhne with his sketchpad. studio teacher, was constantly getting us to have trust in the unknown as the safest place to go. Once you get the sense that you can do something that you never dreamed you could, you become intoxicated with discovery and the exploration of design as a way to see the world.

Q: You suggest that the interdisciplinary research behind each of your projects is informed by your varied course choices while at Rice. How so? A: As it turned out, the classes that had the biggest impact on me were those that weren’t architectural. I took cognitive anthropology with Stephen Tyler, Tom McEvilley in comparative religions and this calculus professor [Howard Resnikoff] who just was a wizard. He said, “You won’t leave this class until you understand that calculus is poetry.” He would write formulas up on the board and read them as poems. It was just breathtaking. You never think when you’re a student that these conversations will stick with you for the rest of your life. Those

talks across all topics changed the way I work here in the studio. Rice has sprinkled that magic dust of insatiable curiosity.

Q: Of all of the opportunities that Rice afforded, which had the greatest impact on your education? A: There was a design competition for an industrial building in Seguin, Texas. I almost didn’t even apply for it, but then I decided to work on it for five hours every day. I would sketch and put it in a booklet and completely forget about it. I didn’t even go to the awards ceremony at the School of Architecture, but on that day, I was walking across campus and one of my classmates walks up to me and says, “Where have you been? Come on!” He dragged me over to the ceremony just as they were announcing that I had been awarded the William Ward Watkin Travel Fellowship. I couldn’t believe I had won it. Andy Todd and Bud Morehead were there, both laughing. It was one of the biggest surprises of my life.

Q: What did you do with the fellowship? A: I visited some of the most remarkable thinkers on architecture and cities at the time: Jan Gehl invited me to swim in the Baltic Sea, and we discussed the choreography of public spaces. In Austria, I met with [art historian] Hans Sedlmayr, who was writing about the loss of the soul in architecture and cities. Aldo van Eyck invited me to his home, and we sat drawing until we worked out the plans for one of his churches. In Stockholm, Sven Hesselgren lectured me on restoring the pageantry of city life. At the time, some of these men were just beginning to have an impact on the profession. They all just opened their homes to me, and I would sit and have dinner with their families. And so my tour of Europe wasn’t just a tour of buildings; it was a tour of the cutting-edge thinkers of architecture. None of that would have happened without Rice, because these figures’ names were in every class.

Q: In your career to date, what are the main changes you’ve seen in the practice itself of architecture? A: We’ve experienced an acceleration of drawing tools that has transformed the profession as much as the art. When I started at Rice, we used T-squares and Maylines [parallel bars]. What once took 30 people to produce a set of drawings in the ’60s became a team half that size in the ’70s and ’80s with computer-aided design programs. Now, we can produce a set of drawings with five people. Yet, while drawing production has accelerated, there is still a burning need for architects to draw, to sketch. The fountain pen and the tyranny of the blank white sheet of paper has not been replaced. The freedom and grace of a sketch, linked to the imagination, still outperforms any computer program. Yet once transferred to CAD, we can show our imagination to the world effortlessly. And the sheer quality of decisions made with this breadth of representation is the most profound adjustment to the profession in its history. ■ Steven Thomson is a New York-based writer with a focus on art, architecture and urbanism. His work has appeared in Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. He recently completed a graduate degree in urban studies at University College London. He can be reached at sjt@stevenjamesthomson.com.

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Wednesday, October

10 Rice Faculty and Staff Reception/ Centennial Lecture Series · Founder’s Court Tent/Tudor Fieldhouse Rice honored faculty and staff at a lavish reception in the centennial tent. J. Craig Venter, among the first to sequence the human genome, kicked off the lecture series.

Highlights from the

Centennial Celebration During one memor able week in October,

Rice gathered its far-flung family — faculty and staff, students present

and students past, community supporters and visitors alike — to commemorate its first century and march boldly and joyfully into its second. The schedule was as packed as it was varied, filled with festivities and feasts (both gustatory and intellectual), reunions and homecomings, ritual and rhetoric. Please enjoy these highlights and check out our centennial website (centennial.rice.edu) for more.

PHOTOS by TOMMY LAVERGNE, JEFF FITLOW and ELI SPECTOR ’14

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11 Centennial Lecture Series · Tudor Fieldhouse Rice welcomed (clockwise from left) international angel investor Esther Dyson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President and physicist Shirley Ann Jackson, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas, as well as genomist J. Craig Venter and Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr.

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World Premiere Concert by Shepherd School Orchestra · Stude Concert Hall Commissioned by Rice University in honor of its Centennial Celebration, the concert featured the world premiere of William Bolcom’s “Ninth Symphony.”

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Centennial Address Friday, October

Academic Procession and Centennial Address · Academic Quadrangle Preceded by an academic procession with representatives of universities from around the world, President David W. Leebron’s keynote address harkened back to that of Edgar Odell Lovett at the formal opening of the Rice Institute in 1912.

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“In the joy of high adventure, in the hope of high achievement, in the faith of high endeavor, for this fair day we have worked and prayed and waited. … [W]e have asked for strength, and with the strength a vision, and with the vision courage. … [T]he Rice Institute, which was to be, in this its modest beginning, now has come to be.” And with these words, President Edgar Odell Lovett 100 years ago welcomed the first class of 59 women and men and the 10 faculty members of the Rice Institute. Today, we gather to celebrate the realization of that hope, the rewarding of that faith and courage, and the continuation of that joy. We join today to reflect on a century of adventure and achievement, to honor our founders and forbearers whose vision and hard work resulted in the extraordinary university we know today, and to speak of our vision and ambitions for the future.

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Our path was set by the confluence of the legacies of three extraordinary men: a great man of commerce, a civic leader and a visionary academic. William Marsh Rice was the quintessential businessman of his time, a man of commercial acumen and philanthropic spirit. In the year 1891, the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art was formally incorporated with a modest initial endowment. After Rice’s untimely death in 1900, the substantial assets that Rice had bequeathed to his institute were rescued by his lawyer and the first chairman of the board of trustees, Capt. James A. Baker. The trustees then began in earnest to define what this new institute would be. Their vision was reflected in the choice of Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, on the recommendation of Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson. And let me add how fitting it is, and how grateful we are, that Princeton’s current president, Shirley Tilghman, is with us on the platform today. President Lovett then traveled the world for more than nine months, visiting the great universities, studying both academic programs and architecture. When Lovett stood on this very spot a century ago, not far from the edge of a growing city with just 80,000 people, he could take pride at the launch of a new university that aspired to be among the best and set, in his words, no upper limit to its endeavors. As William Ward Watkin, the architect who supervised the construction of the first buildings, stated at Lovett’s retirement, out of “the marsh and swamps of this campus,” he built a university of “beauty and fineness.” Imagine yourselves here as Lovett spoke: Around you was mostly a vast empty plain with four lonely structures. There was the Administration Building, now named Lovett Hall. A bit in the distance was the Mechanical Laboratory and its campanile, and across the campus the residential hall and institute commons. Between then and now lies a century of ambition and achievement. All around us we see the architectural embodiment of growing intellectual ambition. Imagine in your mind’s eye that century of building our campus: first beginning near where you sit and then moving outward to a second quadrangle and then a third quadrangle and then beyond, and even jumping across University Boulevard to where the BioScience Research Collaborative now stands — eventually 80 buildings over the course of a century, creating a campus of architectural distinction and harmony. The architecture is now complemented by recent campus art, culminating in our Centennial Pavilion, the Turrell Skyspace, which symbolizes not only our continued commitment to the beauty Lovett emphasized, but also our limitless aspirations. Truly, this is a campus that reflects our commitment to

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learning, to discovery, to beauty, to the nurturing of human potential and to a university that was from its foundation envisioned as a gift to the people of Houston. President Lovett served for another 34 years after the opening, with more than half that time occurring during two world wars and the Great Depression. And still the Rice Institute moved forward, expanding its community and growing its endeavor. As we approached our second half century, we changed our name from “Institute” to “University” to reflect that growth and broader ambition. At the time of our semicentennial, Rice, while on a strong trajectory, had not yet achieved its aspiration to be among the great research universities of the world. That was the challenge faced by President Kenneth Pitzer as he was inaugurated in our 50th year. As the new president then put it, he aimed for an institution that resembled Stanford without a medical school to a Westerner and Princeton with girls to an Easterner. President Pitzer led Rice into five decades of advancement as a research university. We realized that not charging tuition was not about a commitment to price, but a commitment to an ideal of opportunity — that we should be

the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, and the creation of separate schools of Social Sciences and the Humanities. Our ascendancy into the top ranks of American higher education was recognized in 1985 when Rice became one of the 60 elite research universities in the Association of American Universities. Great milestones included the G7 summit in 1990, the establishment of the Baker Institute in 1993 and the awarding of Nobel Prizes to Professors Curl and Smalley in 1996 for the discovery of the buckyball, which opened up new possibilities for materials and medicine. And in 2003, the Rice Owls emerged as national champions from the College Baseball World Series. Out of our Sallyport have passed more than 65,000 graduates — 46,000 of whom are the living Rice alumni community of today, a global community that magnifies every day the contributions that we make as a university. Throughout our first century, we have become an ever greater university, driven to provide opportunity for our students and knowledge for the world. And here I want to pause and acknowledge the remarkable leaders present today who guided us to ascending achievement: our past chairmen, Charles Duncan and Bill Barnett, and our current chairman, Jim Crownover, who between them steered this university for the last three decades, and my extraordinary predecessors, Presidents George Rupp and Malcolm Gillis.

This is a campus that reflects our commitment to learning, to discovery, to beauty, to the nurturing of human potential and to a university that was from its foundation envisioned as a gift to the people of Houston.

open to all, regardless of their financial means. That steadfast commitment continues to lie at the core of who we are. And we also sued to remove a stain of racial exclusion that was both fundamentally unfair and deeply inconsistent with our commitment to serving the people of Houston, of Texas and the nation. As Rice continued its progress toward becoming a more balanced university envisaged by Lovett, new schools sprouted in the 1970s, including the Shepherd School of Music, the Jones School of Business, what is now

WHEN WE LOOK AROUND at the Rice of today, it is very different of course from that of 100 years ago, or 50 years ago or even 10 years ago. We are larger; we are more diverse; we are more engaged with our city; we are more international; and we are more committed than ever to contributing to our world through research and service. The era of the ivory tower is long over. We do not come to the university to shake the cares of society, but to engage those cares in a different way. The university of today is porous, with a constant flow of people and ideas and contributions and relationships. We are very much the university that Lovett imagined and hoped for, and yet we are in many ways so much more. Today our university is counted among the very best in the United States. Whereas President Lovett traveled around the world to visit the great universities, today we receive visiting academic leaders from across the globe who wish to study and emulate Rice’s success. Much of our first century has been dedicated to catching up to our brethren — other leading American universities that in many cases are older, bigger, wealthier. We became more complex, added schools, improved the

quality of our student body and faculty, raised our aspirations and grew. But while we were becoming more competitive with other universities and in some ways more like them, we were also becoming quite distinctive. Even with our recent growth, we remain a distinctively small research university whose aspirations span the range of academic endeavor. Our emphasis on and commitment to undergraduate education are extraordinary. Our sense of being a single community, and the fostering of interdisciplinary relationships and conversations, are rare. Our college system, which creates strong communities across the undergraduate classes, has become the envy of others who seek to emulate it. The dedication of our staff to our faculty, students and the university, and our dedication to them, are defining attributes. As higher education both becomes ever more competitive and faces ever more daunting challenges, we must now lead with confidence in our own values and our own identity, as they have evolved over a century. Our strength as a university lies in part in choosing a different path from others, a different configuration for the university not just of today, but of tomorrow. Twenty years ago, Clark Kerr, the legendary president of the University of California and chancellor of Berkeley, wrote about two competing visions of the university — one in which the university is large and highly specialized in its parts, the other in which it is small and has a commonality of interests, or as he put it, “the best of Berkeley and the best of Swarthmore.” He expressed some pessimism that these visions were compatible. Rice has aspired to be the place where these visions become joined, compatible and synergistic, and we have succeeded. We must draw upon our strengths and turn perceived disadvantages into distinctive advantages. We can be, we must be, a leader in defining what a university can achieve and contribute both in education and knowledge. Fifty years ago, President Pitzer undertook a substantial expansion of the university. We have now completed the first major expansion of our student body since then. Our 30 percent growth has by almost every measure been a success: We have remained true to our commitment to make our education affordable and have attracted an extraordinary and diverse population along every dimension as our applications doubled. We do not intend to grow our undergraduate student body more in the coming decade, because we choose to remain a distinctively small university. Our size fosters an intimate sense of community and the special relationships between faculty and students that have defined the experience for so many of our graduates. Our intellectual ambitions, however, are not scaled to our size. We aim for excellence and

impact on a global standard. Thus our path to success, more than most universities, lies in our ability to collaborate with others and thereby leverage our potential. We are too small to be arrogant. We must in a new time find new ways to build deeper and broader relationships with the remarkable institutions that surround us

Our success in areas like nanotechnology is built not upon the endeavors of a single department, but upon the support, engagement and connection across a large swath of the university. We must infuse this collaborative spirit deep into our processes and personality if we are to continue our success.

— the museums, the medical institutions, the Johnson Space Center and the great enterprises of Houston. We must also reach out across the world and build not merely bridges, but strong and deep bonds. That spirit of collaboration must be focused internally as well as externally. Our success in areas like nanotechnology is built not upon the endeavors of a single department, but upon the support, engagement and connection across a large swath of the university. We must infuse this collaborative spirit deep into our processes and personality if we are to continue our success. Ossified structures that impede our collaborations must be adapted or swept away, and we must be innovative in developing new relationships. Our size is an advantage when it allows us to be both collaborative in spirit and nimble in action. In the arts, biomedicine, neuroscience and other endeavors, we have extraordinary potential, but only if we seize the opportunities that exist through deeper engagement. I believe our university’s personality reflects not only our history, but also our location. We have renewed our sense of connection and commitment to our home city of Houston, both as our students experience it and as our researchers contribute to it. Even a century ago, President Lovett realized that Houston partakes of both the warm hospitality of the South and the dynamic and adventurous spirit of the West. Houston is an entrepreneurial city, and we are

an entrepreneurial university. That spirit, which has some of its origins in our early strength in engineering, now finds its place in every corner of our university. The entrepreneurial imperative incorporates the desire to lead, to create, to innovate and to build. It is reflected in faculty who lead our students abroad to test in the field medical devices they have designed; in the studenttaught courses in our colleges; in the policy explorations of our Baker student fellows; in engineering and architecture students getting together to design a house that not only uses zero energy, but is actually affordable; in the creation and dissemination of digital educational materials for both college and now one million K–12 students; in building a research consortium with medical institutions to advance tissue regeneration that will save limbs and lives; in creating a multitude of student organizations, from Engineers Without Borders to our Emergency Medical Service; in the convening of conferences of experts to study biblical texts and to disseminate results; and so much more. We must nurture and support that spirit, both individually and collectively, among both students and faculty. President Lovett spoke of the pleasures of teaching and the privileges of research. But today we must do that and more. An entrepreneurial university empowers our students and embarks them on a life of difference and impact, regardless of their chosen disciplines and professions.

I WANT FOR A MOMENT to speak more broadly about the role of the university and how it ought to define our mission at Rice and our path forward. It has been 2,500 years since the founding of Plato’s Academy, 2,000 years since the founding of the ancient religious universities in India and Egypt, more than 900 since the founding of the University of Bologna, now the oldest university in continuous existence, almost 380 years since the establishment of the first American institution of higher education. The modern research university emerged in the 19th century and set the stage for the explosion of knowledge that universities have produced. When we look back at the last century, we see knowledge that has emerged from our universities and transformed our world: the fundamental structure of matter, the biological building blocks of life, the electronics that have revolutionized our ability to communicate, connect, analyze and understand. The early embers of the great ideas of our age, such as universal human rights, were fanned in the great universities. Powerful ideals, such as equality of opportunity, were given content and understanding by the work done in universities, and our graduates were inspired to pursue them.

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There is hardly an aspect of modern life that has not been greatly influenced and enhanced by the work done in universities. Indeed, one former university president declared the university to be the most significant creation of the second millennium. And yet, at the beginning of this third millennium, the historic idea of the university is facing both challenge and attack. The very word “university,” coined at the founding of Bologna nine centuries ago, embodies a sense of both oneness and universality — that we are a single entity that encompasses the totality of academic endeavor. As resources are constrained, there are calls to focus our endeavors, to limit ourselves to what we already do well. Great universities, universities many times our size, are choosing to eliminate scholarly endeavors, to focus on their specific strengths, to do what is practical. There is no doubt that we, like they, must focus and be strategic, but I believe we must do so in a different way. We must seize upon those truly important endeavors that require us to bring together participants from across our campus to work together, to understand our world more deeply, and to help solve its problems of today and in the future. Our strength lies significantly in our ability to draw upon and integrate different disciplines and perspectives as we seek to contribute, in pursuance of our mission, to the betterment of our world. We know that technology alone does not solve problems, but rather science and technology complemented by a comprehensive understanding of how to achieve innovation and change in the context of human culture and institutions. President Lovett spoke of the faith he asked of those assembled at the first matriculation: “They must believe in the value of human reason; they must be enthusiastic for their fellowmen. They must believe that it is possible to learn and also that it is possible to teach.” I believe that universities are built upon an additional faith — a faith in the power of knowledge and discovery and creativity to improve the lives of people everywhere and build a better future. That faith must be buttressed by a recognition that universities remain distinctive institutions that contribute to our society in ways no other institutions can or do. Our commitment must be to advance the frontiers of knowledge, understanding and creativity and to produce graduates trained and inspired to make great contributions as if the world depended upon it, for it surely does. The challenges of our world lie before us: to address our interconnected global needs for food, energy, water and a safe environment; to improve human health here and around the world; to harness the extraordinary flow of information for our benefit through better understanding and decision-making; to raise the

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human spirit through the study of culture and creativity; and to bring peace and prosperity to the peoples of our planet. These are large and daunting challenges, but that ultimately is what universities are for. Confronted by these challenges, universities must not be bastions of cynicism but citadels of optimism. Optimism, that if we work to understand the nature of religious tolerance, we can bring harmony. That if we work to understand conflict between nations, we can bring peace. That if we work to understand the origins of disease, we can bring health. That if we work to understand the sources of famine, we can bring nourishment. That if we work to understand the fundamentals of matter and energy, we can bring prosperity and a higher standard of life to people all over our world. Like other great universities, Rice must be cosmopolitan and international in their truest sense. We embrace a community of faculty, staff and students who come from all over the world. While committed to a strong, support-

These dichotomies challenge us — to be separate and apart, yet open and engaged. To be fast and yet also to be slow. To embrace an unthrottled cosmopolitanism and still strive to be distinctively American.

ive and deep relationship with our great city, our ambitions to learn and to contribute reach beyond the borders of our state and country. Our commitment is to all humanity, and we seek the advancement of knowledge for their benefit. And yet, at the same time, we are a distinctively American university steeped in American ideals — ideals of human equality and potential, of political rights and participation, of free inquiry and free expression, of religious freedom and tolerance, of diversity and inclusion, of creativity and innovation, and of the possibilities of hard work and economic opportunity. These ideals are reflected deeply not merely in the values we convey, but in how we choose to carry out our mission.

Universities have been and remain unusual institutions. We are separate and apart and yet open and engaged. The periphery of our campus, consisting of hedges and vegetation punctured frequently by paths and open gates, incorporates this idea. It is an avowedly porous border, and not a barrier, that both separates us from the surrounding city and yet welcomes those who wish to enjoy our contemplative spaces and intellectual engagements, as it also beckons the Rice community to engage with and contribute to our city. In our rapidly changing world, and recognizing that the knowledge we generate can sometimes be quickly developed to benefit others, universities must change some of their ways and be prepared to act with urgency. That is not something we are traditionally known for; indeed, it is fair to say that we are known for our slowness. But universities at their best are both fast and slow. That slowness, that willingness to put reflection and analysis and deep understanding above achieving quick conclusions or results, is an essential part of our ability to contribute in ways that are different and important. Our defining commitment to fundamental research — research that over centuries has proven its worth — depends on patience and on that faith that the expansion of understanding leads to unforeseen benefits to mankind. We take, for example, immense pride in the role that Rice played in putting men into space, but the voyage to the moon did not start with a historic speech in Rice Stadium. It started with Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Newton. The lesson of putting a man on the moon is not only that a focused and concentrated effort involving government and universities and industry can achieve remarkable progress, but that centuries of inspiring teaching and curiosity-driven discovery can make possible things that could not even have been imagined. These dichotomies challenge us — to be separate and apart, yet open and engaged. To be fast and yet also to be slow. To embrace an unthrottled cosmopolitanism and still strive to be distinctively American. And yet, these are the attributes that make the modern university a vital and irreplaceable contributor to human society. The ivory tower image of the university has been replaced by our shimmering beacon on Main Street, but we must maintain our unusual qualities and commitments if we are to contribute in the century ahead as we have in the past. We must make no mistake; we are in disruptive times for higher education. Our most basic concept of the university, as a defined space that brings teachers and students into physical proximity, is in the process of being upended. We now have more students registered for Rice online courses than graduates

over our entire century. Not since the invention of the printing press has the dissemination of knowledge been so changed as in the last quarter century, and it will change again as much in the decades ahead. These changes have the potential to undermine the sense of community that has been a hallmark of our colleges and universities and of Rice in particular. But if we embrace these changes and determine how they can be used to enhance the strengths of the physical university while extending some of its benefits to a virtual global community, Rice will seize a new opportunity to lead as we enter our next century. We must embark upon a reimagining of university education in ways that take advantage of new technologies of learning, while increasing our commitment here on our campus to the personal relationship between teacher and student. We must dedicate ourselves anew to our teaching mission and yet be guided by the ancient Confucian understanding of education: Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand. More than ever, we will seize the opportunity to involve our students and be more effective teachers. As we commemorate the end of our first century today, it is not easy to discern what lies ahead for our second. Think of the circumstances and undiscerned future as President Lovett spoke a century ago. Mass production of the automobile was a new phenomenon, and the first commercial airplane flight was just over a year away. The sun never set on the British Empire, and World War I lay around the corner. Oil had been discovered in Texas a decade earlier, but no one knew what that would mean for our city or our world. And Houston’s first air conditioning, dare I add, was still a decade away. We have every reason to expect that the

political, societal and technological changes of the next century will be just as dramatic as the last, if indeed not more so. We cannot now see those changes. What we can commit to and what we can believe in is the power of the university, of Rice University, to make that a better future through teaching and learning and discovering and creating. A century ago, a group of students, faculty, university staff and citizens of Houston sat just where you sit now to witness the launching of the first institution of higher education in the city of Houston. Rice set forth with a vision of greatness, with a commitment to both importance and excellence, but with little objective reason to think that such a new university could really join the great universities of America. And yet, this endeavor was begun and sustained with confidence and commitment, with optimism and faith, even in the darkest and most difficult of times. As we enter our second century, we do so with no less confidence, no less commitment, no less optimism and no less willingness to work hard to achieve our highest aspirations. We are already more than Lovett imagined; today we embark upon the course that will lead us to be ever so much more than we might even be able to imagine today. Fifty years ago, President Kennedy said at Rice that we must above all be bold if we’re to achieve the ambition of putting a man on the moon. As we enter our second century and face the opportunities ahead, we must be bold; we must be entrepreneurial; we must be collaborative; we must be fast and slow; we must be international yet distinctively American; we must be the great research university that preserved its dedication to its students; we must be Rice. —President David W. Leebron Oct. 12, 2012

Three Decades of Rice University Executive Leadership · Tudor Fieldhouse This panel discussion included President David W. Leebron, former Rice presidents Malcolm Gillis and George Rupp, Rice Board of Trustees Chairman James Crownover and former Rice Board chairs E. William Barnett and Charles Duncan, and moderator Professor Allen Matusow.

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Saturday, October

Centennial Picnic · Central Quadrangle A centennial picnic and celebration brought together 5,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni and academic procession delegates.

Edgar Odell Lovett Statue Dedication · Keck Hall The bronze statue of Edgar Odell Lovett, created by sculptor Bruce Wolfe, was formally dedicated Oct. 13. Many of Lovett’s descendants were in attendance, and the statue was unveiled by the founding president’s great-great-grandchildren.

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Homecoming Game Centennial and Homecoming Football Game · Rice Stadium The Rice Owls took on the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Roadrunners in the homecoming football game. The Owls won, 34–14 — Rice’s eighth-straight homecoming game victory. The semicentennial class gave a record-breaking $6.7 million class donation at halftime.

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Inside the Spectacle

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A year’s worth of under-the-radar planning went into an unforgettable light and sound show marking Rice’s centennial. Thorsten Bauer went straight for the heart. As creative director and co-founder of URBANSCREEN, the Germany-based company that creates and stages description-defying light and sound projections on architectural settings, Bauer led the artists and technicians who brought Lovett, Sewall and Herzstein halls to life for a series of performances during Rice’s Centennial Celebration. The performances were billed as “the Spectacle.” “We wanted to make it an experience for the audience,” he said. “It’s not as much about teaching them as it is about touching them.” Thousands experienced the awe-inspiring performance over three perfect autumn evenings inside Rice’s Academic Quadrangle. The URBANSCREEN team flew to Rice, its first American client, charged with creating an event that would tell the story of the university’s first century to the extended community of students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors attending the extensive series of events the campus hosted during the Centennial Celebration. The artists’ strategy was to let Rice’s distinctive architecture do the talking. “Our first question was, ‘Who is telling this story?’ We decided the architecture itself is the only living witness to the entire history,” Bauer said. “The images come from the inside of the building to the outside for a few seconds, and then go back.” For the three-segment production, the team created a three-dimensional video keyed brick-by-brick to the buildings. “We think of a building as a diva, because it demands so many things,” said Till Botterweck, an URBANSCREEN art director, at a lecture for Rice architecture students the day after the final performance. “This one (Lovett Hall) was even more of a diva.” The ornate building presented many challenges. For one, Bauer said, the team’s original production drawings were based on architectural plans that go back to Rice’s beginnings. When they

came to Rice for the show, they discovered Lovett Hall’s construction crew didn’t always adhere to the plan. “They were a few inches off here, a few inches there, but we were able to adjust,” he said. From the beginning of the process, the owl served as inspiration. Bauer’s imitation of an owl as he described his ideas during his initial meeting at Rice convinced the Spectacle committee that URBANSCREEN was right for the job, said Molly Hipp Hubbard, university art director and committee co-chair. “We fell in love with them at that moment, because we knew they got it. We knew they would be able to get Rice completely and engage and integrate all the stories.” The opening of the show featured the sound of insects followed by the image of a giant owl in shadow flying across the façade of the three buildings. The sound of its wings — ultimately, created with a wet towel waved in front of a microphone — grew out of a prairie soundscape. The owl circled and dropped a feather at the Sallyport, where the Rice Institute took root. A fanciful opening revelation of the architectural details served as a segue to the main segment, in which the artists bent the architecture to their will as the buildings revealed the university’s colorful history, with each decade in turn crackling to life. “This is not like a PowerPoint presentation,” Bauer said of the art form his company refers to as “lumentecture.” “There are often many things happening at the same time, bubbling up, falling to the surface and disappearing again,” he said. “We created the visuals to reflect the design principles of the decades they represent.” The surround soundscape enticed viewers to look this way and that, ensuring that one could not see everything in a single viewing, and probably not even multiple viewings. Bauer and the URBANSCREEN team had been stealing in and out of Rice for a year

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to plan the nearly 20-minute show that not so much told the history of Rice to audience members as folded them inside it. The 270-degree projections were a first for the company that has wrapped a number of buildings in fanciful animations, most notably the Sydney Opera House earlier in 2012. Because details of the performance were to remain a deep, dark secret until the premiere the night of the Centennial Gala, Bauer,

Botterweck, art director Max Goergen and producer Manuel Engels often came to campus under aliases. Sometimes they posed as the German cousins of Rice School of Architecture Dean Sarah Whiting, co-chair of the Rice-side production committee, to conduct interviews for their “research project.” “More than once, people came up and said, ‘Hey, I met your German cousins today!’” Whiting said, laughing. The pressure to keep quiet was even greater on architecture senior Joshuah Howard, whom Whiting sent to intern with URBANSCREEN for a month last summer. “He couldn’t tell anyone what he was doing, even what town in Germany he was in,” Whiting said. Whiting noted the considerable challenge of “getting everyone excited about something we couldn’t talk about.” The committee that also included Centennial Director Kathleen Boyd, Senior Project Manager for the BioScience Research Collaborative Kathy Jones and Associate Vice President for Development Kevin Foyle set a baseline of historic events that had to be part of the performance, based on Public Affairs’ centennial banners that line Rice’s Inner Loop. Otherwise, Bauer said, “We collected tons of photos and tons of text, read all the books about the history of Rice and ended up with a huge amount of information that was far more than we could use.” In fact, Bauer used an astounding 30,000 photos during the five shows and one unplanned encore. Hubbard said that after the final unadvertised performance for the

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Rice Design Alliance gala Oct. 14, hundreds of people were still pouring into the quad. “One student came up to Thorsten and asked, ‘What time is the show?’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re done. We just did the last show.’ And he said she burst into tears,” Hubbard said. “Ten minutes later they decided to run it one more time.” Editing the images to fit the buildings’ façades took months, with tests viewed in the company’s computers and on a small mock-up of the quad. With a projection that measured, in technical terms, 10,000 pixels wide and 2,000 pixels high, there was plenty of room for Bauer to maneuver as he oversaw the flow of artwork in two and three dimensions, matching it to the electronic score that also was composed and produced by the company. “It was the most challenging production for URBANSCREEN so far because of the amount of content, the number of effects, the ratio, the resolution and also because our partners here were very diverse,” he said. “There was no one art director from Rice confronting us; there were many cooks — intellectual cooks. But I liked it, because everybody gave their input, they put things on the table and then they took their hands away. They really trusted us.” The German crew traveled to Houston for centennial week with only data — 800 gigabytes’ worth — as their cargo. The rest of the gear was leased from Houston-based LD Systems, a lighting-and-sound production company started and still operated by Rice alumnus Rob McKinley ’81. The company built and installed the unique two-stage mask that occluded the Sallyport without blocking traffic, and also provided the 12 20,000-watt projectors and the immersive sound system. Sound was most critical to what Bauer called the show’s epilogue, when history had caught up to the present day. “Our decision was to swap the narration line from the visual

in the 100-years part to the auditory,” he said of the segment that features the layered voices of dozens of Rice students coming from every direction. All the while, at first slowly and then in massive waves, bricks of light flow around and about the arches that support the three buildings. Rather than a visual representation of buildings and plans, Bauer said the finale, representing the future, “is built out of the wishes, fears and hopes of the students of today.” He conducted 12 hours’ worth of interviews for the collage that concludes the show. The segment was inspired by a comment President David Leebron made early in the process. “He said in one interview, ‘You know, Rice is one of the last refuges of people whose ambition is to change the world,’” Bauer recalled. “As I worked more and more with Rice, I saw this more clearly. This changed me. This kind of inspiration is the fire in this community, and I found that in every interview I did.” The light may have faded, but the fire remains. “As I left the architecture lecture, I heard two students talking in the quad as the projection tower was coming down,” Hubbard said. “One of them looked at it and said, ‘I can’t believe that it’s gone. I’ll never be able to look at Lovett Hall the same way again.’” —Mike Williams

The Spectacle · Academic Quadrangle The Spectacle was conceived for Rice’s centennial and performed under the stars in the Academic Quadrangle. The German artist group URBANSCREEN designed the performance, which was projected onto three of Rice’s historic buildings.

e WATCH THE SPECTACLE ONLINE: ricemagazine.info/134

Wednesday, October

Centennial Lecture Series · Tudor Fieldhouse Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. was our final Centennial Lecture Series speaker.

e WATCH THE LECTURES ONLINE: ricemagazine.info/132

“Now when President Lovett spoke 100 years ago,

the newspapers in this state and around the nation took due note that something big was happening in Texas. The New York Times reported that President Lovett had attracted an array of learning such as has seldom been assembled in the United States. The Dallas Morning News waxed almost mystically. It observed that President Lovett’s speech coincided with the early evening appearance of both Jupiter and Venus and suggested that the evening sky was an augury of a bright future for the institute. Not every newspaper was as perceptive or transcendent. One local journal reported the founding of Rice in the same column as the news that Congo, the world’s largest circus elephant, was coming to town. But we now know 100 years later that those who bet on the future greatness of Rice, bet right.” —Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr.

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The Apostle of Stoke

REMEMBERING

Ben Horne â&#x20AC;&#x2122;02 By Corinne Whiting

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LAST SUMMER, BEN HORNE ’02, ALONG WITH HIS FRIEND GIL WEISS, DIED IN A MOUNTAIN CLIMBING ACCIDENT IN THE CORDILLERA BLANCA RANGE OF THE PERUVIAN ANDES. SINCE THEN, A VAST COMMUNITY OF FAMILY AND FRIENDS HAS GATHERED IN THE PLACES HORNE LOVED BEST — ON MOUNTAINS AND TRAILS, IN CHURCHES AND PARKS, IN THE HOMES OF FRIENDS AND FAMILY, AND ON RICE’S CAMPUS — TO REMEMBER AND CELEBRATE A LIFE LIVED WITH UNCOMMON JOY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT. DURING ONE OF THOSE SERVICES HELD IN SAN DIEGO LAST SUMMER, BEN’S CLOSE FRIEND SKYE SCHELL ’05 SUMMED UP HIS THOUGHTS: “BEN WAS INSPIRATION. THAT’S WHAT HE WAS TO ALL OF US. HE BROUGHT THE MESSAGE OF STOKE. SINCE WE’RE HERE IN CHURCH, WE COULD SAY HE WAS AN APOSTLE OF STOKE.”

O N E • FA M I LY F O U N DAT I O N S

At 6 feet 2 inches and approximately 185 pounds, Ben Horne stood tall and strong. His most defining features: a curly blond mop, sparkly blue eyes and an expansive smile. As evidenced by the entries in his blog, Zoom Loco, Horne was a prolific chronicler of his life’s experiences. By way of introduction there, he wrote, “My heroes are Tank Man, Tolstoy and Jesus Christ. I do believe that a better world is coming. My goal is to be the most complete person I can be. Full stop.” When Horne’s friends and family describe his life, the same adjectives are uttered time and again — inspiring, passionate, authentic. He loved mountains and sunsets. To a great extent, these traits can be traced to Horne’s early years, growing up in a warm and loving family, the oldest of Gary and Chris Horne’s four children. “Ben felt he had the best childhood experience because he lived in the country as a young kid, on a six-acre farm in south central Pennsylvania, moved to Hawaii and then close to D.C., so that he experienced all the benefits of a rural and suburban life,” Chris said. Horne learned basic hiking and backpacking skills by participating in the Boy Scouts, with great encouragement from Gary. The family often vacationed in the national parks of the American West and enjoyed family nights playing board games. Their religious faith played a large part in the family members’ lives, no doubt motivating Ben, as an adult, to seek out the divine in all he did — from rock climbing to his studies. His Catholic faith served as foundation for his pursuit of peace and conflict resolution in his future career. To his younger siblings (Eric, 30; Math, 26; and Liz, 22), “Ben was the big brother that all three looked up to,” said Chris Horne. He drove his younger brother Eric to school, loyally attended sporting events, and spent countless hours talking politics and music. He recorded songs with Math and, having always served as a mentor to Liz, shared his love of other cultures with her during a joint trip to Central America. In one of many eulogies delivered at Horne’s funeral in Virginia last August, Math said, “Ben’s week beats your year. He climbs unclimbable peaks after running inhuman distances only stopping to write, rap, pray or read up on how to start the revolution. He never settles or merely copes. People might say,

wholehearted. Unrelenting. He maintains the light. Persistent. Deliberate. He says it’s his 100 percent raw Lithuanian beef. I call it guts.” MATH’S EULOGY: ricemagazine.info/135 TWO • WIESSMAN

Because of Horne’s love for the mountains and outdoor pursuits, attending a school in Houston seemed a long shot — after all, it is flat. His parents remember that their son was won over by the bucolic tree-canopied campus and diverse student body, and so Horne entered the Class of 2002. He found a home at Wiess College, where current Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson and his wife, Paula, were then masters. On the academic side, Horne studied economics, math and political science. Soon enough, he made a name for himself as both the life of the party (though his drink of choice was orange juice) and a citizen-philosopher deeply engaged in service. Between his sophomore and junior years at Rice, Horne hiked the Appalachian Trail end-to-end by himself and at a near-recordsetting pace. The experience of solo hiking at such an impressionable age (he turned 20 en route) was transformative, he said. His

independent musicians. He was a DJ there for four years, the DJ director his junior year and station manager his senior year. Former station manager Johnny So ’01 credits Horne with changing the culture of the station, making it more open and accessible to the student body. At the dedication, So said, “Ben immediately stood out — here was a guy that was not only extremely involved in student life at Rice, he was actually popular! That alone was almost a disqualifier for working at KTRU.” When the 40-year-old station’s tower was sold in 2010 to the University of Houston, Horne, along with a dedicated group of KTRU alumni, opposed the sale. On savektru.org, he wrote, “KTRU is an idea. A philosophy. KTRU is not just a club. It is a cause. KTRU is, even, possibly a religion.” Ultimately the sale of the FM license went through, but the station survives as KTRU-HD radio, available through the Internet and mobile devices. To honor Horne’s advocacy and service, KTRU’s broadcast studio, located on the second floor of the Rice Memorial Center, was dedicated the Ben Horne Memorial Studio last October. During Rice’s centennial and reunion weekend (the 10th reunion for the Class of 2002), a group of Horne’s classmates and friends gath-

“I am sure many stories about Ben have been told these last few weeks, and many more will be told in the years to come. Tell those stories. Ben loved stories.” —Eric Horne, Aug. 7, 2012, Annandale, Va.

journals from that time reveal a maturing and probing mind. In one prophetic passage, he wrote, “The goal of changing things for the better can be reached — the key is to inspire others, to affect other people in little ways, and they in turn will continue to pass it down. When we seek personal glory, we can achieve transient fame; if we seek to better the world, we can contribute to lasting results. If we don’t pass it on, it will fade as memories of us fade.” At Rice, Horne felt immense pride for his work with KTRU, the student radio station, what he called “one of the greatest things about the university” and a platform for

ered in the Hindman Garden for an informal tribute of words and song. Horne’s parents flew in for this event, which was organized by Lizzie Taishoff Sweigart ’01. In a peaceful grove of giant live oaks, Dean Hutchinson, Liora Danan ’03, Adam Larson ’05, Josh Katz ’01, Josh Hale ’02, Iris Hurtado Wingrove ’02, Saheel Sutaria ’02, So and others took turns sharing stories of their college years. Sutaria and Wingrove first met Horne during O-Week. Hale was Horne’s freshman-year roommate. Their voices conjured memories of Freshman One-Act plays and “Hello, Hamlet”; of beach trips, spontaneous road trips, flag football and water-gun fights; of chasing and

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“People say that Ben lived many lives’ worth in his 32 years, and not only in terms of the mountains he climbed, places he visited or miles he ran — but also in the number of people he loved, and how deeply he loved them.” —Anne Chmilewski, Aug. 14, 2012, San Diego

catching squirrels; having philosophical discussions; being recruited to work at the radio station; and attending every kind of cultural celebration on campus. Danan met Horne when he was working at KTRU and she was the senior news editor at the Thresher. Their long relationship had just begun as Horne graduated college — they lived in four different cities at the same time and traveled to 22 countries together. They got engaged, and though they ended their engagement last fall, the two remained best friends. At the Rice service, Danan said, “I believe that Ben’s greatest strength, what allowed him to inspire us all, was his willingness to fail. This was a core value for him, a direct reflection of his deep faith. Ben was keenly aware of his own failings and limitations, and he was exceptionally willing to fight the inner struggle because he knew it was worth fighting. He believed in humanity precisely because it is broken.” DEDICATION OF THE BEN HORNE MEMORIAL STUDIO: ricemagazine.info/136 T H R E E • A S C E N D I N G A N D T R AV E R S I N G

After Rice, Horne joined the Peace Corps and went to Kyrgyzstan. Already an adept outdoorsman, it was there that he learned the sport of alpine climbing and became “spoiled, climbing some world-class mountains,” he said last June. Although he liked soloing, Horne also enjoyed the dynamic of group climbing, which forces participants to overlook fears, egos, personality quirks and bad moods. In such settings, Horne said, “You have one objective. You’re all helping one another with a common goal.” He likened climbing to an ancient practice like hunting. “In the most primal sense,” he said, “you’re tapping into something that humans have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years.” It was the “mighty Sierra Nevada” that provided a triumphant experience last spring for Horne, Shay Har-Noy ’04 and Konstantin Stoletov. All were part of the loose confederation of climbing enthusiasts called Pullharder, a San Diego-based community of skilled climbers who share their experiences online. In March, the trio successfully completed the first-ever wintertime ascent of Peter Croft’s Evolution Traverse, a route that involved nine 13,000-foot peaks and the traversing of more than eight miles of the Evolution subrange of the Eastern Sierra. Horne called this “one of the Lower 48’s greatest climbs,” yet it had only previously been completed about 15 times and never outside of prime season. The technical route took seven days from car to car (including one storm day) and involved four days on the actual route with 36 total hours of climbing. At times, the trio endured winds as high as 90 mph and temperatures as low as -7 F, making for a challenging environment in which to do such technical climbing. In a post-trip blog post, Horne admitted he was “stoked, but … tired.” Yet he also expressed great excitement for having accomplished this feat in his “home range,” at being associated with the route of one of his biggest inspirations (climber and mountaineer Peter Croft) and for the symbolism behind climbing a traverse named Evolution. In an interview last summer about the Evolution climb, Horne emphasized that this accomplishment was mostly personal. “The most important thing is that your motivation is internal,” Horne said, “If you’re doing something for external recognition, it’s just not as fulfilling. It leads to a strange culture in which [the achievement] becomes about bragging.” Horne physically held on to pieces of life experiences by way of souvenirs and ticket stubs. He also kept meticulous lists and Excel 38

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spreadsheets that not only helped him prepare for upcoming treks and climbs, but also recorded details of the number of countries he’d traveled (53 “real” visits; 62 if you count airport layovers), states he’d visited (49; only South Dakota remained), climbs completed, national parks explored, “bizarre experiences” endured. His page of “Top Ten Sights” reveals no fewer than 26 places, ranging from the Sistine Chapel and Taj Mahal to Havasu Falls and Joshua Tree. EVOLUTION TRAVERSE TRIP REPORT: ricemagazine.info/137 FOUR • LITTLE THINGS

Many remember Horne for the big things — his impressive academic achievements and astounding athletic accomplishments. Not long after the Evolution Traverse conquest and right before he set out for Peru, Horne ran an ultramarathon (100 miles) in less than 24 hours. “If Ben was going to do something,” Danan said, “he was going to do it all the way.” But it was the everyday things that mattered the most. In a eulogy delivered at his San Diego memorial service, she added, “Ben never wanted to be a superhero because of his physical achievements. In fact, he went out of his way to understate them. If we idealize his achievements, we are misunderstanding Ben.” While living in San Diego, Horne organized a series of discussion dinners around a potluck meal and an informal roundtable. He invited those representing different backgrounds and beliefs who he thought would benefit most from the conversations; together they covered topics from race and the environment to religion. Commented Har-Noy, “Oftentimes you have people who aren’t intellectually honest; they think they’re smart but don’t listen to anybody else. They shut off the willingness to accept someone. Ben fundamentally sought out alternative opinions on how things work.” Since 2007, Horne had been pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and completing his studies of conflict resolution and mediation. Eli Berman, professor of economics at UCSD, also taught economics at Rice. Horne was one of his students there. When both landed at UCSD, Horne once again studied under Berman, who ultimately served as his dissertation adviser. Horne’s research focused on the role of mediation in international conflict and how third parties can intercede to make peace agreements possible that would not otherwise happen. “Ben’s interest in this question, as far as I can tell, came from a wonderful place,” Berman said. “He cared deeply about people and believed in mediation among individuals. He also had a deep concern for the human suffering caused by unresolved conflicts. Ben’s research made substantial progress on the theory of mediation, which we hope will be of use to practitioners.” At present, UCSD faculty are working to give recognition to his research and encourage others to continue what Horne started. FIVE • PERU

On pullharder.org, Horne’s in-progress trip report titled “The Peruvian Chronicles” detailed the first climbs he and Weiss completed in the Cordillera Blanca last July. In the post, he chronicles the weather, the challenges, the lows and the highs in characteristic self-deprecating and humorous fashion. The post is accompanied by an image of a sunset of wondrous beauty. Their next destination was Palcaraju Oeste, where they would attempt (and succeed) in putting up a first-ever ascent of a new route on the mountain’s south face. On July 13, on the way back

Left to right: Alexei Angelides ‘98, Sarah Pitre ‘01, Horne and Dennis Lee ‘05 in the KTRU studio in 2000; Rice graduation with siblings Matthew and Elizabeth Horne, 2002; Elizabeth and Ben in Guatemala, 2007. Below: Climbing Evolution Traverse with Shay Har-Noy ‘04 and Konstantin Stoletov, March 2012.

“I GREW UP IN THE APPAL ACHIANS, THEN LIVED FOR SPELL S IN THE TIEN SHAN (K YRGY ZSTAN) AND THE ROCKIES. I LOVE MOUNTAINS AND MOST EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM. NOW I LIVE BY THE SEA IN LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA, WITH THE M I G H T Y S I E R R A N E VA D A V E R Y C L O S E B Y.”

—Ben Horne, zoomloco.wordpress.com

Below: Horne and friends Saheel Sutaria ‘02 and Kristen Stecher ’02; Liora Danan ‘03 and Horne, San Miguel, Mexico, 2011.

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“The day I found out they found Ben’s body, I was on safari in Malawi. I watched the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever seen that night, sitting in a vast grassland with wild animals around and good friends by my side. It sounds like a lot of Ben’s friends and family felt this way and had a similar experience that night, but I nonetheless felt like he was watching the sunset with me that night, saying goodbye in his own extreme, spectacular, poignant way.” —Brigitte Zimmerman, maintainthelight.org

down from the peak, rescuers speculate that the fragile ridge where they were walking simply collapsed. After Horne and Weiss were reported missing, stunned friends and family watched in disbelief as the search unfolded in real time. Climbing websites and listservs posted updates for friends and family. Har-Noy’s company obtained satellite imagery and employed crowd-sourcing techniques to try and find the two. [See sidebar.] On Saturday morning, July 28, Gary Horne received a call from the rescue coordinator. Their bodies had been found at the bottom of the mountain. Accompanied by Danan, the two flew to Peru to bring Ben home. SIX • M A I N T A I N T H E L I G H T

Since Horne’s death, Gary has poured himself into creating maintainthelight.org, a memorial website dedicated to his son, named for a motto Ben adopted to honor his grandmother. One section pays honor to Horne by linking to dozens of heartfelt eulogies and letters as well as examples of Horne’s prolific writings, photos and academic work. The second part of the website conveys a mission: How can we who remain here on Earth ‘maintain the light’? On the website, friends commit to living into their strengths and hopes and to do something inspired by Horne. Playing the piano, serving God, connecting with people, viewing sunsets, participating in an Ironman competition, climbing, running, refraining from judgment and simply living life are some of the promises Horne’s friends and family have made. “Ben was deeply affected in his childhood by stories from people who said they had waited until it was too late, for whatever it was that mattered to them,” Danan said. “Ben did not wait. He was always setting goals, always training, in all categories of his life. Ben practiced his religion in the cathedrals of mountains and church pews and backyard BBQs and rock concerts and overcrowded buses in foreign countries.” The site’s content serves as daily inspiration for all those who remain deeply grateful for the example of Horne’s life. Full stop. ■

“Last year for my birthday, Grandmom sent me a card with a photo of Denali on the front. I climbed Denali for the first time 2 weeks after her death, still grieved. The emotion definitely spurred me to press on. A few years before she sent me a card of a lighthouse with the words ‘Maintain the Light.’ I do believe death is a part of life, and that her light can shine on through us.”

—Ben Horne, June 23, 2011

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TOMNOD: PULLING TOGETHER

Though they didn’t know each other at Rice, Shay Har-Noy ’04 and Ben Horne ’02 had become acquainted while both were in grad school at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), ultimately forging a strong friendship Shay Har-Noy ’04 based on their mutual love of climbing in the Sierra Nevada. Har-Noy earned degrees in economics and electrical and computer engineering at Rice; at UCSD, he earned a master’s and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His day job is CEO of Tomnod, a young tech company that provides distribution and analysis of current satellite images for a variety of clients. On July 25, 2012, Har-Noy got an email with a personal and urgent bent — good friends Horne and Gil Weiss, who had been mountain climbing in the Peruvian Andes, were missing. The team reached out to their professional contacts at DigitalGlobe and GeoEye to ask for archival imagery of the mountain. Tomnod (meaning “big eye” in Mongolian) requested that the next time the satellite passed overhead, it focus on the section of the mountain where Horne and Weiss had been climbing. Within a couple of hours, the team had received and processed the image and put it online, inviting friends and family to help search for clues in the snow patterns. On the map, images were flagged and marked after several people reached a consensus that they saw the same thing. Within 15 minutes, hopes soared when taggers identified three black dots (on the otherwise white snow) as rescuers headed up the glacier. “I was psyched,” said Har-Noy. “We were in go mode. I was thinking, if these guys are anywhere in this picture, we’re going to find them.” This flurry of excitement pervaded social media as family and friends clung to the possibility that the two were merely injured or stranded. Over the next four hours, more than 800 people logged in to scour small sections of the mountain’s image. Before a search plane took off for the mountain, Har-Noy sent the air and ground rescue teams detailed imagery of what they identified as the top four search locations. The ground team had independently arrived at the same conclusion, and the climbers’ bodies were found below their last tracks in the imagery. “Our efforts to find Ben and Gil really emphasize the power of timely satellite imagery and our technology in critical situations,” Har-Noy said. A devastated Pullharder community announced the death of their two dear friends on their website. “These are two of the finest climbers we have ever known … embodying the spirit of the mountains with everything they did. Many of us have had the honor of sharing in their love for the wilderness, and that lives on.”

RICEOWLS.COM

A Winning Season

Sports

Rice Soccer Shares C-USA Regular-Season Title With 11 wins, six losses and three ties, the Rice soccer team scored its best regular season record in program history. The winning season earned the team, under head coach Nicky Adams, a C-USA co-championship title with Colorado College. Rice was eliminated in the opening round of the C-USA Tournament. The Owls debuted a dynamic freshman scoring duo of Lauren Hughes and Holly Hargreaves, who combined for 19 goals during the season. Hargreaves and sophomore midfielder Quinney Truong were both named First-Team All-Conference USA, and Hargreaves was named C-USA Freshman of the Year. Hargreaves totaled 10 goals as a starter for all 21 games. She tied for seventh in the nation with six game-winning goals and ranked among the NCAA and C-USA statistical leaders in goals (10), points (23) and shots (76). The rookie scored a Rice record game-winning goal in four-straight games in September. Truong was fourth on the team in minutes as a starter in the midfield, playing 92 percent of the team’s total time. The Fort Worth, Texas, standout scored the gametying goal against Big 12 power Oklahoma and also had a goal on the road at University of Alabama at Birmingham. She assisted on game-winning goals in back-to-back games vs. Sam Houston State and Tulsa while maintaining a .400 shots-on-goal percentage. Seniors and team captains Julia Barrow and Lauren LaGro were named to the C-USA All-Academic team for success in the classroom and on the soccer field. Barrow has maintained a 3.92 GPA as an English major with a minor in poverty, justice and human capabilities. She led the Owls with four assists and rarely came out of a game, playing all 90 or more minutes 13 times. A three-time C-USA All-Academic honoree who has maintained a 3.87 GPA as a kinesiology major, LaGro started all 21 matches and helped the Owls to a share of the 2012 conference regular-season title. LaGro often was assigned to cover the opposing team’s top scoring threat. Overall, the Rice backline helped hold opponents to just 11.7 shots per game.

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Arts

Rice’s de Menil Years “Raid the Archive: The de Menil Years at Rice” commemorated the 100th anniversary of Rice University as well as the Menil Collection’s 25th anniversary. The de Menil years at Rice began in 1969 with the exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the just-completed Rice Museum. This stunning collection of works from the 15th to the 20th century explored the intersections of art and technology. Among the 200 works were a replica of a da Vinci flying machine, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car, Jean Tinguely’s ball producing and consuming Rotozaza, and Claes Oldenburg’s giant floppy desk fan. It also was apparently the first exhibition to show video art, created by the very young Nam June Paik. Decades-old exhibitions don’t usually age well. Ideas or works that were cutting-edge or contemporary 40 years ago can seem quaint and dated later on. But “The Machine” was a show many people would be thrilled to see today, and it’s not unique in the repertoire of exhibitions, projects and events that took place at the Rice Media Center and the Rice Museum (dubbed the “Art Barn”). Established by John and Dominique de Menil in 1969 along with Rice’s Institute for the Arts (now the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Department of Art History and Rice Cinema program),

both venues went on to present an astounding array of groundbreaking exhibitions, films and events. “Raid the Archive,” on view Oct. 12–Nov. 9 in the Rice Media Center, included exhibition and opening photographs, letters, notes and other ephemera and was accompanied by film screenings and panel discussions. The centennial exhibition was curated by John Sparagana, professor of painting and drawing and chair of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts, and Katia Zavistovski, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History. The title is taken from “Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol,” a 1969 Rice Museum show in which the de Menils asked Andy Warhol to curate an exhibition selected from the storage vaults of the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. The “Raid the Archive” film series screened “Tinguely In Motion.” Filmed in 1969 for the Rice Institute by Bill Colville, the film captured Jean Tinguely’s time in Houston constructing a sculpture specifically for “The Machine” exhibition. It shows the Swiss artist moving (and dancing) through a Houston junkyard, clad in a pressed white shirt and black blazer,

Experimental exhibitions continue on at Rice ... . And the de Menils’ involvement and interest in Rice through the years helped set it all in motion.

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Clockwise from left: Installation view of “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” Rice Museum, 1969; exhibition poster; Dominique de Menil, 1979. (Photo credits: Hickey-Robertson and Geoff Winningham ’65)

Students Arts

The Matter of Music Quick, before this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony, check out one of last year’s winners. The winner of the 2012 Grammy for Best Clockwise from top left: Opening night for “Raid the Archive: The de Menil Years at Rice,” Rice University Media Center, 2012; view of “Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz: The Art Show,” Rice Museum, 1984–85; “The Machine” exhibit, Rice Museum, 1969. (Photo credits: Carolyn Van Wingerden, Hickey-Robertson, Geoff Winningham ’65)

smoking and casually selecting materials for his sculpture. He talks about how much he enjoys it when his sculptures break and have to be repaired, reveling in the chance and chaos of the whole thing. Comments from the artist and his decidedly nonprofessional welder assistant were intercut with commentary from the beleaguered conservator sent along from MOMA to keep the sculptures in working repair. Not only is the film an insight into the artist’s work, it is also an insight into an artistic climate that continues today in Houston, where artists often draw on and collaborate with industry to execute projects. During the de Menil years, the Media Center brought in the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Peckinpah and Henri Langlois. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas came into town to screen “THX 1138” as well. For Rice students and the Houston community to have had this kind of access is stunning. In one of many memorable events, Dennis Hopper came in 1983 to speak about a new film, but instead bused the audience out to the Big H Speedway to see him “blow himself up” in the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act — i.e., a chair with dynamite under it. View the video online at timeline.centennial.rice.edu/entry/368/. Those years were a lively, experimental and provocative time. The de Menils, in supporting and establishing the arts at Rice University, involved a number of students and young people in their endeavors, many of whom, like artist Mel Chin, would go on to become significant contributors to the art world in their own right. The de Menils were also instrumental in bringing in young and influential faculty like William Camfield, the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor Emeritus of Art History, and Thomas McEvilley, Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus of Art History and critic. Dominique de Menil would leave the university to establish the Menil Collection, but experimental exhibitions continue on at Rice in the site-specific installation program of Rice Gallery; in the art department’s new experimental exhibition spaces EMERGEncy Room and Matchbox Gallery; and in the continuing activities of the Rice Media Center. And the de Menils’ involvement and interest in Rice through the years helped set it all in motion. —Kelly Klaasmeyer

Opera Recording is “Doctor Atomic,” a Sony DVD recording of a 2008 production at the Metropolitan Opera, conducted by Alan Gilbert. Shepherd School alumna Sasha Cooke ’04 starred as Kitty Oppenheimer opposite Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer. The contemporary opera is by American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. The opera tells the story of the Manhattan Project scientists who created and tested the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. In a New York Times review of the production, critic Anthony Tommasini had plenty of praise for Cooke, writing, “The scenes with Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, sung with aching, wistful intensity by the mezzosoprano Sasha Cooke, are beautifully rendered.”

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ON THE

Bookshelf

“Ultimately, these religious differences play a substantial role in U.S. life, from identity politics to working for racial justice and reconciliation.”

Rice Sociologist Examines Race, Religion in America A new book co-authored by Rice sociologist Michael Emerson assesses racial differences in how black and white Protestants practice their faith. “Blacks and Whites in Christian America:

How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions” (New York University Press, 2012) is co-authored by Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, and Jason Shelton, an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington. “We often hear the term ‘the black church,’” Emerson said. “We really wanted to find out, what is the black church? We wanted to know how black Protestants — who comprise 93 percent of black churchgoers — differ from

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their white counterparts. We wanted to see if there’s anything unique about how they practice their faith.” Emerson said that while their research, including interviews with numerous black pastors, showed that there are “absolutely no differences” between blacks and whites when it comes to the core beliefs (for example, the Apostles’ Creed) of Protestants, it revealed “stunning” differences about how the two groups go about their faith. “At the very core, in the fundamental beliefs of Christianity — that God exists, for example — black and white Protestants do not differ,” Emerson said. “But on almost

everything else, even the terms they use to describe who God is, they do differ and often dramatically so.” All of these differences were conceptualized by Emerson and Shelton into what they call the five building blocks of the black Protestant faith. The building blocks include: • Experiential: Black Protestant faith is active and experiential; it is less concerned with precise doctrinal contours than is white mainline or evangelical Christianity. • Survival: Their faith is critical to survival and helps individuals cope with suffering associated with everyday trials and tribulations. • Mystery: Black Protestant faith is mystical and expresses an appreciation for the mystery in life; it includes folklore and cultural components driving from the African diaspora, the consequences of racial inequality in America and non-Christian religions. • Miraculous: Black Protestant faith is confident and comprehensive; the miraculous is ordinary and the ordinary is miraculous. • Justice: Their faith is committed to social justice and equality for all individuals and groups in society. Emerson noted that all of these differences remain after accounting for differences in education, income, age, gender and region of residence. These differences were found even when comparing black Protestants to the more zealous arm of white Protestantism, white evangelicals. Emerson believes that the differences between black and white Protestants are rooted directly in the country’s history of racial discrimination. “It’s based on personal and communal experiences,” Emerson said. “White Protestant faith has never been about survival, whereas black faith from the start has been. Slavery isn’t here anymore, but that idea of who God is has not changed for African-Americans.” Emerson said he hopes the book will bring greater understanding to the differences in how white and black Protestants approach religion. “Ultimately, these religious differences play a substantial role in U.S. life, from identity politics to working for racial justice and reconciliation,” Emerson said. “By going about faith differently, valuing different aspects of the Christian God and having divergent religious histories, black and white Protestants vote overwhelmingly opposite of one another, and often work against each other in efforts toward racial equity and cohesion. For real progress to be made, these groups will need to truly understand one another.” — Amy Hodges

ON THE

“ That’s the way it is.” Brinkley Chronicles Cronkite

In “Cronkite,” the first full-life biography of the legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, author Douglas Brinkley chronicles the life of one of the most influential news anchors in television history — a life that included formative years spent in Houston. Brinkley, a Rice University history

professor and fellow at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, wrote the biography with the cooperation of Cronkite’s family. The book examines the newsman’s role in the latter half of the 20th century — from Vietnam and the space missions to reporting to the nation the death of President John F. Kennedy. Born in 1916, Cronkite grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, where his father worked as a dentist. He dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin during the Great Depression to take the first in a series of radio jobs in Oklahoma and Missouri. Cronkite joined United Press International in 1937, and when World War II broke out, he covered battles in Africa and Europe, parachuted with the 101st Airborne into Holland and witnessed the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg Trials. In 1950,

“Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro,” by David L. Hill ’90 (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2012). Hill is a pediatrician and father of three who practices medicine in Wilmington, N.C.

Bookshelf Viral Doom Returns

he joined CBS News, where he anchored the Sunday night news and the 1952 presidential conventions and hosted “You Are There,” a show that re-enacted historical events. Cronkite became the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in 1962. The 1963 assassination of Kennedy inserted Cronkite into the national consciousness, Brinkley said. Other notable moments in his broadcast career included his 1968 declaration that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate,” which President Lyndon Johnson thought moved national opinion, and his coverage of the moon landings. Cronkite was, in fact, the unofficial voice of the American space program during its early heyday, a role than garnered him renown but also some media criticism, Brinkley found. “Walter had so bought into space that any criticism of the moon launch in 1969 was anathema to him,” recalled Bill Plante who, as part of CBS’s coverage of Apollo 11, reported on how some people on the street in New York thought the space agency’s efforts were a waste of money. Cronkite retired as anchor in 1981 at age 64, widely hailed as the “most trusted man in America.” Brinkley said the idea for a definitive biography was triggered about nine years ago by fellow historian and friend David Halberstam. During a drive with Brinkley to the Louisiana Book Festival, Halberstam remarked that Cronkite was the most significant journalist of the second half of the 20th century, but no author had adequately tackled his life and times. Brinkley has also authored books on Gerald Ford, Teddy Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter.

“Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health,” by Joseph Dumit ’89, (Duke University Press, 2012). Dumit is director of science and technology studies and professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis.

—Jeff Falk

“From the Stage to the Studio: How Fine Musicians Become Great Teachers,” by Cornelia Watkins and Laurie Scott (Oxford University Press, 2012). Watkins is a lecturer of music in Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. This is her second book about teaching music.

Justin Cronin, a distinguished faculty fel-

low at Rice University, has followed up his best-seller “The Passage” with “The Twelve,” released last fall. It is the second book in his postapocalyptic trilogy. In “The Twelve,” Cronin picks up the story, taking readers on a 592-page journey interweaving characters from “year zero,” when the vampires first escaped from a secret Colorado lab, with flashes forward to 79 and 97 years in the future. The narrative follows bands of survivors as they search for fuel, food and protection and cope with the unthinkable that has devastated civilization as they knew it. The reader meets Lila, a doctor stricken with posttraumatic stress syndrome, and Kittridge, a war veteran and sniper who helps save a band of refugees. A less likeable new character is Horace Guilder, a selfinterested, high-level government bureaucrat at the helm when the crisis originally unfolded. Guilder was able to ensure his own escape, but he’s not a figure one would root for. Returning characters include Alicia, an army lieutenant and loner, and Amy, a supernatural heroine, who with others continue their hunt for the original 12 “virals.” —Jeff Falk

“Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920–1945,” by Julie Fette (Cornell University Press, 2012). Fette is an associate professor in the Department of French Studies at Rice.

Rice Magazine

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No. 15

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2013

On My Honor Try your luck at this Rice-themed crossword. No cheating! 1

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The first freshman ___ parade was in 1921. 6 ___ balloon fight (Beer Bike kickoff) 11 Sally___ (with 124 Across) 15 Baker Institute’s Edward Djerejian is an expert on the ___ Spring. 19 ___ the Barbarian 20 “Doe ___” 21 ___ Shawkat of “Arrested Development” 22 Plaster ingredient 23 “A World ___” 24 Young adult novelist Sonya ______ 25 Altoids come in ______ 26 Copycat 27 Rice’s student-faculty ___ is less than 6:1. 28 Quoting Hamlet, after an ORGO exam: “___ is me.” 29 ____ Humperdinck 31 Conduit for graffiti and clandestine exploration 35 Descendant of Indo-European speakers 36 Studied by comp sci majors 37 ___ Tigers 40 Eastern potentates 43 Accumulate 46 It’s between St. Paul and Eau Claire 50 1990 Dead album, “Without ___” 51 Bryce Canyon locale 52 With 66 Across, first Rice president, ____ Lovett 53 ___ Loop 55 Gentile 56 Sound prefix 57 One from Eastern Europe 58 Native of Budapest 60 Where many Rice students are in the summer 63 F. Scott Fitzgerald was one (abbr.) 66 See 52 Across 69 With 110 Down, the theme of this issue 74 Houston’s METRO runs on these 75 Beginning

76 Wash off again 77 What Rice students eat on March 14:____ ice cream 79 Nihilistic art movement 82 “___ go Rice!” 83 UK Luftwaffe counter 86 Psychic Edgar 87 ___balls 88 “___ go Bragh” 89 T-shirt size 91 Dining hall semester vouchers 93 “Hey you!” 95 Pianist studied by students at the Shepherd School (Hint: Schumann) 97 College quads are nice outdoor ____. 98 Beatles’ German release “___ Liebt Dich” 99 Mythical Scottish beast (var.) 101 Baker 13 cover-up 109 They’re the best. 113 Soy paste 114 Come-on 115 Texting shorthand for “Ah, that’s clear” 116 City of Edvard Munch 117 He’s Horrible in the comics. 118 Pastrami _____ 119 President Leebron is on its board. 120 Architect van der Rohe 121 One of the “45º 90º 180º” rocks is ___. 122 Rent out again 123 Home of Lady Vols (abbr.) 124 See 11 Across 125 ___Week 126 Juan’s ___ sense

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Column heading Mortise partner Jolly Green Giant shoe width There are four in Monopoly (abbr.) ___ de foie gras “Unbearable Lightness of Being” actress Lena 13 “Silver Bells” sound 14 It hits with a charge. 15 Rice opponent of infamous sideline tackle 16 Maturing 17 McLean’s “___ Pie” (abbr.) 18 Ernie’s pal 30 Caustic soda 32 “__ the season” 33 Reading direction (abbr.) 34 Defense against the Scud 38 Jacques’ “my bad” 39 Inherent 41 ___ Speedwagon 42 With 93 Down, was by the original Administration Building 43 One wanting to make amends 44 Tomorrow in Tijuana 45 It’s desirable at the track. 46 16th-century date 47 River of Estella, Spain 48 They may be innies. 49 Pooh pal 51 Top amateur athletics group 52 Sports site 54 Weathermen’s tool 59 Spruces up the bathroom 61 Old object 62 Tailor’s length 64 Mountain bike race format 65 Dog and cat, perhaps 67 They’re found in trash cans. 68 What Will Rice did in the men’s Beer Bike race last year 70 Transport of the future? 71 When repeated, Speedy Gonzalez mantra 72 Donkey sound 73 Where to hear the Red Sox

78 Sailor’s acknowledgment 80 When doubled, flak 81 Code of Copenhagen (and others) 83 Students love Rice’s new ___ Center. 84 ___ Rose 85 Boys Town founder Father Ed ___ 87 Heat forward Chris 90 ___ urn (Rice diploma text shape) 92 Given to some at Rice Commencement 93 See 42 Down 94 Zones 96 “___ the Expert” 98 Given to loud nasal exhalations 100 Leaf pore 102 Famed violin maker 103 Watch 104 “Love ___ you need.” (Beatles) 105 ___ Zellweger 106 ___ “The Pearl” (and others) 107 Till now 108 “___ tall dark stranger” 109 Resumed (abbr.) 110 See 69 Across 111 Actor Baldwin 112 Sometimes found at a Rice party: ___ pit 117 “Left turn” for Mr. Ed Crossword by David Gusakov

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A P A R T N S O N E S N T I N S N A P E R 30

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N C A A NM I E S N A T I L T N R E L E T T E N N N A R C H NW I L L Y N S E S T A

Rice Magazine

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No. 15

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2013

defining Moments An alum shares his family’s experience from Rice’s Centennial Celebration. Dear President Leebron, Many voices have told you how wonderful the Rice Centennial Celebration was, I’m sure! But perhaps not many of them drove 1,200 miles to Houston from Minneapolis with their wife, Marlys, and daughter, Brynne, in confidence that it would be totally worthwhile. … My Rice residence was East Hall — a name unknown to anyone on the Rice campus today. While East Hall was a mystery to them, the name of every other building on the campus was a mystery to us. In getting around the magnificent Rice campus, we were dependent upon bus drivers, police, student volunteers and maps to reach four days of venues on time. Everyone whom we asked for information was cordial, interested and helpful. The lecture by J. Craig Venter on the cutting edge of his science specialty was wonderful. Too bad we will not be around when “people will have a computer with a little box attached so that when they order a pill online it will show up in their box about 1/5 of a second later.” The Shepherd School of Music Centennial

www.rice.edu/ricemagazine

Concert on Thursday was truly magnificent. Jon Kimura Parker on the piano gave me goose bumps; his play was so exciting. The orchestra was as good as any I have ever heard. … We congratulate the Shepherd School staff and their music director Larry Rachleff. The academic procession and your centennial address was indicative that the academic world and Rice University are thriving and will continue to do so. My lifetime “R” membership card came in handy at the football game as we Minnesotans were not too thrilled about the idea of sitting out in the Texas sun with no shade for two or three hours. We walked up to the “R” room and I presented my card. Even though we were not on any list of names, they graciously let us in. We enjoyed the game in air-conditioned comfort. I’m saving the most wonderful thing that happened to us for last. Certainly the Finale and the Spectacle were super events. But what happened after the Spectacle when people were getting up off the grass was the best event of all: A

young lady just ahead of us turned around. She told us she had graduated from Rice last year. She wondered how we liked the centennial events. She wondered where we were from, whether any of us had gone to Rice. When I told her we had driven down from Minnesota, and I had graduated in mechanical engineering in 1950, she just lit up. She was so excited that anyone could care enough about Rice to drive down from Minnesota 62 years after their graduation. It comforted her to know that she had gone to a university that warranted love and dedication throughout her life, because other people had felt that way before her. It was one of life’s defining moments for me. My wife, daughter and I enjoyed every minute of the four days we were on the Rice campus during its Centennial Celebration. We thank you for planning, organizing and executing it so well. Very sincerely yours, Glenn A. Fuller ’50 B.S., mechanical engineering “R” winner — Baseball (1948, 1949)

No Upper Limit. Still.

The Centennial Campaign

A Gift for the Long Run For runners in the Boston Marathon, trekking up the 88-foot Heartbreak Hill 20 miles into the race can be like climbing Mount Everest. But when Linda and Bob Shepherd ’70 began heading up the slope April 21, 1997, determination and months of careful planning propelled them up the hill and across the finish line. The Shepherds are approaching their retirement in a similar way, carefully planning a deferred gift annuity that will help them meet their financial goals while honoring Bob’s mother through the creation of an endowed scholarship. Bob and Linda were among the first in their families to earn college degrees and credit their mothers’ commitment to education with making their achievements possible. “We give to universities to honor our moms,” Bob remarked. “And I give to Rice because I appreciate what Rice did for me.” Bob, a radiologist who earned a B.A. and M.S. in chemical engineering from Rice, says the solid academic foundation he received as an undergraduate gave him the flexibility to enter any field. Now, by establishing the Lurlene Shepherd Endowed Scholarship, the Shepherds are ensuring that female undergraduates receive an equally strong education. By funding the scholarship with a deferred gift annuity, they also guarantee themselves a steady stream of income for the long run.

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Deferred Gift Annuities Enhance Your Retirement

]

Setting up a deferred gift annuity is a great way to ensure a secure income during your retirement while supporting Rice. To learn more about this type of gift, please contact the Office of Gift Planning.

Phone: 713-348-4624

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Email: giftplan@rice.edu

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Website: www.rice.planyourlegacy.org

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Owls Beat Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl The Rice Owls scored 26 unanswered points in the second half of the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl to beat the Air Force Falcons 33−14 Dec. 29, 2012, at Amon G. Carter Stadium in Fort Worth, Texas. The Owls closed out the year with their fifth consecutive win and their sixth win in the last seven, completing a remarkable reversal to a season that saw the team start 1−5. Sophomore wide receiver Jordan Taylor earned the bowl’s MVP award. Watch more: ››› ricemagazine.info/138