Faculty | Researchers | Office of the President | Remarks | Remarks | Class of 2008 Matriculation

Presidents Remarks 2004

Members of the Class of 2008,

On behalf of the deans, masters, faculty, staff and all members of the university community, welcome to Rice!

One of my new responsibilities as university president is to welcome each new group of students at this matriculation ceremony, an occasion marking your entry into the Rice community. While this is a duty that I will enjoy for each incoming class over the next years, I know from my experience in my last position that this class — the Class of 2008 — will always be one that is very special to me. For, like you, I am beginning my first year at Rice. In many ways, we embark on this journey together.  We are both enthusiastic about what we have found at Rice, but also looking for a positive ways to contribute to it.

I admit that there are some differences between you and me. You live in small dorm rooms; I live in a giant house. You have a lot of hair; I don’t. I don’t have to take another final exam; you do. You will get carded if you go into a bar; sadly, I won’t. Your parents have now left; when I go home, my kids will want me to read to them. Before you came here, many of you probably took a couple weeks and traveled or visited your families; and so, in fact, did I.

I wanted to relate to you two experiences from that recent trip to Philadelphia to visit my parents. We took our children to Sesame Place — that’s an amusement park with Muppets outside Philadelphia. While we were wandering around, we had the most astonishing coincidence. I ran into my college roommate, with his two young children.  It was such a joy to see him.  He is a medical researcher and grant administrator at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. My point is a simple one: you will make lifelong friendships here, and the more different and more varied they are, the more rewarding they will be.

Two days later, I went to the barbershop — in fact, the samebarbershop I went to as a child. While waiting to get my hair cut, I was reading a volume of speeches given by Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of Rice. Now, I know, most people read magazines when they go to the barbershop; I read speeches. The woman waiting with her young child next to me suddenly leaned over and said, “Did you go to Rice?” When I explained who I was, she told me she had gone to Rice. So, today you join a community. It is not merely the small, welcoming community of your college, but the community of your class of 2008, the community of all the new students here, the community of all the students returning next week, the community of faculty and staff, and the community of all our alumni. You will find members of this community wherever you may go, all over the world, and they will serve you well.

Although you just arrived today, I already know something about you and can say with confidence that the Class of 2008 consists of an incredibly varied group of people. You come from small towns and big cities, from as close as down the street and as far away as Singapore . You are the products of closely knit extended families; you were raised by single parents. You are diverse in many ways. Your favorite movies, for example, range from “Finding Nemo” to “Kill Bill,” from “Rudy” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and, of course, from “Fahrenheit 9/11” to “The Passion.” Your parents are farmers, nuclear scientists and everything in between. Now, it is true, a few of you have some pretty weird preferences. One of you, at least, likes spam. Now, I don’t know whether that referred to the e-mail or the food, but I have a hard time understanding it either way.

You have different relationships with your families. In listing your favorite memories, one of you said it was holding your sister in your lap at three years old, and another said it was hitting your brother in the head with a plastic hammer. And for those of you who actually responded to the question of who you might want to have a torrid relationship with, it ranged from Mozart to Will Smith, and Helen of Troy to Paris Hilton. Some of you had the good judgment not to answer that question.  And one of you listed nine people.

I am going to guess that this range of difference exists in your reactions to leaving your families today. Some of you, no doubt, thought this day just couldn’t get here fast enough. Others of you were not as sure about being left in a new and unfamiliar place. As I told your families earlier today, I remember, albeit vaguely, being dropped off at college by my parents and having this distinct sense that I was on my own. You have no reason to feel that way because you are not on your own. Even before you arrived, over the course of the summer, you have corresponded with your Orientation Week advisers, upperclassmen who are on campus to introduce you to the most distinctive and welcoming feature of the Rice undergraduate experience — the residential college system. 

The colleges are your new homes in many senses of the word. They are quite literally your homes in the sense that they are the places where you will now eat and sleep. But they are your new homes in a much more important sense. Your college is also a home in that it provides a safe and comfortable space for you to decide what you want to make of your time at Rice. Deciding what you want to make of your time at Rice is the single most important question that you must ask yourself tonight and during this Orientation Week and the weeks, months and years ahead.

You may decide to contribute to both the intellectual and social life of your college. You may decide to make your contribution on a campus-wide level, becoming involved in activities and events that bring students together from all colleges. You may decide that your contribution will be made alongside a professor in a scientific research lab or in the field investigating the complexities of human behavior. Many of you will engage in athletics, whether at the varsity, club sport or intramural level. You may decide to do all of these things, and even more.

But if you start finding your experience here entirely comfortable, you are doing something wrong. Let me say that again: If you start finding your experience here entirely comfortable, you are doing something wrong. Now is the time to try new things, some for the first time. Take an art class, even though anything not expressed in numbers starts to give you hives. Play a club sport, even if you aren’t athletic. Speak up, even if you are afraid. I ask you to take these risks, trying things that you may not be initially very good at because I know what will happen if you don’t perform at your best.  (That’s something new to most of you.) You will walk home to your college and find the support of your masters, your roommates and your friends, who could not care less if you tripped over yourself playing in your first club soccer game or if you didn’t get the highest grade in your art class or if in some other way you thought you made a fool of yourself. They will be proud of you for trying something new. And you will learn something about yourself and about other people.

Rice allows you to try, and sometimes fail, in a noncompetitive environment. I know that this is the reason that many of you decided to choose Rice.

In this class, there are 375 high school varsity athletes, 249 club presidents, 21 editors-in-chief of school newspapers and yearbooks, 145 members of student government, including 13 student council presidents and 37 class presidents, and the list goes on. These highly accomplished people are now your classmates and your future friends. You all know you are here not to compete with one another but to learn from one another. So within and without your colleges, engage with the people who are like you and engage with the people who are different from you. You will learn from both, and the diversity in your classmates will be one of the great treasures of your experience here.

Now, the temptation, of course, is for me to tell you about my first year at college, and to draw on that in trying to give you some advice. I will try to resist that temptation, with one exception. At some point in the late fall my first year, I was in my room when there came a knock on the door. I opened it, and a man stood there. And he seemed old — really old — although I think he was probably younger than I am now. He said that he had lived in that room, and he wanted to come see it again, to revisit his college experience, because it had been so extraordinary. And he mentioned how much he would have liked to come back and have the chance to do it all again. Well, I didn’t understand this at the time. What is it that would bring someone back 20 years later in this way? I can tell you one thing: It’s not because of the substantive knowledge that he had learned or because he excelled in his classes, because he double-majored or worse, triple-majored. It is because there is something so special that can happen during these years that you will cherish it, and build upon it, for your entire lives.  And that will happen to you if you seize this experience to the fullest — beyond your classes, beyond your rooms, beyond your colleges and beyond even the hedges that define this fabulous campus.

One thing you will hear me talk a lot about this year is Houston, the place we all call home when we are at Rice. As those of you from Houston already know, and those of you from other places will soon discover, this is an amazing and vibrant city. It is full of things to do, places to go and people to meet. I encourage you to go beyond the hedges and come up with creative ways to engage with the city.

Let me now say something about what happens after you are finished with your time here. How can we prepare you for the world beyond Rice?  I am sure of one thing: We cannot do it simply by preparing you for today’s world.  If we know anything at all, it is that the world will continue to change, that the challenges of tomorrow will be different from the challenges today. I think back to when I was in school. Advanced technology, at least for an individual student, meant you had an electric typewriter, an instrument that now is becoming hard to find. Most people got about six television channels. Terrorism was not something that affected our daily lives in America . And no one thought you could engineer things at the molecular level.

In my view, you can either fear change or embrace it.  One of my favorite stories is the story of the Betamax, which was the first consumer videocassette recorder sold.  We are now living at the end of the VCR technology, as DVD players, Tivo and other digital recording devices are turning the VCR into an artifact. The history of the videocassette recorder demonstrates the difference between fearing change and embracing it.

Videocassette recorders first reached consumers as I got out of law school.  I was living in Los Angeles and a friend of mine purchased one of the early VCR models, a Betamax made by Sony. The movie companies were afraid of the VCR, and they sued Sony to stop making the device. People said that the VCR would allow consumers to watch movies at home and that would spell the end of the movie industry.

That, of course, didn’t happen. Not only were movies more successful than ever, but the VCR was the greatest benefit to the movie industry that could have been imagined. Soon, half of movie revenues and sometimes more came from videotape sales and rentals. The thing that the industry had so feared was the very thing that made it more profitable than ever. Sometimes the changes that we are most afraid of are the ones that will lead us to new and better places.

One last point: I know that as part of Orientation Week you are involved with your college themes, which perhaps have little in common except, this year, the letter O. One of those themes draws on the work of Dr. Seuss. Indeed one of the new groups at Lovett, I understand, is Horton. “Horton Hears a Who” is absolutely one of my … excuse me, my children’s favorite books.

The story, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, involves an elephant who hears a small voice from a dust speck. He concludes that there must be a person on the speck, indeed a whole town, but no one else can hear that voice. To make a long story short, he is persecuted by others in his own world who do not believe there is any being on the dust speck, and they imprison Horton and prepare to boil the dust speck. Everyone on the dust speck is making all the noise they can, but still no one but Horton can hear them. Finally, the mayor of the dust speck finds one shirker and persuades him to raise his voice. And it is the addition of that last person’s voice that finally makes the Whos heard and saves them and Horton.

So, with that inspiration, I want to tell you three things.  First, listen carefully for the voices that others may not hear. They are perhaps the voices that will inspire you, motivate the contributions you will make and illuminate the path you will follow. Second, make your own voice heard. You are enormously talented and will have great opportunities to contribute, here at Rice and beyond. It may seem on occasion that you cannot make a difference, but I assure you, if you make your voice heard, you will make that difference.  And third, work together to achieve things otherwise not possible.

As we begin our first year at Rice, you and I are about to embark upon a great adventure.  Our ship is sailing.  Bon Voyage.