President's Letter to Alumni
September 5, 2005
We begin this year against the backdrop of one of the greatest disasters our country has ever experienced. Just one week after our students began classes, Hurricane Katrina arrived on the Gulf Coast, assailing Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. By Monday morning, many breathed a sigh of relief that the worst predictions had not come to pass. But during the day, the New Orleans levees broke and a great catastrophe, the magnitude of which we are now only understanding, started to unfold.
It is still hard to fathom that approximately a six-hour drive from Rice, a bit more than 300 miles, the nation’s 35th largest city and one of our great cultural treasures remains largely underwater and uninhabited. Our deepest concern and sympathy goes out to those in the Rice community and all others who have been most directly affected. The sobering events of the last week remind us both of our small place in this world and of the important work of a great research university like Rice. From understanding natural phenomena to engineering mechanisms to try to keep us safe, to preserving architectural heritage, to managing the social and political processes that can maintain and rebuild communities, the work that we do has great social importance.
All of us, especially those of us in Houston, should try to make some contribution to the effort to ameliorate the suffering and save a great city. As you have perhaps read, the city of Houston, with its assets of the Astrodome, Reliant Center, and the George R. Brown Convention Center, has taken more than 25,000 evacuees into those shelters and many more in other shelters and homes across the city. The American Red Cross, bringing its decades of experience and trained volunteers to bear, is capably staffing the shelters and providing cots, clothing, food, and water. Many of you have donated to the relief effort, and we have received heartwarming stories of alumni opening their homes to fellow Rice alums and other people who have lost everything.
Here at Rice, we have mobilized to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina in the best ways that we can, trying to make use of both our institutional competence and the range of resources we can bring to bear. Rice was among the first universities to respond to students displaced from New Orleans. On August 31, we announced that we would accept as fall semester visiting students Tulane University enrollees whose home is the Houston area. (Tulane has announced that it hopes to reopen for the spring semester, and with campus housing full, we can best help students who have a home here.) Our undergraduate admission office staff fielded more than 1,000 inquiries, accepted 172 applicants, and expects more than 110 students to attend a special orientation about joining our semester, which began August 22. We recognize, of course, that Tulane students, like Rice students, come from a range of economic circumstances. We will waive tuition for undergraduates who already have paid their Tulane tuition. For those who have not, we will honor any financial aid their university has awarded them and remit to Tulane net tuition collected by Rice from them.
Universities across the country have joined in the effort to meet a need far too great for any one or any dozen universities. Most have been able to take only small numbers of students, often 25 to 50, making Rice’s assistance, in relation to our size, among the largest offered. Other universities in Houston and Texas also have stepped up generously to host students from other universities in the stricken area.
On a department-by-department basis, Rice also will accept graduate students from affected universities at no charge and if possible offer accommodations to faculty from the stricken area to sustain their research. Our Jones Graduate School of Management is offering tuition-free visiting student status to 11 first- and second-year MBA students from Tulane, and Jones School alumni are organizing housing for those students.
We have focused on Tulane in part because it is a sister university in both the Association of American Universities, the organization of the country’s top research universities, and in our athletic conference, Conference USA. There also is a substantial overlap in our applicant pools, and given that the semester had already started here at Rice, we needed to avoid a case-by-case application process that would prevent us from responding to this crisis in a timely manner.
As an institution and a community, we are pursuing other ways to help. Rice is establishing a program to allow faculty and staff some paid time off over the next three months to make contributions of volunteer time to the disaster relief efforts.
Our students, faculty, and staff began immediately, as groups and individuals, to join the response to Katrina’s destruction in a variety of ways. Many from the Rice community have gone to shelters to volunteer their time. Last week, my wife and I joined students in volunteering at the convention center. It was not yet filled to capacity and so far as I could tell was being wonderfully managed, with cots, clothing, and food in good supply.
Our Rice EMS student volunteers have worked double-shifts at the Astrodome and other evacuee locations to provide medical assistance. Sixteen members of the Rice custodial staff organized a volunteer effort to clean restrooms at the Astrodome. Our Housing and Dining employees are cooking 500 pounds of meat per day for delivery to the shelters by the End Hunger organization.
Food, clothing, monetary, and volunteer drives have been organized by many groups on campus, including: HOOTS, a long-standing social and charitable organization begun by employees of Facilities, Engineering , and Planning; the Black Student Association; the Office of International Students and Scholars; the Jones School; the Athletic Department; and others. Rice’s Community Involvement Center has created a website with extensive information on volunteer opportunities; ways to donate money, food, or clothing; and opportunities and training for direct evacuee assistance.
Our Shepherd School students are attempting to organize performances at the shelters to raise morale and help pass the time for evacuees.
Fondren Library staff members are volunteering with the Houston Public Library to provide services—from children’s books to information on FEMA, jobs, and housing— at the shelters. Our human resources office is involved in efforts to find employment for the displaced, including circulating information about faculty and staff from schools in the affected regions and working with the Texas Medical Center and state officials to set up a hiring and job-screening center at the Astrodome.
Our Facilities, Engineering, and Planning Department is working to coordinate Houston-area contractors to stand ready should universities in New Orleans ask for assistance in recovery. And the university is offering counseling programs for students, faculty, and staff whose family and friends were affected by the hurricane.
These efforts and more as they develop may be found on our website at http://www.rice.edu by clicking on the headline “Rice’s Response to Hurricane Katrina.”
I am proud of our efforts, both as a university and as members of a community. Together, we are able to assist both the specific population we are best positioned to help and the larger group of evacuees so in need of food, clothing, medical care, and other support. We shall continue to help in whatever ways are useful, and we know that you will do so, too.
As coincidence would have it, our homecoming game this year, on November 12, is against Tulane. Despite not being able to return to its own campus, Tulane is making arrangements to field its athletic teams, including its football team, during the fall semester. I encourage you to return to campus for Homecoming & Reunion 2005 that weekend, not only to participate in the usual activities and cheer on Rice, but also to join us in very warmly welcoming the Tulane athletes and fans we expect to join us. We will be exploring other ways we might help in the relief efforts that weekend as well.
I hope to see you then.
Sincerely,
David W. Leebron
