Rice Magazine | Spring 2015 by Rice University

The Magazine of Rice University

SPRING 2015

RETHINKING NATURE Timothy Morton philosophizes about ecological awareness. ALSO: Growing up on campus, a Zeff Fellowship chronicled, learning to communicate, and more research and campus news.

The Magazine of Rice University

SPRING 2015

Contents FEATURES

HOME SWEET CAMPUS Becoming a college master, RA or head resident fellow is often a family affair. So, what’s it like to grow up on campus? (Hint: Never boring.) By Jenny West Rozelle ’00

TAXI DETOUR By listening to the stories of migrant taxi drivers around the world, Sabrina Toppa discovered a love of journalism. By Sabrina Toppa ’13

WRITE. SPEAK. PRESENT. ENGAGE. Down with composition courses. Up with writing to learn — and learning to write. By Lynn Gosnell

DEPARTMENTS

S A L LY P O R T 5 P R E S I D E N T ’ S N O T E

S C O R E B O A R D 13

A B S T R A C T 16

S C E N E 22 NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observatories are

processed for launch in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Fla. MMS consists of four identical spacecraft that will provide the first 3-D views of a process known as magnetic reconnection. See story on Page 19.

A R T S & L E T T E R S

FA M I LY A L B U M

Photo: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 1

on the web FEATU RED CON TRI BU TORS LYNN GOSNELL

(“Write. Speak. Present. Engage.”) writes to learn and is always learning to write. Since 2012, she has been the editor of Rice Magazine and is a longtime contributor to higher education publications. JANA OLSON

2015 UNCONVENTIONAL STUDENTS AT RICE: A VIDEO SERIES Each year, videographer Brandon Martin seeks out a few of Rice’s outstanding seniors to profile. In this video, Petra Constable ’15 stands out from the crowd. From Jamaica to the Houston suburbs, this Will Rice College senior has seen the scenery change during the course of her life. One thing that hasn’t changed is her outgoing personality. In fact, one of her friends described Constable as a NARP (Not A Real Person). A biochemistry and cell biology major, she hopes to become a doctor one day. “You’ll find here at Rice, you have a campus full of nerdy NARPs,” Constable said. Watch: ricemagazine.info/256 See more videos from the 2015 series: ricemagazine.info/257

FO L LOW RI CE U N IVE R SIT Y

JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00

(“Home Sweet Campus”) has a special connection to the subject of kids on campus. As an RA at Brown College from 2009 through 2014, she and her husband, Joe ’99, raised their son, James, at Rice for the first three years of his life. James feels right at home at Brown College and now has hundreds of big brothers and sisters for life. SABRINA TOPPA ’13

Follow Rice news via the Office of Public Affairs’ social media outlets. From Instagram to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more, we document the daily goings-on about campus and beyond. And don’t forget to check out Rice Magazine’s dedicated blog. To read the current issue online, find us on ISSUU, or visit the Atavist website for our feature stories.

(“Taxi Detour”) works for TIME Magazine’s Hong Kong office. She spent 2013–2014 embarking on a 12–month Zeff Fellowship to interview migrant taxi drivers around the world. Follow Toppa on Twitter @SabrinaToppa.

ISSU U rice.edu/ricemagazine

FLICKR flickr.com/photos/ricepublicaffairs/

TW I T T E R @RiceMagazine

I N STAG R A M instagram.com/riceuniversity

Timothy Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, is equally at home discussing 19th-century British literature, object-oriented philosophy, food and his musical hero, Björk.

RIC E MAGA ZI N E B LOG ricemagazine.blogs.rice.edu

YO UTUB E youtube.com/riceuniversity

See interview on Page 7.

R I C E M AG A Z I N E F E ATUR E S ricemagazine.atavist.com 2

(“Six Degrees of Valhalla”) is a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at Rice. This is her second assignment for Rice Magazine, and her passion is to help fellow scientists communicate their work to the public. Outside of research and writing, she enjoys organizing events on campus, experimental cooking and relaxing with her three ginger tabbies.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

ON TH E COVER

Illustration by Adam Cruft.

forEword The Magazine of Rice University SPRING 2015 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR

Tanyia Johnson CREATIVE SERVICES

Jeff Cox senior director Dean Mackey senior graphic designer Jackie Limbaugh graphic designer Tracey Rhoades editorial director Jenny W. Rozelle ’00 assistant editor Tommy LaVergne senior university photographer Jeff Fitlow university photographer Intern Leticia Trevino ’16 CONTRIBUTING STAFF

B R A N D O N M A RT I N

B.J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Jeff Falk, Amy Hodges, Patrick Kurp, Brandon Martin, Tracey Rhoades, Jenny W. Rozelle, David Ruth, Mike Williams

Adventures, Past and Present

T 60 PAGES (EIGHT MORE THAN USUAL), THE SPRING 2015 ISSUE IS OVERFLOWING WITH NEWS AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE LATEST EVENTS, activities and

miscellaneous goings-on about campus. Two new series in Sallyport continue: residential college traditions (Baker College, you’re up!) and faculty portraits of “unconventional wisdom,” rendered in words by our subjects and in image by the brilliant illustrator Adam Cruft. Philosopher and English Professor Timothy Morton is featured and gets the cover treatment. Among Abstract’s research news and findings, “Six Degrees of Valhalla” returns with an original take on Rice graduate students’ academic genealogies. Electrical and computer engineering doctoral student Jesse Choe agreed to let us investigate his line — and that’s some family tree. Our three features are a diverse package. We’ve been wanting to take a look at growing up on campus as the child of a residential college master, RA or head resident fellow, and Jenny West Rozelle ’00 delivered a lovely series of profiles (and also her second child, a daughter named Clara, a few months ago). A former RA at Brown College, Jenny and her husband, Joe ’99, raised their son, James, while tending to hundreds of college students for five years. We also include a first-person chronicle of a year spent on an intense research project abroad, courtesy of the Zeff Fellowship. Finally, I had a blast visiting and observing Rice’s best writing teachers at work for a comprehensive look at the new Program in Writing and Communication. With the extra pages, we were also able to let you know about two distinguished guests at Rice this semester — Michael Petry ’81, the 2015 Campbell Lecturer, and Jón Gnarr, the hard-to-categorize Icelandic politician, actor and comedian. All these stories hint at the myriad ways Rice students turn their classrooms, colleges, studios, theaters and labs into places of learning and fulfillment, where “a spirit of high adventure,” as Edgar Odell Lovett said, is always within reach.

Lynn Gosnell lynn.gosnell@rice.edu

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 3

letters

Reader Response

THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

DEAR EDITOR

The article “Better Births” (Winter 2015) raises awareness about the pregnancy health challenges that are a result of racism. Our communities suffer from unusually high at-risk pregnancies and infant mortality rates. As an African-American professional, I also suffered from the pressures of psychosocial stress during my second pregnancy while living in Biloxi, Miss. I witnessed a high infant mortality rate for African-American women on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It is excellent that [Tyan Parker Dominguez] is now in Austin working with the city’s Health and Human Services Department as well as with Eva Roberts in the African-American community. I hope the community awareness models crafted by Tyan and Eva will be utilized in the city of Houston soon. —Pretta L. VanDible Stallworth ’83 I do take mild exception to “Of Neckties, Cranes and Gentlemen” (Winter 2015) on Page 10. Not only is the term “Gentlemen’s College” totally inappropriate (in my view and memory), but also Hanszen was only one of the four colleges that required coats and ties on Sunday. Gentlemen’s College? It is to laugh. I’m afraid Mr. Brotzen ’80, whose father was a professor in the mechanical engineering department when I was a student, got a little carried away. —Galloway Hudson ’60 EDITOR’S NOTE: In the Winter 2015 issue, in response to readers’ requests, we launched a series on college traditions — Hanszen batted first. In this issue, our friend Franz Brotzen takes up some (of the many!) Baker College traditions. We look forward to hearing your mild (or otherwise) exceptions.

WINTER 2015 SURVEY FINDINGS MOST-READ DEPARTMENT Abstract RUNNER-UP Sallyport MOST-READ FEATURE “Economics’ New Course” SELECT COMMENTS “Six Degrees of Valhalla” A cartoon about academic lineage and Valhalla “Excellent ‘comic,’ both content and art.” “I don’t get it.” “Picture Knowledge” Profiles and portraits of current students “This should be a regular feature of the magazine. I’m fascinated by the students.”

WRITE TO US Read Rice Magazine and get a little carried away. Write to us at the address to the right, or simply email comments to ricemagazine@rice.edu.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

Robert B. Tudor III, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Keith T. Anderson; Doyle Arnold; Laura Arnold; Nancy Packer Carlson; Albert Chao; T. Jay Collins; Mark Dankberg; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Doug Foshee; Lawrence Guffey; John Jaggers; Charles Landgraf; R. Ralph Parks; Lee H. Rosenthal; Ruth Simmons; Jeffery Smisek; Amy Sutton; Robert M. Taylor Jr.; Guillermo “Memo” Treviño; James S. Turley; Randa Duncan Williams; Huda Zoghbi. ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

David W. Leebron, president; George McLendon, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for IT and Chief Information Officer; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president of Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education; 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 Development and Alumni Relations. EDITORIAL OFFICES

Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 Phone: 713-348-6768 ricemagazine@rice.edu POSTMASTER

Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 ©May 2015 Rice University

News and Updates from Campus

risti Kincaid, who teaches general chemistry at Rice, loves obstacles — especially ones that require her to run, jump, scale, hang, grip and balance. So last year, Kincaid decided to put her fitness skills to the test by auditioning for the program “American Ninja Warrior,” a popular athletic competition now in its seventh season. First, she submitted a three-minute video audition, filmed mostly around campus. “I’m not just a chemistry teacher,” she said to her video audience, “I’m a chemistry ninja,” before showing off both her athleticism and her love of chemistry experiments. Kincaid’s wit and charm, combined with the avid rock climber’s impressive

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

display of upper body strength, won her an invitation to compete in the show’s regional qualifying round, held in Houston in March. “I liked the idea of getting an image out there of someone who is both nerdy and sporty.” To see how Kincaid did, tune in to NBC in late May. Watch Kincaid’s audition tape: ricemagazine.info/258 —L.G.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 5

sallyport

ARcode (Audio Response Code), an app that permits the sending of data using sound, won its designers the $3,000 firstplace prize in the fourth annual HackRice hackathon. More than 250 caffeine-fueled coders, hackers, programmers and friends took part in the 24-hour hacking marathon, held Jan. 30–Feb. 1 at Rice. Organized by the Rice Computer Science Club, HackRice was open to all programmers and designers, including people not enrolled at Rice. Participants formed 44 teams and, starting at noon on Saturday, created assorted digital projects such as apps and other software. Criteria used to judge the projects included innovation and creativity, technical complexity, impact/potential and polish. The winners collected $8,350 in prizes. “This year we tried to maintain an atmosphere of fun,” said Aaron Roe, a senior in computer science and technical chair of the Computer Science Club. “We raffled off prizes, totaling $1,500, every hour.” Read about all the prizewinners: ricemagazine.info/259 —Patrick Kurp QUEER RESOURCE CENTER OPENS In January, more than 100 people attended a kickoff party for the new Queer Resource Center on campus, dubbed the QRC. Rainbow stickers and pamphlets, detailing the goals of the center, were handed out. Those in attendance were asked to give suggestions for speakers, movies and literary sources that would benefit members of the Rice community in relation to LGBTQA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Asexual/Ally) issues. The LGBTQA+ community has had some resources in the past, including ally training sponsored by the Wellbeing Office and Queers & Allies, a long-standing club on campus. During the 2014 spring semester, a new LGBTQA+ group, Query, was founded. Starting off as a book club, which promoted an exploration and discussion of the queer identity, Query’s interests soon spread to include advocacy. “Part of that advocacy is founding the QRC. In turn, the QRC will go out and

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

advocate for other things, including the projects we feel are important,” said Nicholas Hanson-Holtry, a Sid Rich College junior and founding member of the center. The QRC has two central staff advisers: Catherine E. Clack in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Kathleen Gould in the Student Wellbeing Office. “My biggest priority for the QRC,” Hanson-Holtry said, “is that five years from now when [we’re] not here, the [QRC] is still going to be here.” —Letty Trevino ’16 KTRU-96.1 FM TO RETURN The Federal Communications Commission approved KTRU’s application for a low-power FM transmitter in February, and Rice’s student-run radio station expects to broadcast on Houston’s FM airwaves by the end of the year. “The KTRU community is incredibly excited to re-enter the FM format as a pillar of the Houston local music scene and continue

to provide its eclectic, broad range of music through the accessible means of FM radio,” said Sal Tijerina, KTRU manager. The transmitter will have a maximum power of 41 watts, which will reach a radius of about five miles around campus. KTRU has been broadcasting online since the sale of the 50,000-watt tower, frequency and license to the University of Houston was completed in 2011. Rice designated a portion of the proceeds from the sale to be used by KTRU. The station is using the majority of that funding for programming, but the funds also will cover the cost of equipment for the new signal and installation. “KTRU started out years ago as a low-wattage broadcast station in Hanszen College on the Rice campus, and this new transmitter will take KTRU back to its origins,” said Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson. He credited Will Robedee, KTRU general manager, with spearheading the effort to apply to the FCC for a low-power transmitter. Once the transmitter is installed later this year, KTRU will begin broadcasting on 96.1 FM; the station currently broadcasts 24 hours a day online at www.ktru.org and on HD radio at 90.1 HD2 24 as well as through TuneIn and IHeart apps and soon-to-be-added NextRadio app. Tijerina said the online and HD broadcasts will continue. —B.J. Almond

J E F F F I T LO W

HACKRICE DRAWS 250 CODERS

Sallyport

UNC O N V EN T I O N AL WISDO M

THE PHILOSOPHER Timothy Morton holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice, where he also is the director of English undergraduate studies. Since coming to Rice in 2012, Morton has been building programs in ecological theory, energy and sustainability. He is the author of many books, including “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World” (2013) and blogs daily at www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. In 2015–2016, Morton will co-direct the Humanities Research Center’s yearlong Rice Seminar, “After Biopolitics.” He spent the past year collaborating with Björk on the collection “Björk: Archives,” which was published to coincide

A DA M C R U F T

with the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on the artist and singer. ON HIS CAREER TRAJECTORY I decided to work with food, which is of course ecological — it comes out of the ground and it involves nonhuman beings. But it’s a particular angle. I wrote two books about food and two collections of essays and texts on food. I was gradually trying to figure out how to write more directly about ecology per se, and it took about 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, to get my mojo together in that regard.

EMBRACING OOO I’d already decided that the difference between life and nonlife isn’t very rigid, so why can’t I talk about coffee cups and spoons? There is a spoon, but the spoon isn’t directly present to me. I can’t directly access the spoon. There is a spoon — it’s not a knife — but when I look for the spoon all I find is spoon data: it’s metallic, it’s shiny, it’s a certain size. Nevertheless, the spoon is not an octopus; I’m very firm on this.

DEFINING OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (OOO) My first ecology book, “Ecology Without Nature” (2007), rather counterintuitively said that in order to have ecological awareness, philosophy, politics, ethics and aesthetics, you have to drop the idea of nature, which is this static “thing” over there, under here, in me. It’s in the DNA. It’s in the atoms. Ecological awareness is just the opposite. It’s the realization that my whole body is full of mercury right this minute. I started to think in a more ontological way — What is? What are the criteria for existence? And then somebody told me that this idea was called “object-oriented ontology.”

DISCOVERING HYPEROBJECTS When you go through the rabbit hole of object-oriented ontology, the first thing that happens to you — and this happened to its founder, Graham Harman — is that you’re like, OMG, I’m surrounded by all these things and permeated by them. I’ve got eyebrows, and in these eyebrows there are little crustaceans, and in these crustaceans there are these other things. I’m penetrated and permeated and surrounded by these objects — I can’t get them off me! And that’s ecological awareness, realizing that you have poisons and toxins and bacteria everywhere and you can’t get them off. continued on Page 8 S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 7

sallyport

TR A D IT I O N S | BEER BIK E

N MARCH, Beer Bike, a beloved annual tradition, celebrated its 58th annual bicycle race and drinking competition. Following Willy Week, a weeklong celebration that included picnics, pranks and college events, students, staff, faculty, alums and university friends gathered to cheer — and chant — for their favorite racers. Each residential college, as well as the Graduate Student Association, fielded teams, and this year’s event once again exemplified every college’s unique spirit and determination to become crowned Beer Bike champions. BEER BIKE 2015 RESULTS WOMEN’S RACE

1st Jones 2nd Will Rice 3rd Sid Rich

MEN’S RACE

1st Jones 2nd McMurtry 3rd Will Rice

ALUMNI RACE

1st Will Rice 2nd Jones 3rd Hanszen

NOT YOUR GRANDDADDY’S REAL Some of these things are actually symptoms of other things I can hardly see. Like, I probably have all this scar tissue in me from radiation — ultraviolet light, X-rays. This is evidence of something that’s real, but I can’t see it or touch it. So I started thinking, what’s a good word for that? Like, all the styrofoam in the world — think of the Pacific garbage patch. I’m going to call it “hyperobject.” It’s hyper because I can’t see it or touch it, but it’s an object because it’s actually physical and real. But it’s not my granddaddy’s real. WHAT IS REAL? [The term hyperobjects] is a very good way of talking about ecological things. We don’t really have language for the

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

climate — we can’t point to it. So global warming deniers have a point, which is that we can’t see it anywhere. It gives a word for something that’s real, even though you can’t see or touch it.

all forms of perceiving and all forms of technology, whether it be the singing voice or the latest computer technology. She’s working with some really deep things. I’ve always seen it as a kind of ecological art.

WHEN BJÖRK EMAILS I was just checking my inbox one day last July, and I found an email: “Good evening, my name is Björk.” It was pretty amazing. Of all the people I would have liked to work with since graduate school, she would be No. 1. And then we began this three-month email dialogue, a kind of a mind meld. It’s really the nicest thing I’ve ever done, both in terms of the experience of it and the writing.

FINDING A HOME AT RICE Something about the chemistry of Rice and Houston allows for eccentric weirdos such as myself to be semi in charge of stuff. Something about the fact that this is not the East Coast or the West Coast actually allows people to be a little more creative on the humanistic side. I feel like there’s a conversation that we could have at Rice, possibly better than anywhere else, between humanistic research and science and engineering.

MUSIC AS ECOLOGICAL ART Björk expresses really profound and vulnerable things to millions of people. It has to do with

ECOLOGICAL POLITICS I like being in a place where there’s that much connection to oil. Ecological politics is

always hypocritical, because you can’t be nice to everything at the same time. You can’t be nice to the bunny rabbit parasite and the bunny rabbit. You’re always going to be doing something “wrong.” We play this game of spot-the-hypocrite, whether we’re on the right or the left. But once you know that everything’s interconnected, then everything you do is a little hypocritical, because if you do this you’re not doing that. FINDING ONESELF IN TEXAS There’s a kind of can-do, let’s get it done attitude. If you want to save the world, you might as well get some Texan guy. The Brits are good for emergencies — everybody be calm, let’s proceed in an orderly way to the exits — but if you want to save the world you need someone who’s willing to bend the rules a little bit. —Michael Hardy ’06

J E F F F I T LO W

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM

continued from Page 7

Sallyport

TR A D I T I O N S | BA K E R C O L L EG E

Keeping It Classy

M A R K M ATS O N

AKER COLLEGE HAS SPAWNED MANY TRADITIONS OVER THE YEARS, FROM THE COSTUME DRAMA OF BAKERSHAKE TO THE UNCOSTUMED COMEDY OF BAKER 13. With its famous wood-paneled commons, it’s to be expected that some of Baker’s parties focus on food. Sides of beef, entire pigs and other mammals are cooked in an annual festival known as “Baker loves meat!” Current Master Ivo van der Werff, who along with his family is a vegetarian, said, “Our goal is to change the chant into ‘Baker loves veggies.’” He admits he has yet to succeed. O n e o f B a k e r ’s m o s t b e l o v e d traditions, the Baker Gentlemen’s Hedonist Society, or BGHS, is still held in near universal esteem by the college’s men and women alike, but it began in 1993 in response to a club based on what many considered to be boorish behavior by some of the males in the college. Greg Marshall ’86, who had just been named a Baker associate in 1992, had observed the behavior, so he came up with a clever alternative: the Baker Gentlemen’s Hedonist Society, emphasizing that hedonism, “defined as the pleasure of the individual — and of society — was actually a good thing,” Marshall said, ”because if society is happy, then it must be healthy and working well for all of its members.” The BGHS organized a series of events, from a night at the opera to a bluffer’s guide to wine ordering and an annual farewell toast for graduating seniors called Parting Glass. Baker’s longtime (and recently retired) college coordinator Venora Frazier, widely known as Ms. V., launched a spring tea ceremony with the BGHS. “I would bring my hats and ask everyone to dress up and come to tea,” she recalled. “It started out in the Baker office as a small event, later moving to Baker library, and in the last four to five years, has bloomed into a big event that is now held in the Baker Commons. This society is really representative of Baker being the classiest college on campus.” Despite the gender bias implied by its name, the BGHS was open to both sexes. Karen Park ’98 was the society’s first “minister of foreign affairs.” Her favorite BGHS event was a scotch tasting in a local bar for the over-21 set. “We learned some scotch basics and then tried a few different kinds. It was just the kind of event that perfectly embodied the mission of the Hedonist Society.”

Another popular BGHS initiative involves flowers — appropriately enough, in Baker red. Since its 1993 founding roughly coincided with Valentine’s Day, the gentlemen of the college announced the new society by hand-delivering single red carnations to every Baker woman. Incoming Baker president Victoria Eng, a junior, remembers being touched by the gesture as a freshman. “I still have my flower, somewhere,” she said. Baker’s horticultural traditions aren’t limited to cut flowers. Back in 1987, Baker community associate Gary Hornberger ’70 got a call asking for help in finding a Christmas tree to spruce up the commons for the holidays. “Where do you find a 20-foot Christmas tree?” he remembers thinking at the time. Through a circuitous path, Hornberger got in contact with Leon Toubin, who owned a parcel of land near Blinn College in Washington County. Toubin, the son of one of Rice’s earliest female graduates [Rosa Levin Toubin ’19], offered his tract, and a group of Baker freshmen began an annual tradition of renting a large flatbed truck and a chainsaw, driving to Brenham and harvesting a huge cedar to bring back to campus. When Toubin sold his acreage in the late ’90s, Hornberger found William Randall ’01, a Rice MBA graduate, who offered to let the freshmen cut down a tree every year on his property in Montgomery County. Baker’s outgoing president, senior Andrew Stout, said it’s great fun to watch the freshmen try to get a giant cedar into the commons each November. The six feet closest to the base is always well-decorated, he said, but the remaining, harder-to-reach, parts receive less attention. “But, we try,” he laughed. —Franz Brotzen ’80

IN MEMORIAM BILL ARHOS ’57, founder of “Austin City Limits,” the longest-running live music TV program, died April 11 at the age of 80, following a long illness. Raised in Bryan, Texas, Arhos graduated from Rice in 1957 with a B.A. in health and physical education. A star in two sports (baseball and basketball), Arhos remained ever proud that he was only the fifth pitcher in Rice baseball history to register a win over the University of Texas at Austin. In 2007, he was honored with the Association of Rice Alumni’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Following graduation, Arhos helped launch KLRU-TV, Austin’s public television station. He spent his entire broadcasting career there, retiring in 1999 after nearly 40 years. When the pilot program for “Austin City Limits” aired in 1974, featuring Willy Nelson, it would change the music scene not only in Texas but nationwide, becoming one of the premier live music venues in the country. Arhos served as executive producer of the show from 1975 to 1999 and president and general manager from 1986 until 1999. In 2014, Arhos, along with Willy Nelson, was inducted into the inaugural Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. Arhos is survived by two daughters, Leslie Lucas and Laura Jenkins, and a son, Damon Arhos, as well as six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His sister, Virginia Arhos Hardy, is a 1960 graduate of Rice. Watch the ACL induction video: ricemagazine.info/260

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 9

sallyport

In Brief 2015 Brown Prize

MARIE LYNN MIRANDA will join Rice University as provost July 1. Miranda, the Samuel A. Graham Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, specializes in research on environmental health. She is a leader in the evolving field of geospatial health informatics and has studied, for example, the impact of racial residential segregation on health. She is also the founding director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, a research, education and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Miranda served for 21 years on the faculty at Duke University. The child of immigrants, Miranda said that “growing up brown in a black neighborhood in Detroit” and doing research in disadvantaged and minority communities “kept me attuned to issues of inclusiveness.” Shaped by parents committed to education as the mechanism for opportunity, Miranda said, “The fact that I now have the privilege of serving as the next provost of Rice University bears witness to the power of education to transform lives.” A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke, she earned her A.B. in both mathematics and economics and a Ph.D. and M.A., both in economics, from Harvard. Miranda is married to Christopher Geron and has three children, Thompson, Mariel and Viviana. Read more: ricemagazine.info/261 —B.J. Almond

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

teaching the intro biochemistry courses stems partly from the fact that he is a biochemist and partly from his desire to prepare his students for postgraduate studies. “To me, as a biochemist, this is ‘The Course.’ It’s the chemistry of life, right?” Full story: ricemagazine. info/262 —Jade Boyd

Hebl honored with George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit Professor of Psychology Michelle “Mikki” Hebl became only the 10th faculty member to receive Rice’s George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit. Rice professors can receive this prestigious award just once in their career. A member of Rice’s faculty since 1998,

Hebl has won seven George R. Brown teaching awards. Hebl believes that great teaching involves “finding a message that you really believe in and then delivering it with as much passion as possible.” Outside the classroom, Hebl is an avid runner who has completed marathons in all 50 states and has run marathons on four of the seven continents. She offered the following advice for new teachers: “Enjoy the teaching moments. Not the ones that you are delivering to the students — the ones that they are delivering back to you.” Read more: ricemagazine. info/263 —Arie Passwaters

KiLife Wins 2015 Rice Business Plan Competition KiLife Tech, from Brigham Young University, emerged as the top startup company in the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business in March. Selected by 275 judges from the investment sector as representing the best investment opportunity and taking home $500,000 in cash and prizes, KiLife Tech bested 41 other competitors hailing from some of the world’s top universities. KiLife Tech developed the Kiband, a smartband for parents concerned about keeping track of young children in crowded public spaces. DexMat, led by Rice graduate students Dmitri Tsentalovich and Francesca Mirri, took home fifth place and a total of $64,000 in winnings. DexMat manufactures high-performance carbon nanotube fibers as a stronger, more flexible and lightweight replacement for old-fashioned metal wires that currently are being used in aerospace cables. Read more: ricemagazine.info/264

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E | S H A U L I N H O N / S LY W O R K S P H OTO G R A P H Y

NEW PROVOST APPOINTED

Yousif Shamoo knows there’s nothing flashy or trendy about his Biochemistry I and Biochemistry II courses. They are large lecture classes. The material is dense, and there’s lots of it. “It’s an old-fashioned class,” said Shamoo, professor of biosciences and vice provost for research. “I do everything wrong. I use PowerPoint. I talk. They listen. And yet, somehow it seems to work.” Rice alumni agree. Based on their votes, he received Rice’s highest teaching award — the George R. Brown Prize for Teaching Excellence. Shamoo has won three George R. Brown Awards for Superior Teaching since 2009. Shamoo’s dedication to

Sallyport

N OT ED A N D Q U OT ED

It’s very hard (in Iceland) to get out information on climate change. ... People are not very informed, and they’re very skeptical. If it was up to me, I would change Iceland into a renewable peace paradise of human rights and creativity and good music, and tourism would bloom, but it’s not up to me. Jón Gnarr, comedian, actor, musician, former mayor of Reykjavík, Iceland, and — most importantly — the writer-in-residence for Rice’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. Gnarr was a guest speaker on climate change awareness in an environmental studies course. See Gnarr’s story on Page 54.

I thought when I graduated from Rice that I would never use mathematics again, but of course I’ve gone on to use it throughout my career. In mathematics you can refer to a proof as beautiful, and what you mean by that is that it takes the minimal number of steps to get to the solution. Michael Petry ’81, quoted in houstoniamag.com, April 7, 2015. Rice’s 2015 Campbell Lecture Series featured three talks by Petry, a renowned artist, author, curator and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, London. See Petry’s story on Page 49.

Do religiously motivated people, by virtue of their religious commitments and projects, have a special right to disobey the laws that everyone else has to obey? Call that the issue of religious autonomy. Lawrence Sager, the Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Regents Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, and a visiting professor at Rice, speaking during a forum sponsored by the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, March 31, 2015. The event was co-sponsored by Rice University Lawyer Alumni and the law firm Locke Lord LLP. Read more: ricemagazine.info/265

Inflicting pain on the wrongdoer does not actually help restore the thing that is lost. Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, speaking on “Anger and Revolutionary Justice” for the President’s Lecture Series, Feb. 9, 2015. The lecture series is sponsored by the Office of the President and is supported by the J. Newton Rayzor Lecture Fund.

Universal human rights fly in the face of our well-cultivated impulse to withhold judgment. Amputating the hand of a thief is wrong ... regardless of cultural prerogatives. How do we resolve this tension between our desire to call something wrong and our conviction to be respectful and tolerant of different cultures? We resolve it by asking ourselves the question, ‘Where does the power lie?’ William F. Schulz, president and CEO, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, speaking on the future of human rights, Oct. 22, 2014. The lecture was sponsored by Rice’s Program in Poverty, Justice and Human Capabilities.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 11

President’s no te

DAV ID W. L E E B R ON

The Long View and the Long Run One of the features of universities is the long view we take of our mission and activities. That’s present in two important ways, namely in both our education and in our research missions. In the education of our students, and particularly our undergraduate education, we are not preparing students for their next job or even for the next five years. Even in this rapidly changing world, we aim to prepare our students for the long run — for the multiple jobs or even careers they will have, and for the different times of their lives, including their retirement. We hope to play a role in each graduate having a successful, happy and meaningful life. Universities like Rice don’t just ask the question of what we can do to assure our students of their next job (although we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of that issue), but how we can contribute to each student’s lifelong success and satisfaction. How do you educate for the long term? A recent Gallup-Purdue study identified the “big six” college experiences that make a difference in both employment satisfaction and overall preparation for life after college. The key attributes of an impactful college experience included having professors who inspired students about learning, who cared about the student as a whole person and who served as a mentor — supporting their goals and dreams. Key experiences included a long-term (semester or more) project, an internship that applied classroom knowledge and a high level of engagement in extracurricular activities. But the long-term view is even more critical to our research mission. In college, I studied the history of science, with a focus on the history of chemistry. My thesis was on a 19th-century German chemist who ended up on the wrong side of the debate over a new structural theory of molecules and in particular organic molecules. 12

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

The six-carbon benzene ring was theorized in 1865, and the three-dimensional tetrahedral structure of carbon bonds was first established in 1873. In many ways, these discoveries (and many intervening ones such as the structure of graphite in 1924) laid the foundation for the discovery at Rice University over 100 years later of carbon-60, or buckminsterfullerene (“buckyball”). In turn, that discovery led to the new field of nanotechnology, which is producing at Rice and elsewhere remarkable applications in fields ranging from water purification to medicine to energy. Even for an individual scientist, a project of discovery can last decades. Rice Professor Pat Reiff, an eminent space physicist, first participated in the formulation of a project idea to explore the magnetopause (which I am sure you know is the boundary between the magnetosphere and the solar wind plasma). One of the projects to emerge from this proposal in

1990 was incorporated in a space mission launched just two months ago, a quarter century after the idea was formulated. It is part of the nature of human beings to be impatient, to want to solve problems quickly and to move on. Our institutions increasingly, and often unfortunately, reflect diminished attention spans and time horizons. If financial returns do not quickly materialize, many, if not most, of us sell the securities. In many cases, we judge the performance of our politicians over two-year cycles, and that in turn is the view they take. Under many circumstances, after one or two failures, we decide to move on to new people or new projects. British economist John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that “in the long run, we are all dead.” Keynes did not mean to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about the long run, but only that we also should be concerned about the impact of the short run. Just because in the long run the economy will find its equilibrium shouldn’t lead us away from measures that will stimulate growth and alleviate suffering in the short term. I don’t mean to get into a debate here over Keynesianism, but only to suggest that the mission of great universities, and especially research universities, is biased toward the long run. And that these institutions are essential to the future of our cities, our nations, our society and indeed probably our species (and in fact other species). Bringing together and supporting people who believe that the discovery of knowledge will in fact make a big difference in the long run, even when we can’t yet say what that difference will be, is central to our mission. It took over 200 to 300 years of work in modern chemistry, pursued largely at universities in countries across the globe, to arrive at the buckyball. Of course, in the spirit of Keynes we must keep our eye on the short-run issues as well — balancing the university’s budget, our reputation and rankings, the hypercompetitive environment, and a wide range of urgent and contested issues. But it’s ultimately the long run that counts, both for our students and for the world that benefits from our additions to knowledge and understanding.

Sports News and Profiles

Record-breaker: Claire Uke When senior Claire Uke broke Regina Cavanaugh’s ’87 29-year-old Rice record in the shot put at the 2015 C-USA Indoor Championships, her mind was in another place.

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

he 17.95-meter throw won Uke her third-consecutive C-USA Indoor title, but it came only a week after her aunt had died of breast cancer. “I took it really hard because it affected my mom really badly,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to do anything tremendous at this meet. I just went in with the mindset that each of my throws would be dedicated to her memory. It turned out that she was smiling down from heaven at me because it was at this meet that I broke the school record and garnered the third-best throw in the country.” It wasn’t the first time Uke excelled at a track and field event. She won five consecutive shot put competitions to start the 2015 indoor season. She has 26 career victories in throwing events — she also competes in the discus.

Although Uke plans to train for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, she said she’s not interested in a long-term professional career. Rather, her sights are set on medicine. “I’m a kinesiology major with a concentration in sports medicine,” she said. “My dream career is to be an orthopedic surgeon. I’ve been completely fascinated by the subjects of anatomy and physiology, and adding the biomechanics component of movement to this was one of the biggest reasons I chose my major.” Uke has grown so close to the Rice track team she considers them family. “The friendships and bonds I’ve been able to make with these girls, regardless of what event they do, have been ones that I will cherish for a lifetime.” —Franz Brotzen ’80

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 13

sallyport

Soccer for All As a midfielder for the Owls soccer team and co-chair of Futbol 4 Dreams, a charity that collects soccer balls, uniforms and equipment for underprivileged kids, Gabriela “Gabi” Iribarne has juggled a lot of balls during her time at Rice. Iribarne, who will graduate in May, hopes to train with the Argentinian National Team this summer before starting graduate school.

New coach for women’s basketball

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

ABOUT GABI 6 Gabriela Iribarne CLASS

Senior

HOM E T OW N

Mission Viejo, Calif. HEIGHT

5’2”

POSITION

Midfielder

n 2012, Iribarne, who holds dual citizenship with the United States and Argentina, was hand-selected by the Argentinian national team to compete at the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup. The competition, which is played in late August each year, overlapped with Iribarne’s fall soccer season at Rice. But with a little juggling and the support of her coaches and professors, Iribarne not only joined some of the world’s best female soccer players under 20, she scored the game-tying goal in the South American qualifying round, helping her team qualify to go to Japan. For Iribarne, the extra support she has received while at Rice is what makes Rice, Rice. “The Rice community is special. This is seen in the diverse student body as well as the amazing professors and staff,” she said. “I was constantly challenged and encouraged to have big ideas and pursue them.” In recognition of her significant community service, good academic standing and athletic participation, Iribarne received a C-USA Spirit of Service Award, while helping women’s soccer win the 2014 C-USA title this past fall. Scoring the winning pair of goals, Iribarne was named the tournament’s most valuable offensive player. “I am excited for the opportunities to come,” Iribarne said. “But whatever happens, I will always be playing soccer either competitively or recreationally.” —Tracey Rhoades

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

Tina Langley, who has helped develop University of Maryland into a Final Four program over the past seven seasons, has been named the fifth head coach in Rice University women’s basketball history, Director of Athletics Joe Karlgaard announced in April. “Tina Langley is a winner,” Karlgaard said. “She’s an enthusiastic, demanding and caring coach who develops young women into great players, students and citizens. I’m ecstatic that she’s agreed to lead our women’s basketball program.” Langley spent the past seven seasons serving as Maryland’s associate head coach, compiling a 195-49 record during that time. The Terrapins are coming off a 2014–15 campaign in which Langley helped guide the team to their second consecutive Final Four appearance and a 34-3 record, climbing to a high of No. 3 in the USA Today Coaches Poll. “Rice University has a rich tradition of excellence in the classroom and in athletics,” Langley said. “I feel fortunate that I can walk into the home of a high school student and promise her and her parents that their academic goals will be valued every bit as much as their basketball goals, and that both can be achieved at the highest level at Rice.” Read more: ricemagazine. info/266

Sallyport

Four-Time Conference Champs

STOVAL-REDD JOINS OWLS “We want to welcome Ziggy to Rice University and to the Rice football family.” With those words, Rice University head football coach David Bailiff made 7-year-old Fre’derick “Ziggy” Stoval-Redd of Mississippi an honorary member of the team. Team IMPACT, a national organization, pairs Division I athletic teams with children with life-threatening illnesses. Ziggy has fought off acute lymphoblastic leukemia twice and is currently in remission. “I just want to say ‘thank you’ for allowing the opportunity for him to be a part of the team and for allowing him the opportunity to live life like a regular kid,” said mom Phila Stoval. Read more: ricemagazine.info/267

—David Ruth

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E | R I C E S P O RTS I N FO R M AT I O N

PILLOW VAULTS TO RECORD WINS

ROPER SETS RECORD Last December, Rice sophomore Cali Roper became the first runner in school history to be awarded the Conference USA Cross Country Female Athlete of the Year award. Roper, from Willis, Texas, advanced to the NCAA Championships (placing 47th) after finishing fifth at the NCAA South Central Regionals, where she set a school record in the 6K.

Senior Chris Pillow followed up a sensational 2014 track and field campaign by earning First-Team All-American honors with a seventh-place finish in the pole vault at the 2015 NCAA Indoor Championships. He also won a second consecutive C-USA indoor pole vault title in February, then represented the Owls at the USA Track and Field Indoor Championships and was the top collegiate finisher, placing second overall with a lifetime best vault of 5.60m (18-4.50). Pillow now has his eyes set on a trip back to the NCAA Outdoor Championships.

After celebrating its previous three Conference USA championships on foreign courts, the Rice women’s tennis team made certain that the inaugural season at the George R. Brown Tennis Center would end with a championship flair as the Owls downed Marshall 4-1 in April to capture the C-USA women’s tennis title. The title was the fourth C-USA crown for the program in the past 10 seasons that Rice has been a member of the conference and the third consecutive title win. Rice captured previous championships at Southern Methodist University, the University of Houston and Old Dominion, and the most recent title allowed the team to match Tulsa and Tulane as the only schools to win three consecutive C-USA women’s tennis titles. Senior Natalie Beazant was selected C-USA Player of the Year for the second time. Head coach Elizabeth Schmidt earned her third consecutive C-USA Coach of the Year honor. Every member of the Owls starting lineup was honored by BEAZANT league coaches as part of the All C-USA singles and doubles teams. At press time, the team was heading to the first regional tournament of the 2015 NCAA Women’s Tennis Championship. The Owls are ranked 29th nationally. Read more: ricemagazine.info/268

Head coach Elizabeth Schmidt earned her third consecutive C-USA Coach of the Year honor.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 15

Abstract

Findings, Research and more

Carina Nebula survey reveals details of star formation A new Rice University-led survey of one of the most active star-forming regions in the galactic neighborhood is helping astronomers better understand the processes that may have contributed to the formation of the sun 4.5 billion years ago. “Most stars form in giant molecular clouds, regions where the density of matter is sufficient for hydrogen atoms to pair up and form H2 molecules,” said Patrick Hartigan, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice and lead author of the new study. “The Carina Nebula is an ideal place to observe how this happens because there are dozens of examples of forming stars at various stages of development.” The Carina Nebula spans more than 100 light-years and is visible to the naked eye as a bright glowing patch in the Milky Way for observers in the Southern Hemisphere. In addition to thousands of stars similar in mass to the sun, Carina 16

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

contains more than 70 O-type stars, each with a mass between 15 and 150 times that of the sun. O-stars burn hot and bright and die young, typically within 10 million years. These massive stars play a key role in how less-massive, solar-type stars in the same region evolve because O-stars evaporate and disperse dust and gas that might otherwise collect in a disk to form planets around the low-mass stars. In the new survey, Hartigan and colleagues Megan Reiter and Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona and John Bally of the University of Colorado at Boulder used the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Extremely Wide-Field Infrared Imager and its

Mosaic camera to photograph the entire Carina region from the four-meter Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo in northern Chile. Hartigan said numerical simulations in recent decades have suggested that strong stellar winds from O-stars also induce star formation by compressing material in a molecular cloud to the point where it becomes gravitationally unstable, a process known as triggering. He said the new images reveal important constraints on this process. Read more: ricemagazine.info/269 —Jade Boyd

N A S A , E S A , N . S M I T H ( U N I V E R S I T Y O F CA L I FO R N I A , B E R K E L E Y ) A N D T H E H U B B L E H E R I TAG E T E A M ( STS C I /A U R A )

PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

abstract

BIOENGINEERING

New tactic targets brain tumors Drugs that target insulin pathways to slow or stop the growth of brain tumors are going in the right direction but appear to be on the wrong track, according to new research at Rice University. Through detailed computer models and experiments on two distinct glioblastoma cell types, the Rice lab of Amina Qutub, assistant professor of bioengineering, has found reason to believe therapies that attack the insulin signaling pathway thought to influence tumor development have had mixed results in trials because they go after the wrong targets. The new work, led by Rice graduate student Ka Wai Lin, is the first to establish, through a computer model, mechanisms that show why some brain tumors are insulin-sensitive while others appear to be insulin-insensitive. The National Science Foundation supported the research. The research, which appears this month in PLOS Computational Biology, provides deeper understanding of interactions between key factors in the insulin signaling pathway that influence the growth of glioblastomas. See a video about this research: ricemagazine.info/270 SOCIOLOGY

Eviction can result in depression, poorer health and higher stress Eviction from a home can have multiple negative consequences for families — including depression, poorer health and higher levels of stress — and the side effects can persist for years, according to new research from sociologists at Rice University and Harvard University. The study focused on low-income, urban mothers — a population at high risk of eviction. “The year following eviction is incredibly trying for low-income mothers,” said Rachel Kimbro, an associate professor of sociology at Rice, associate director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s Urban Health Program and the study’s co-author. “Eviction spares

neither their material, physical nor mental well-being, thereby undermining efforts of social programs designed to help them.” Read more: ricemagazine.info/271 —Amy McCaig CHEMISTRY

Carbon nanotube fibers make superior links to brain Carbon nanotube fibers invented at Rice University may provide the best way to communicate directly with the brain. The fibers have proved superior to metal electrodes for deep brain stimulation and to read signals from a neuronal network. Because they provide a two-way connection, they show promise for treating patients with neurological disorders while monitoring the real-time response of neural circuits in areas that control movement, mood and bodily functions. The fibers, created by the Rice lab of chemist and chemical engineer Matteo Pasquali, consist of bundles of long nanotubes originally intended for aerospace applications where strength, weight and conductivity are paramount. The individual nanotubes measure only a few nanometers across, but when millions are bundled in a process called wet spinning, they become thread-like fibers about a quarter the width of a human hair. Read more: ricemagazine.info/272 —Mike Williams

$5,000 for Excellence in Engineering as well as one of two Willy Revolution Awards for Innovation in Engineering Design. The second prize brought them an additional $3,000. “It’s unreal! Really cool,” Hunt said. “I’m glad we put all the work in that we did.” The project was sponsored by the Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits Laboratory directed by Aydin Babakhani, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Read more: ricemagazine.info/273 —Mike Williams KINDER INSTITUTE FOR URBAN RESEARCH

Economic optimism despite oil slump Rice sociologist Stephen Klineberg, founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, released the new findings of this year’s Kinder Houston Area Survey in late April. Rice’s Kinder Institute conducts the annual survey, now in its 34th year. Key findings from the 2015 survey:  Positive ratings of local job opportunities (“excellent” or “good”) increased from 60 percent in 2014 to 69 percent in 2015.  65 percent of Harris County residents said

traffic congestion has gotten worse — a 9 percent jump since 2013.  43 percent of the survey participants

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Team D.R.A.D.I.S. wins Engineering Design Showcase Team D.R.A.D.I.S. was a double winner at the annual George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase at Rice University for its development of a dynamic radar and digital imaging system to help drivers avoid accidents. The competition held at Rice’s Tudor Fieldhouse in April featured the designs of 88 teams of engineering students who competed for nearly $20,000 in prizes. The D.R.A.D.I.S. team of Rice seniors Galen Schmidt, Spencer Kent and Jeremy Hunt, all electrical engineering majors (though Schmidt has a second major in computer science), took the top prize of

said that making improvements in public transportation is the best solution to the traffic woes; just 26 percent thought the answer lies in the traditional solution of building bigger and better roads and highways, down from 33 percent in 2011.  More than half — 58 percent — of area

residents believe that abortion is “morally wrong,” yet 63 percent are opposed to “a law that would make it more difficult for a woman to obtain an abortion.” These answers have remained essentially unchanged across the years of the surveys. Read more: ricemagazine.info/274 —Amy McCaig

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 17

abstract

Recent Faculty Publications Aiming for Global Accounting Standards by Kees Camfferman and Stephen A. Zeff (Oxford University Press, 2015) After six years of extensive research, writing and a total of 170 interviews conducted around the world, “Aiming for Global Accounting Standards: The International Accounting Standards Board, 2001–2011” by Kees Camfferman and Stephen A. Zeff has been published by Oxford University Press. The book was commissioned by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and offers a historical perspective to help readers understand the background of International Financial Reporting Standards and the issues faced by the IASB. This essential read on accounting standards is not a text book but a historical resource, according to Zeff, the holder of the Keith Anderson Professorship in Business and professor of accounting at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

VEST helps deaf feel speech Under the direction of neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman ’93, Rice students are refining a vest with dozens of embedded actuators that vibrate in specific patterns to represent words. The vest responds to input from a phone or tablet app that isolates speech from ambient sound. Eagleman introduced VEST — Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer — to the world at a TED Conference in March. He is director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine and an adjunct assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. His lab studies the complex mechanisms of perception through psychophysical, behavioral and computational approaches as well as neuroscience and the law. The Rice students working on VEST are seniors Zihe Huang, Evan Dougal, Eric Kang and Edward Luckett and juniors Abhipray Sahoo and John Yan. They are aiding Scott Novich, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Rice who works in Eagleman’s lab. Novich devised the algorithm that enables the VEST to “hear” only the human voice and screen out distracting sounds. The low-cost, noninvasive vest collects sounds from a mobile app and converts them into tactile vibration patterns on the user’s torso. Watch a video: ricemagazine.info/275 —Patrick kurp 18

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism

by Gordon Hughes (University of Chicago Press, 2014) This is the first English book written about Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), an abstract artist who worked in Paris in the early 20th century. Hughes argues that Delaunay is the only abstract artist who belonged to the abstract movement in response to visual scientific theory. Hughes is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History and the director of undergraduate studies in art history at Rice.

Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century

by Christian J. Emden (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Emden argues for an analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism within a historical context, that is, the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the 19th century. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history and history of science. Emden is a professor in Rice’s Department of German Studies.

Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War

by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) Guthrie-Shimizu argues that the introduction of baseball into Japanese culture has helped establish and fortify the political, cultural and economic relationship between the U.S. and Japan. The sport carries American values and has established itself as a symbol of modernization for Japan. Guthrie-Shimizu is the Dunlevie Family Chair in History and professor of history at Rice.

Björk: Archives

texts by Klaus Biesenbach, Alex Ross, Nicola Dibben and Timothy Morton (Thames & Hudson, 2015) Published to coincide with the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibition on the singer and artist, “Björk: Archives” gathers five individual volumes, each one taking a different approach to exploring and understanding Björk’s creative pursuits. Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice and the director of English undergraduate studies, contributed “This Huge Sunlit Abyss From The Future Right There Next To You,” the fruits of a three-month collaboration between Björk and Morton exploring ideas of art, religion, philosophy, politics and, of course, music.

abstract

A long road to a perfect launch The spectacular night launch of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in March, was an important one for Rice’s space science family.

Rice folks who attended the March 12 Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission launch included (from left) Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)’s Jim Burch '68, MMS principal investigator; former Rice staffer Bill Lewis and his wife, Laura; Cynthia Lyle ’64 and SwRI’s David Young ’64; Pat Reiff ’74, MMS co-investigator; Rice Space Institute Administrator Umbe Cantú; SwRI’s Roman Gomez ’07; and incoming Rice graduate student James Webster. Those not pictured include NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Deirdre Wendel ’06, Rice Space Institute Director David Alexander and Rice Dean of Natural Sciences Peter Rossky. The MMS sits atop the Atlas V launch vehicle. See a larger picture of the MMS on the Table of Contents page.

NASA | RUDEE GOMEZ

or those of us who put in a substantial part of our careers in dreaming up the mission (it arose from a workshop 25 years ago), to getting it into NASA’s strategic plan, then into the NASA budget, then made into a proposal opportunity that our Rice alumni-led team won, and finally into detailed design, fabrication and testing, it was a long road that culminated in a perfect launch. And now the real business of the mission begins. MMS comprises four identical, disc-shaped spacecraft, each about 13 feet in diameter, to study Earth’s magnetosphere — the bubble-shaped region around our planet that is dominated by Earth’s magnetic field. MMS is specifically designed to study “magnetic reconnection,” a process that taps the energy stored in a magnetic field and converts it — typically explosively — into heat and kinetic energy. This work is significant because it will teach us some important physics that could help us better predict how solar storms will impact Earth. For decades, Rice has been a leading player in creating models that forecast how geomagnetic storms will impact Earth. We call this “space weather”; major events are caused by solar flares and the blasts of plasma they erupt. To forecast space weather today, we use upstream satellites like the Advanced Composition Explorer and the new Deep Space Climate Observatory to measure the solar wind and the magnetic field imbedded in it. Our models use that data in a neural network to predict how the magnetosphere will respond to the solar wind, and we’ve gotten very good at interpreting this data and using it to forecast space weather: We haven’t missed a major storm in nearly 12 years! Since we can accurately forecast storms today, we can reliably give a few hours’ warning to satellite operators and power-grid managers about how those storms may impact Earth. But we’ve reached the limit of what we can achieve with forecasting. The next step — and this is where MMS comes in — is to develop full-blown simulations of space weather, much like the

atmospheric simulations that are routinely used for weather forecasting today. Understanding magnetic reconnection is key to understanding solar flares and space weather, and MMS will help us by making the first unambiguous high-time resolution measurements of plasma composition and of electric and magnetic fields at reconnection sites. Coupled with models from the theory team, the measurements will help us determine how reconnection produces large numbers of energetic particles. Many Rice folks played a role in getting MMS off the ground, and a large group of us got to attend the March 12 launch at Kennedy Space Center. Following a spectacular nighttime liftoff, the four spacecraft were deployed around midnight. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out. The magnetometers were barely extended when the St. Patrick’s Day solar storm hit Earth. It was the largest storm of the solar cycle by far — and one that our forecast system correctly predicted. We captured some data from that storm, but we’ll get even more next time, after the postlaunch shakedown is complete. We don’t build spacecraft hardware at Rice anymore. It is too expensive to keep the ultra-high-quality engineering and test facilities going. But our partnership with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio is a tremendous benefit because the institute has the facilities and staff and has won a steady string of missions to keep the critical mass going, especially because of Jim Burch ’68, MMS principal investigator. By partnering with Southwest Research Institute, Rice faculty and staff have first-class access to the best spacecraft missions like MMS. Read more: ricemagazine.info/276 —Pat Reiff ’74 Pat Reiff is co-investigator on NASA’s MMS mission, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice, and associate director for public outreach at the Rice Space Institute.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 19

abstract

SIX D EG REES O F VA L HAL L A SIX DEGREES OF VALHALLA is inspired by Stanley Milgram’s experiments in social networks; actor Kevin Bacon’s eponymous parlor game; the stellar academic genealogies of Rice graduate students, alumni and faculty; and the enduring awesomeness of Valhalla, Rice’s graduate student pub. CHOE, current Rice graduate student, pursues his Ph.D. under Kevin Kelly at Rice, imaging crystals and conductive polymers at the atomic level. THOMSON earned his Ph.D. under Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), Nobel laureate for discovering argon; also famous for explaining why the sky is blue (Rayleigh scattering).

KELLY, now an associate professor at Rice, earned his Ph.D. under Naomi Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor, while studying carbon-based nanomaterials.

JESSE CHOE 5

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING (ECE) GRADUATE STUDENT

BORN was a postdoc for J.J. Thomson, Nobel Prize winner for discovering electrons.

HALAS’ Ph.D. adviser was terahertz pioneer D.R. Grischkowsky, whose academic lineage in quantum mechanics dates back to Werner Heisenberg.

4 HEISENBERG earned his Ph.D. under Max Born, Nobel laureate who was nominated several times for work on crystal lattices, solid state physics and quantum mechanics.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

abstract

N E W FACES

A NEW FORM OF ASIAN STUDIES

S O N I A RYA N G

by Jeff Falk

ONIA RYANG, THE NEW DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES’ CHAO CENTER FOR ASIAN STUDIES, ENVISIONS A NEW FORM OF ASIAN STUDIES THAT CAN SPEAK TO THE WORLD AND GLOBALIZATION AT LARGE, beyond the narrow confines of nation-state boundaries. A noted social anthropologist and Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies, Ryang is ethnic Korean and grew up in Japan. She is fluent in Korean and Japanese. The author of five books in English and one in Japanese, Ryang came to Rice in July 2014 from the University of Iowa.

J E F F F I T LO W

Q What drew you to Rice and Houston? A I found a great opportunity at Rice and the Chao Center to pursue my passion for educating America’s future leaders and endowing them with integrity, a healthy sense of social justice and indignation about social inequality and political and economic injustice. Needless to say, I am very happy to be here, but at the same time, I feel my honor comes with responsibility — a greater responsibility for showing students new ways to look at the world, exploring new research areas related to Asia and the world and to reach out to the larger public in Houston and beyond. With Houston being the fastest-growing city in the U.S. in terms of new Asian populations, I am extremely fortunate to have a critical mass of Asian and Asian-American community leaders and activists that I can try to cultivate a good working relationship with. Q What do we need to pay attention to in Asian studies right now? A Asian studies in the United States started and prospered with wars — not one, but many, including World War II, Korea, Vietnam and, most recently, the Cold War. If we were to look at the Middle East as part of Asia, the current war against terror also plays a part. However, it (Asian studies) also waned as these wars came and went. There is another important factor: economics. In the context of Asia and Asian studies, the economic rise and fall of a nation often was a result of heavy U.S. involvement precisely because of the concerns on the security front.

Look at Japan’s rise as a world economy. It was protected and aided heavily by the U.S. due to the post-World War II concern over the Cold War’s Far Eastern front. Look at South Korea, where the heavy-handed military dictatorships in the past profited enormously because of U.S. aid and military protection. Thus, growing on the backs of the poor and the weak, the South Korean economy rose to one of the strongest in Asia. China, however, is slightly different and this is one challenge that Asian studies faces. Should we simply study China? Or is China’s rise different from the past rises of Asian nations because of the intense globalization that is happening simultaneously? I think China’s rise as well as the transformation of Asia needs to be seen in close interaction with globalization.

Q How is the Chao Center positioned to explore these questions? A Thanks to (former Chao Center interim director, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities, and professor of history) Richard Smith’s original forward-looking vision, the Chao Center stands on the history of having emphasized a transnational approach to Asia. I intend to build on this tradition and will go further along this line envisioning a new form of Asian studies that can speak to the world and globalization at large, beyond the narrow confines of nation-state boundaries. This is, of course, easier said than done. It takes one’s lifetime, if you like, to master one Asian language, so how do we ever make transnational Asian studies possible? This is a question that I believe current Asian studies as a scholarly discipline faces, and the Chao Center is at the forefront of this inquiry.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 21

Scene

22â&#x20AC;&#x192;

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

Jury of Mentors and Peers Photo by Tommy LaVergne For Rice School of Architecture (RSA) students like senior Yutian He, months of studying, experimenting and model building culminate in the studio final review, or jury. During this milestone event, faculty and distinguished guests provide critical feedback, a process that plays out in real time and is open to fellow students and the public. Yutian’s project, “Disassembling the Astrodome,” grew out of a seminar and studio where students chose a significant Houston building to research and redesign. The project “involved a careful study of the original working drawings of the stadium in order to propose new ways that it might come apart,” said seminar leader Sam Stewart-Halevy, RSA’s Wortham Fellow. Here, construction elements such as lamellas, beams, tensile rings and seating braces find new form and purpose, from drive-in theaters to rock-climbing walls, night markets to climate-controlled urban farms. The model pictured depicts buildings arranged in a sand base, “a small portion of my entire project which is on an urban scale that spans the entire Astrodomain,” Yutian said. “Rather than tearing down the Astrodome completely,” said Stewart-Halevy, “she has imagined a form of deconstruction that would distribute the pieces of the dome across the site in the form of smaller recreational structures, walls and towers.” —Lynn Gosnell

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 23

FOR THE MANY ALUMNI WHO LOOK BACK SENTIMENTALLY ON THEIR YEARS AT RICE, THE BEAUTIFUL 300-ACRE CAMPUS WAS LIKE A HOME AWAY FROM HOME. BUT FOR A SMALL NUMBER OF YOUNG PEOPLE, RICE REALLY HAS BEEN “HOME.”

BY JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

It can be a little surreal to be the offspring of college masters, head resident fellows (HRFs) or resident associates (RAs) â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the faculty and staff members and their families who live full time in houses or apartments on campus and provide guidance and intellectual support to the students in their residential colleges. Picture a few hundred extended family members living, dining, studying, sleeping and, yes, sometimes partying in close quarters. But those years of living on campus can provide a lifetime of memories. Masters, HRFs and RAs form a special bond with the many students who live at their college through the years, and their kids get to share that in their own way as they find their place in the Rice world.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e â&#x20AC;&#x192; 25

FRANZ BROTZEN ’80 COLLEGES J O N E S A N D B R O W N YEARS 1 9 74 – 1 97 5 , 1 9 7 7– 1 9 8 2

ice has always been a part of Franz Brotzen’s life. His father, the late Professor of Materials Science Franz Brotzen, first began working at Rice in 1954. Both Professor Brotzen and his wife, Frances, were active associates at Jones College before being asked to fill in as masters for a year while then-master and Professor Neil “Sandy” Havens was on sabbatical. The year was 1974, and the younger Franz Brotzen was leaving for college at Johns Hopkins University. After one semester, he decided that attending school was not in the cards for him at that time. “I was ready to be wild and irresponsible. I was a ne’er-do-well,” he said. Franz returned to Houston and began working for a landscaping business. He lived in Jones House off and on during spring 1975. “My parents were very close to a number of the women at Jones [which was then female only]. In May, when

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

school ended, the students had to move out of the college. So we had people crashing in the masters house. When I moved back into the house that month, my bedroom was taken. I ended up sleeping on a cot in my father’s office.” Soon after, their one-year mastership ended and the family went back to his parents’ house. Then, in summer 1977, they became masters at Brown College, also a women’s college at that time. “We got notice that they were going to be masters again, this time full time at Brown instead of just the one year like at Jones. My dad said, ‘Your mother and I have talked about it and I think we’re going to move in. Are you up for this?’ I was like, sure, why not?” Franz had begun attending Rice in January of that year as a second-semester freshman and had been commuting to his classes, so living on campus was a welcome change. Although he was assigned

to Lovett College and developed many of his strongest friendships with students there, he never lived at that college, choosing instead to live at home, first at his parents’ house and then at the Brown Masters House. “Brown House is a nice house with two refrigerators that were always stocked because they were always having parties — part of the masters’ job description, I suppose.” Franz lived at Brown until his graduation in 1980. “It was a great experience because people were always coming in. I remember waking up one morning when school was out for the summer. My parents were out of town and I heard voices downstairs. They were having some kind of event to welcome the new freshmen. There were all these lovely young women dressed up; it was some kind of tea or something. You’d wake up to wonderful surprises like that.” If his parents hadn’t been masters, Franz probably would have continued to live at home rather than on campus, he admitted. As an older student who went back to school at age 22, he was a selfdescribed “loner” during the one semester he commuted to classes from off campus. “I never had an O-Week, so I never met people in that context,” he said. “As soon as we moved into Brown, I instantly knew 180 women. I also was getting to know other people across campus and worked for the Thresher. Living at Brown, to me at the time and in retrospect, was the best of all possible worlds.”

OPPOSITE PAGE:

Franz working on a final paper at the Brown Masters House as friends, spread throughout the house, do the same. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE STARTING AT UPPER LEFT:

The Brotzen family; Frances Brotzen on the Brown College roof; Professor Brotzen’s mastership announcement

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 27

Ashlyn with Wiess students at a powderpuff game

ASHLYN HUTCHINSON MUNSON COLLEGE W I E S S YEARS 1 9 9 4 – 2 0 0 1

shlyn Hutchinson Munson first moved onto the Rice campus with her parents and younger sister, Emma, when she was 13 years old. Although she already had spent time at Rice as the daughter of Chemistry Professor (and now Dean of Undergraduates) John Hutchinson, she was not entirely happy about the move “for teenage angst reasons that have long since been forgotten,” said Ashlyn. John and his wife, Paula, had been associates at Lovett College when she was very young, and she remembers attending college nights there. “I was promised that if I sat through dinner, I could dance on a table later.” Living on campus brought a whole new range of experiences beyond dinner and dancing. She held a variety of jobs at Rice, including waiting tables at Cohen House and working as an administrative assistant in

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

the dean of engineering’s office. In her first two years at Wiess, she participated in intramural softball and basketball teams and was in the Wiess musical “Hello, Hamlet!” “My best memory is when my mom threw a surprise birthday party for my dad’s and my joint 40th and 15th birthdays,” she said. “She had Baker 13 [the semimonthly run of a number of shaving cream-covered students] run through the party. My 15-year-old friends had a variety of reactions. One says that she has yet to recover 19 years on.” After living on a small, private university campus for so many years, Ashlyn chose a different route for her own education, attending the University of Colorado at Boulder for her undergraduate degree and the Colorado School of Mines for her Ph.D. in mathematics. “When it came time for me to apply

to colleges, I was not nearly as stressed as my friends. College didn’t seem like too big of a deal. I always remembered the advice I heard my parents giving others. For example, my parents used to tell other parents whose freshmen would call home with a problem that they should tell their kids, ‘Wow, that is quite a problem. What are you going to do about it?’ That was a good reminder that I could take care of myself.” Now an educator herself, Ashlyn is an assistant professor of mathematics at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. “I always wanted to be a professor, so I assume living on campus had at least some influence. Given that I work on a college campus that is similar in size to Rice, I have very specific views on how a university should be run and expectations of the students.” And her Rice connections continue today. A former Wiess student is her “unofficially adopted brother” and the godfather of her son. She maintains friendships with a number of other students whom she sees on visits back to Houston. Facebook also has made keeping in touch with a variety of alumni easier. Ashlyn even had a unique visitor while she was living in Boulder: “A Rice student figured out where I worked and brought his parents along to meet me. I’d never even met him before, but he was pretty excited to say hello and ‘Team Wiess!’” Said Ashlyn, “I’m happy my parents moved us to Wiess. I have a collection of childhood stories that almost nobody else does. And there are 2,000-plus alums out there who love my parents almost as much as I do.”

TYLER STODDARD SMITH ’98 COLLEGE H A N S Z E N YEARS 1 9 8 2 – 1 9 8 7

yler Stoddard Smith remembers his years living at Hanszen College as a “wonderland.” In the eyes of an 8-year-old, it must have seemed that way. Even finding out that they were going to live on campus was like a fairytale. “I liked that we were going to be ‘masters.’ It had an imperial ring to it,” he said. “I considered myself a young but vital co-master, if only in name.” Tyler was already quite familiar with the Rice campus before moving in. His parents were associates at one of the colleges, and when he was a toddler, his father, Richard Smith, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and a professor of history, would sometimes teach his class with Tyler sitting on his shoulders.

After the young Smith became a campus resident, his fun began in earnest. “As masters, my parents always had a ton of ice cream in the refrigerator. They needed to be prepared for events such as TGs [as in TGIFs, which took place on Fridays] and OWeek dinners, so the fridge was stocked. Thanks to my little fat friends and I, Hanszen probably had the most deficient ice cream supply of any of the colleges. Being at the college was so much fun that most of my friends just lived with us part time.” The students at Hanszen were “amazing” with a young child in their midst, according to Tyler. “For them, I must have been a tremendous nuisance. I have memories of barging into student’s rooms on occasion, like an 8-year-

old Kramer. I was always carrying a plastic M-16 I got for Christmas. I wandered around the quad, rolled around in mud and hid behind trees to camouflage myself. Then I’d make a machine gun noise and pretend to exterminate groups of students hanging out in front of the commons, making out on the swing, etc. Everybody pretended to die on command, and in really creative ways. I’m not a violent person, but this all seemed very normal at the time, even encouraged.” Some of his experiences at Hanszen could even be considered surreal. How many people can claim Allen Ginsberg as a past houseguest? But in 1983, that’s exactly who stayed in the masters house for a few days. Professor Smith had invited Ginsberg to give a poetry reading in the Hanszen College Commons. Ginsberg and Tyler spent time playing video games and bonded over a mutual love of the band The Clash. Before leaving town, Ginsberg attempted to teach yoga and meditation to Richard and Tyler. Ginsberg took the experience very seriously, but the Smith men began to dissolve in hysterical laughter before they could even assume the correct meditative posture, which didn’t go over well with the Beat poet. When the time came for Tyler to go to college, he chose to attend Rice and earned a B.A. in Spanish. “Spending almost 10 years of my life on the Rice campus has taught me that you never know what’s going to come roaring out of the sky: water balloons, fruit, homemade rockets, beer, guinea pigs, etc. If Rice students can find a way to launch something, they’ll launch it.” Unique lesson learned.

Tyler at Hanszen

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 29

LEFT:

Krista Comer and José Aranda’s introduction as new Baker masters with sons Jesse and Benito

RIGHT:

José Aranda and Benito (back row) with Baker students during Beer Bike

BENITO ARANDA-COMER ’17 COLLEGES B A K E R / D U N C A N A N D B R O W N YEARS 2 0 0 4 – 2 0 1 0 , 2 0 1 3 – P R E S E N T

he first time his parents were chosen as masters, Benito Aranda-Comer was 10 years old. “The Baker College students brought my dad a big cookie cake, so I was pretty excited about that,” he said. “Rice is one big playground to a kid. I liked to host a lot of friends here. We’d go to basketball games and football games. For me, it felt like limitless opportunities to enjoy the unique situation I was in.” But he was also nervous. “Being very young and understanding that my parents had this serious role in the college, I was happy to go to meals, eat and leave,” said Benito. “I was really aware that these students were so much older than me. I wondered what they thought of me but didn’t exactly have the communication skills to ask. But the Baker students showed me what it meant to be a nice young adult, especially to children.” Being the son of college masters also has helped focus Benito’s

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

own academic experience. “I want to be able to say that I tried my hardest. I remember looking at the Rice students and seeing them stressed out or upset or very happy — anywhere in the spectrum. The takeaway I got from that is that they tried. They showed up because they wanted to work and learn. They wanted to change and be a certain kind of person. It was admirable to me. I decided I wanted to be that person as well.” After five years at Baker, Benito’s parents — José Aranda, the department chair of Spanish and Portuguese and associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of English, and Krista Comer, associate professor of English — were asked to stay on as masters for an additional year, as Baker was combined with the new Duncan College during fall 2009–spring 2010. In 2013, when they became masters at Brown College, Benito started his freshman year as a student at Baker

and primarily resides there while classes are in session. “I think some people at Brown are cognizant of the fact that I’m the Brown masters’ son, but some people don’t even know. I don’t want to be treated differently,” he said. Whether at Baker or at Brown, Rice is home for Benito. There’s a level of comfort and confidence that he has developed during his years on campus. “When I got into Rice, I realized that my formation as a young adult happened here,” he said. “There have been a lot of things that have helped me grow as a person and made me the person I’ve become. A lot of it has to do with living at Baker and my parents being masters. What I’ve never taken for granted is that I feel like I can do anything at Rice. I can go to class, I can learn, I can meet people, I can foster my imagination and friendships with other students. It’s a special spot. All the people make it what it is.”

Simon and Colin (standing) with Laura and Steve Cox at the Sid Richardson Masters House

FROM THE PARENTS’ POINT OF VIEW

STEVE AND LAURA COX COLLEGE S I D R I C H A R D S O N YEARS 2 0 0 0 – 2 0 0 5

hen Steve and Laura Cox were named as masters at Sid Richardson College, their sons were teenagers: Colin ’11 was 15 years old and Simon, who currently is a graduate student in religious studies at Rice, was 13. “I think the greatest advice that we got from previous masters was to find special time for our kids. Because it would be very easy for them to become resentful,” said Laura. “By our second year, Colin was a student at Rice and lived at Wiess College. Thursday night

was a free night for all four of us, so we made it pretty clear to the students at Sid that every Thursday night was our family dinner night. It was understood that we weren’t going to let anyone in unless it was an emergency. You have to make that time.” Still, Laura and Steve, a professor of computational and applied mathematics, encouraged their sons to get to know the Sid residents. “It was organic, the friendships they made,” said Steve. “During our first year, one

student in particular became a natural fit as an ‘older brother’ for Colin and Simon. It was great for them to have this sort of mentor.” Colin and Simon also attended occasional events such as powderpuff games and played foosball with Steve on the seventh floor of Sid nearly every evening before dinner. Said Laura, “Colin and Simon thought it was the coolest upbringing. They loved it. We could walk to musical performances, lectures, art shows, students’ presentations in architecture. There was constant intellectual stimulation.” Added Steve, “Living on campus definitely had an impact. They were inspired by what the students were accomplishing.”

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 31

TAXI DETOUR W O R D S A N D I M A G E S S A B R I N A T O P PA

SABRINA TOPPA ’13 SPENT A YEAR INTERVIEWING MIGRANT TAXI DRIVERS IN AFRICA, THE MIDDLE EAST AND SOUTH ASIA ON RICE’S ZEFF FELLOWSHIP. NOW, SHE’S STEERING THAT EXPERIENCE TOWARD A CAREER IN JOURNALISM.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

ireworks rained on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the beads of light fluttering in the sky and illuminating graffiti in Arabic scrawl. “Irhal,” the Arabic word for “leave,” danced on asphalt across from a dilapidated KFC, as thousands of teenagers cordoned off the street from vehicles, including taxicabs. It was July 4, 2013, and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, had been toppled by a military coup. Cairo oscillated between mourning and celebration. On the way to dinner, the father of an Egyptian friend silently cried while driving me past the neighborhood mosque he had prayed in alongside Morsi. “He was a simple man; he prayed with ordinary Egyptians — but this is how he is treated,” he said to me, referencing Morsi’s imprisonment. I had landed in Cairo at this noteworthy moment thanks to Rice’s Zeff Fellowship, which awards one senior a $25,000 grant to carry out an independent research project in an international setting. My project centered on migrant cab drivers working in Egypt, Qatar, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. However, it also included migrant-exporting countries like Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya to contextualize the forces that impel a migrant to move. I chose the taxi as the metaphorical vehicle to understand untold migrant stories, including my own family’s.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 33

IMMIGRANT TAXI DRIVERS

I was born in Brooklyn to a taxi driver and housewife from Pakistan. The cab mapped out my own family’s transition from migrants to makers. Most migrant cabbies are seen through a blue-collar frame: faceless bodies moving from A to B, transporting others to successful lives or careers without accounting for their own. However, this tale obscures another truth: In some cases, the job’s structure affords optimal independence to the men behind the wheel. Drivers control their schedules, do not have bosses and don’t have to wear uniforms. While these points may strike an average worker as inessential, for a migrant still clinging to an ancestral homeland, the taxi presented the best opportunity to preserve, in practice, what they feared it would erode: a cultural address. Among my own relatives in New York City, I saw that driving a cab enabled them to retain their sartorial choice of the Pakistani “salwar kameez” (a long tunic and baggy trousers), patronize Pakistani restaurants on work breaks and attend all five prayers in South Asian mosques dotting the city. This effectively enabled certain migrant communities to thrive by creating a shadow infrastructure for the workmen. The South Asian cabbie in New York City also was inextricably tied to a network of blue-collar shops, restaurants and religious centers that embraced the migrant in off-duty hours. “The job gave me the greatest flexibility with my time,” my dad had once explained to me. “I was my own boss: I managed my own schedule, and I set the rules.” My aim was to highlight the independence stemming from this career path and how it was a particular boon for migrants. How? By hanging out in taxi ranks, taking cabs to move around and sitting patiently with cab drivers until they gave me a conversational green light into their lives.

WELCOME TO EGYPT

On my first day in Tahrir Square, Cairo’s ubiquitous cabs — white ones were illegal, black legal — were in scarce supply. The unofficial white taxicabs, four-cylinder Chinese cars with Mitsubishi engines, usually roved around for easy money, with the meter-skipping taximen hungry for customers. Business had slowed because of the more obstreperous crowds that formed at intersections, hurling political slogans. Many people stayed at home, afraid of the sun as much as the police. Only the Sadat metro station — the closest one to Tahrir Square — was open and swelling with sweating bodies, almost all attired in a polychromatic patriotism. My own forehead was wrapped in a headband fashioned from the three colors on the Egyptian flag: red, white and black. I swept a large Egyptian flag through the air, mimicking the other 20-somethings thronged in the square — more than 7,000 miles away from my own country’s Independence Day. Protests in Egypt often resembled rock concerts, and that night in the square I saw kernels of popcorn exploding on the street while young men twirled with intense vigor, beating themselves in a political frenzy. Cairo unfurled like a mess on the screen in July, but in person, it looked like a circus. I soon learned that the chaotic din of politics banged on every street corner. Even buying “ayesh,” or bread, — synonymous with life in the local dialect of Arabic — was a de facto political gesture. Strolling down the street, policemen would halt my steps, asking if my route to taxi garages had a detour in Rabaa Square, the main venue of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protests. Because of Ramadan and the ongoing political instability, most of my interviews with cab drivers occurred under glowing mosques at nightfall. On Friday, the holiest day of the week, political sermons exhorted men to take to the streets, creating an undercurrent (at least) of violence. When we did meet, most drivers told me that instability had spurred an uptick in car hijackings. Some cabbies explained that they would receive a customer who would rattle off a nearby destination, then place a gun to the driver’s head, demanding he drive a long distance. On the outskirts of the city, pockets would be emptied and the cab would be taken, ripped apart, and sold by its constituent pieces to the highest buyer. My project’s thematic anchor was movement and transition, but in Egypt, this instability reconfigured this idea of control that I thought the drivers had. It was clear some of them had no power at all.

THE JOB GAVE ME THE GREATEST FLEXIBILITY WITH MY TIME. I WAS MY OWN BOSS: I MANAGED MY OWN SCHEDULE, AND I SET THE RULES.

ABOUT THE ZEFF FELLOWSHIP The Roy and Hazel Zeff Fellowship was established by Stephen Zeff, the Keith Anderson Professor in Business and professor of accounting at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, in honor of his parents. Since 2002, more than a dozen Rice students have been awarded fellowships that support a year of world travel and independent study. 34

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

ABOVE Ahmed Ibn Tolon mosque in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt LEFT Toppa with a Kurdish-Iraqi taxi driver on the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr

IRAN

I R AQ

CAIRO E GY P T

S AU D I ARABIA QATA R

DOHA

S U DA N

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e â&#x20AC;&#x192; 35

CLOCKWISE Migrant taxi drivers in the Industrial Areas of Doha, Qatar Bangladeshi taxi drivers in uniform in Doha, Qatar Toppa speaking to migrant taxi drivers from Uganda and Kenya in the canteen of the state-owned transportation company in Qatarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Industrial Areas Nepali migrants Drivers Kevin from Kenya and Paul from Uganda

36â&#x20AC;&#x192;

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

A NEW CLASSROOM

A lack of power was a theme I encountered again in the thumb-shaped Gulf state of Qatar. At Rice, I had studied Qatar’s migration policies as a participant in the Public Diplomacy and Global Policymaking student colloquium, which is sponsored by Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The course brought Qatari and Rice students together to debate various foreign policy issues. By studying migration, we learned that in Qatar, foreigners outnumbered locals five to one, and Qatar had the highest population growth rate in the world in 2012: 4.93 percent. Citizenship was only granted to blood relatives of Qataris, meaning migrants lived with precarious legal status, and their right to enter the country was tied to the employer who sponsored a visa. However, a year after studying these policies, it was clear that the low-wage South Asian drivers I met in Qatar lived far away from the educational centers where academics analyzed their circumstances. These drivers emerged as my experiential teachers, instructing me better than any textbook. For example, outside of Doha, Qatar, I roved around the swath of desert repurposed as the Industrial Areas — a no-go area for most tourists, especially female tourists. These were cities of men where I became the only woman, flanked on both sides by Kenyan drivers who agreed to take me there. Here, Doha’s glittering skyscape was subsumed by the drab reality of migrant toil. Sheltering the masses of laborers, the Industrial Areas illustrated a cruel living differential: whereas Qataris lived in affluent bubbles, the migrants often lived in buildings with peeling paint, missing toilets and victuals wrapped in newspaper outside their walls. This face of Qatar, drivers explained, was not one they exposed to their own families. Drivers would spend several months’ salaries purchasing an expensive suit to wear on the plane ride home. In Qatar, I lived with the Egyptian host of a show on Al Jazeera Egypt, the channel that had been kicked out of Cairo under the pretext of “supporting terrorism.” Living in exile, many of my host’s colleagues had languished in Cairo’s jails or been blacklisted by Arab states. In this setting, I learned journalism was not a career, but a calling. One day, I visited Al Ghanim bus station, the country’s largest, and found drivers standing in front of their parked cars. When pedestrians approached, the men waved the customers away like mosquitoes. Each driver needed to produce 235 Qatari riyals a

day (around $65) in order to pay his employer for the right to use the company vehicle, so abstaining from work — going on strike — was not merely a symbolic outcry, but a financial gamble. Drivers told me how they would ration their food, eating one meal a day. I met men like Dulal Ismail, a Bangladeshi laborer who left his entire family behind in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to amass modest funds in the Gulf. His daily income hinged on steering a wheel through Doha’s newly emerging neighborhoods. Yet all of his break time was spent sipping chai and nostalgically dreaming of home. Tedium was the main feature of life as a South Asian laborer in Qatar. Despite the central bus station’s close proximity to Qatar’s free museums, none of the men I knew ever visited one. Instead, Ismail, like other Bangladeshis, saved up scraps of money to send home, living meagerly in Doha in order not to squander the fruits of their labor. When I’d tell these stories at the end of the day, my host would look at me in disbelief, saying “What you’re doing is journalism. Not everyone can go to these places or make contacts this easily. But you can do it.”

WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS JOURNALISM. NOT EVERYONE CAN GO TO THESE PLACES OR MAKE CONTACTS THIS EASILY. BUT YOU CAN DO IT.

HOW TO BE A JOURNALIST? JUST DO IT.

I was wearing a journalist’s hat, whether or not I saw it that way. Seeing me gripping a pen and pad, most drivers at Al Ghanim assumed I was a reporter. “Which newspaper do you write for?” they’d ask. I would explain I was an independent researcher, but many clamored for me to expose their story, one the outside world needed to hear. The most vocal advocates for publicity were often East African drivers who came from Nairobi’s worst neighborhoods on short-term contracts. One Kenyan driver, Kevin, appeared to be a teenager, but was actually in his mid-20s. Sporting a baseball camp and gold teeth, he offered me free bus rides during shifts and demanded his passengers respond to my questions. I was the only woman on the bus, sitting in Qatar’s designated female seats. Kevin showed me the culture of Qatar’s migrant worker, inviting me to worker canteens, company housing and private gathering points for drivers. He told me how some workers paid a small sum to acquire vehicles to gain some measure of independence and wrestle free from the company strictures. I also found the shops that Kenyan workers relied on, the churches they prayed in and the foods they somehow reclaimed more than 2,000 miles away. These features were virtually invisible to outsiders, S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 37

including Qataris. In short, I had found the migrant infrastructure that mirrored my dad’s South Asian taxi milieu in New York City. Upon leaving, Kevin furnished his family’s contact details in Nairobi and told me I would find help there. Although it was not on my original Zeff itinerary, I decided to head straight to East Africa after Qatar. I took a series of minibus taxis from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, meeting various family members in an attempt to trace the standard migrant’s journey. This was not easy. I moved from town to town like a deaf-mute, unable to comprehend basic navigation. Somehow, after an 18-plus-hour bus ride from the border, I found Kevin’s house. His mother greeted me warmly, asking me about her son’s health while plying me with “ugali” (cornmeal), vegetables and soda. Between soda refills, her Wi-Fi-enabled phone rang — she had received a call from Kevin in Doha. Her voice had cracked as she handed me the phone. “Sabrina, I can’t believe you’re in Kenya. I thought you were joking,” Kevin said. I laughed, chiding him for not having more faith in my words. I looked up at his mother, who was crying, overcome with nostalgia. “I miss Kenya,” Kevin garbled. “Eat ugali for me!” he shouted. I told him I had a massive plate right in front of my face. He laughed, and I handed the phone back to his mother. When I left Kevin’s home, which was adorned with all of his childhood photos — playing basketball, hugging his sister, sporting a matatu driver’s swagger — I realized I had discovered the missing piece of stories I could only partially understand. Specifically, this story was about more than the migrant himself. There was a larger structure and interconnectivity that it would be impossible to ignore. A job that I had thought could fuel such independence could also destroy the dependence sons had on their parents and steer a migrant toward larger distances, pulling the parents far away from a migrant son’s voluntary exile. When Kevin’s mom had asked me about his conditions in Qatar, I did not say anything about the underpayment of wages or the cruel hierarchy of class and race in the Gulf’s migrant melting pot — Africans were always seen as guest workers, never expatriates — but all of these facts weighed on me. At the end, I

accumulated a pressing sense of guilt that morphed into a sense of responsibility. Whether it’s taxi drivers in Qatar or protesters in Egypt, there are always stories that are too often muffled or unheard.

ON THE MOVE

After a short stint in Nepal, where I held my first paid job as a working journalist writing stories about education and migrant issues, I moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh. On one assignment, I went to the coastal city of Barisal and conducted an interview on a boat with one of the only female ferry drivers in the country. I also wrote about Bangladesh’s first transgender pride parades and its underground LGBT community. When my visa ran out, I still wasn’t ready to come home to the U.S. In January, I landed at TIME Asia, where I write online briefs, research and fact-check stories. I’m also researching and reporting a story on Rohingya Burmese refugees. Hong Kong is a city that mirrors New York City in its multilayered vibrancy. In Victoria Park, a few minutes’ walk from my apartment, Indonesian and Filipino live-in maids gather on Sunday (their only day off). Talking to them, I heard the same stories of wage theft, employment abuse and a thirst to go home. The world’s migrant labor is commodified and shuttled across borders, operating in a global system that seemingly never changes. Now I have a better understanding of social media practices (how to write a headline for Twitter vs. Facebook) and photo production (what works best for Web production is not the same as print). I also have learned to tackle bigger topics, less local and more global. Rice’s Zeff Fellowship gave me a crash course in how to live and work overseas in countries where I had no contacts or experiences. Indirectly, it encouraged me to embrace the intrepid spirit of immersive journalism that so many foreign correspondents valorize. Moving forward, I am undaunted by the prospect of overseas reportage. All I have to do is recall the fireworks that rained in Tahrir Square and illuminated other stories in the distance. “Yalla,” the taxi drivers had said. Let’s go.

I FOUND THE SHOPS THAT KENYAN WORKERS RELIED ON, THE CHURCHES THEY PRAYED IN AND THE FOODS THEY SOMEHOW RECLAIMED MORE THAN 2,000 MILES AWAY. IN SHORT, I HAD FOUND THE MIGRANT INFRASTRUCTURE THAT MIRRORED MY DAD’S SOUTH ASIAN TAXI MILIEU IN NEW YORK CITY.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

BEHIND THE WHEEL IN DOHA

BY SABRINA TOPPA

*reprinted from Dhaka Tribune

Taking a tea break with the Bangladeshi men driving Qatar’s buses and taxicabs “Dhaka is a huge city,” he tells me. “Doha is small.” Dulal Miah Ismail is a 39-year-old Bangladeshi bus driver. Wearing a starched white shirt, Ismail’s maroon tie is emblazoned with a logo for Mowasalat, Qatar’s state-owned transportation company. Ismail is standing against the sand-coloured walls of Qatar’s Al Ghanim central bus station. He enters this bus station several times a day, as his route jags through the arteries of Sanaya, the beating heart of the industrial areas, to anywhere from the Sealine Beach Resort or Souq Al Attiyah, back to the central bus station. Here in Al Ghanim, Qatar’s car-less population – consisting largely of South Asian men wearing cotton panjabis – wait to board air-conditioned buses underneath a white tent-like structure intended to shield them from the sun. “In Qatar, there are too many Bangladeshis,” Ismail says, sipping his cha. “Every day, they come.” He points out two men nearby, both attired in the same Mowasalat uniform. Recently, Ismail has seen the station swell with men from South Asia, imported as the economic bedrock behind the comprehensive national strategy enshrined in Qatar’s National Vision 2030.

A SOUTH ASIAN FAMILY Although the migrant community is diverse, there is a sense of unity and kinship among the labourers. The nation-state boundaries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India seem to collapse in Doha’s heat. “All of us came here for money,” a 27-year-old Riyadh says, “because we have to support our family.” A Dhaka native, Riyadh remits anywhere from

Tk5,000-10,000 monthly back home to Bangladesh, where his family depends on him as the sole breadwinner. “I’m the eldest in my family. I have two brothers and one sister. I made the decision to drop out of university -- even though my sick dad told me not to – to come here. I pay for my younger brother’s tuition for a BBA,” he says. Qatar hosts approximately 150,000 Bangladeshi labourers. Ismail is one of the 7.7 million Bangladeshis – 5.3% of the population – seeking employment outside Bangladesh.

LINGUA FRANCA Riyadh spends his days driving taxis, and his nights studying English, which he associates with improved job prospects. “While I’m on the job, I am always writing. What is this word? Or how can I use this word? Learning English is my hobby in Qatar.” But the limited interaction with non-labourers makes mastering the new language a challenge. In fact, he insisted we conduct our interview in English. “In Qatar,” he tells me, “day by day, my speaking skills are going down because there is no one to practice with.”

QATARISATION Foreigners outnumber nationals in Qatar, where the government created a Qatarisation programme guaranteeing public sector jobs for Qatari citizens. At least half the energy and industry sectors

must be filled with Qataris. Human Rights Watch reported that 99% of Qatar’s private sector is expatriate labour. Riyadh, a taxi driver living in Qatar for the past 15 months, tells me: “I don’t like taxi driving. I don’t think it’s a professional job. In Qatar, there is good money, but no honour.” Around the gold souk, Al Ghanim grows alive. Here, stalls serve labourers tea, biscuits, and shwarma anything cheap and quick. Ismail, adhering to his Bangladeshi hospitality, refuses to let me pay for the tea, which is served Sulemani style-without milk.

NO PICNIC As Ismail and I walk around the station, eyes stick to us because I am the only woman. Sometimes, days will pass before he speaks to a girl, Ismail tells me. Athough it is a public bus station – the largest in the country – Al Ghanim’s only women are the occasional Filipino or Ethiopian caretakers on their journey homeward. Finding a Bangladeshi woman here is rare. For Ismail, the only women he sees are his customers, or those women walking on Doha’s sun-baked streets – many of which are not yet pedestrianised for walking. A 2013 International Organisation for Migration report stated women account for a mere 6% of Bangladeshi migrants worldwide. Ismail and his colleagues live in all-male dormitory-style accommodation 30 minutes from

the city centre, in the 500,000 sqm Karwa City Housing complex. Lauded by Qatar’s Emir as an exemplar for company housing projects, the $96 million accommodation includes medical facilities and a gym – ensuring workers never need to leave. It’s not clear where they would go, however. Though there are entertainment options in Doha -- last year, Qatar hosted Bangladesh’s 2013 Channel i Music Awards -- Ismail’s work hours prevent him from participating. He leaves the Karwa City complex at 6am and returns so late in the evening that the Karwa’ canteens have usually stopped serving dinner. And although there are free things to do nearby – the Museum of Islamic Art is a 20-minute walk from the station – Ismail and his colleagues have never been inside.

MAKING THE BEST OF IT For Ismail and Riyadh, the biggest challenge is usually breaking up the tedium of the day. Hour after hour, the men circumambulate the same blue taxis and buses, watching customers pile in and out. “Qatar is a small country” Ismail tells me. “Each day is the same.” He looks at Riyadh sipping his tea, and they erupt into laughter after a Bangla joke. At least for now though, the tedium of a daily driving schedule is broken by familiar jokes and warm cups of cha.

See more: ricemagazine. info/277

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 39

WriteSpeakPr Rice’s Program in Writing and Communication is everywhere on campus, helping faculty and students alike become better communicators. by lynn gosnell ow do you reimagine writing instruction at one of the

country’s top universities? A few years ago, Rice

faculty began asking how

they could improve an outmoded and

scattered approach to teaching writing. T he res ult? A g ro wing , ev o l v i n g a n d

innovative communications program that

reaches students at every stage of their scholarly growth — and helps prepare them for what comes after they graduate.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

resentEngage WHAT WOULD OUR DREAM WRITING AND COMMUNICATIONS CENTER LOOK LIKE AT RICE?

HOW CAN WE MAKE WRITING INSTRUCTION MORE RIGOROUS, RELEVANT AND PARTICIPATORY? HOW CAN WE SUPPORT OUR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN COMMUNICATING THEIR RESEARCH? HOW CAN WE HELP UPPER-LEVEL STUDENTS IMPROVE THEIR COMMUNICATION SKILLS?

These are some of the questions taken up by Rice faculty in 2010, when several faculty “working groups” began to reevaluate the role of writing instruction across campus. Consultants were hired to evaluate how we taught writing and how we gauged what students were learning. Eventually, a vision emerged to create an ambitious, wide-reaching and highly accessible writing and communication center. This meant moving writing instruction out of a remedial mindset. Didn’t pass the composition test? Off you go to writing class. Passed? You’re good to go. Instead, writing was reimagined as a core practice, one that students would encounter in some format on every step of their academic journey. What the working groups and consultants all agreed on was that “there was just not enough attention to writing at Rice,” said Helena Michie, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and chair of the faculty advisory board for the Program in Writing and Communication.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 41

TRACY VOLZ

DIRECTOR, PROGRAM IN WRITING AND COMMUNICATION PROFESSOR IN THE PRACTICE IN PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION

I like to think that writing and communication stand at the very center of all learning in all disciplines. Everything else radiates out from that center, like spokes of knowledge. Writing and speaking are not one of those spokes — they’re the hub. ―Chris M. Anson

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

In 2012, Rice launched the Program in Writing and Communication (PWC), a resource for students and faculty. Tracy Volz, a professor in the practice, was hired to direct the center. With years of experience teaching Rice’s engineering students to be better communicators, Volz is passionate in her advocacy for stronger writing pedagogy. “Not only do students need to have superior communication skills for academic performance,” said Volz, “but they need to be prepared to communicate with the various audiences they will encounter, when they leave Rice for internships, jobs or graduate school.” The program is set up to help students communicate more effectively, whether the task is for a class, a research competition or a job interview. Brian Spector ’88, an English and economics alum who recruits new graduates for jobs at BP, worries when he sees Rice students come to a job interview less than prepared. “From my perspective, everything is about communication,” said Spector. “It’s about speaking clearly, being engaging, writing concisely and writing in a way that gets people interested.” Even “good writers,” said Spector, should want to get better, a lesson he learned as an English major in Dennis Huston’s classes. “He told me I was a good writer, but I could get better.” Currently, the PWC comprises four programs whose missions often overlap: the Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication; an English as a Second Language instruction program; the First-year Writing-Intensive Seminars; and a pilot program called Communication-in-the-Disciplines. Campus communication centers are key allies in the mission of higher education, said Chris M. Anson, University Distinguished Professor and director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University. Anson worked as an external reviewer and consultant for Rice’s communications programs in the past. “I like to think that writing and communication stand at the very center of all learning in all disciplines,” Anson said. “Everything else radiates out from that center, like spokes of knowledge. Writing and speaking are not one of those spokes — they’re the hub.”

COMMUNICATION CENTRAL The Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication

N A NOT-SO-HUSHED CORNER OF FONDREN LIBRARY, senior Alex Kumar sat head-to-head with his 9:45 a.m. appointment, an engineering student who sought advice on a report. “Do you have specific questions or concerns?” Kumar asked, quickly scanning the homework. “Should I add a topic sentence here?” the student asked. “Yes, tell them what you’re thinking. There are a couple ways to go about it,” Kumar answered. By the time the student returned the paper to his backpack, he had solid feedback — and more work to do. Kumar works at the comprehensively named Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication, Rice’s home to one-on-one writing consultations as well as a growing resource for communication expertise and outreach. Occupying a spacious, light-filled suite of rooms on the library’s second-floor mezzanine, the center is the linchpin of Rice’s wide-ranging effort to integrate writing and communication skills into the heart of academic inquiry and practice. A founding principle of this movement is that all students — even ones who arrive on campus as so-called “good writers” with high test scores — have room to improve. “It’s not a writing center; it’s a communications center,” said Matt Taylor ’92, associate vice provost for academic affairs and associate dean of undergraduates. Taylor was instrumental in turning the Rice

faculty’s working blueprint for a writing and communications program into reality. As the program’s interim director from 2012 to mid-2013, he led the design and renovation team that created the warm and inviting Fondren Library space and hired the directors who got the center, in his words, “up and writing” in short order. Rice alumna Jennifer Shade Wilson ’93 directs the center’s staff of two associate directors, Kyung-Hee Bae and Elizabeth Festa, and program coordinator Shar’-Lin Venier Anderson. This small team brings a broad range of experience and expertise in writing pedagogy, English as a Second Language (ESL) theory, visual rhetoric and design to Rice. They train more than two dozen paid student peer consultants, both undergraduates and graduates, who, like Kumar, staff the center every weekday during the academic year. Along with giving feedback on specific assignments, the consultants aim to “improve the writer,” Wilson said. “It’s not just about the text or those slides or this presentation; it’s about showing them within the context of that piece how they can improve in the future.” During the 2013–2014 academic year, the center logged more than 2,500 individual appointments with undergraduate and graduate students and a handful of postdocs, faculty and staff. Since opening in 2012, the center’s student and professional staff have become

a trusted source for feedback on any number of writing and communications activities as evidenced by its growing profile across campus. “I rushed to the center with my first essay,” junior Jan Dudek said, referring to a First-year Writing-Intensive Seminar (FWIS) assignment. “I’ve had a great relationship with a few of the tutors, and I would often come back multiple times for the same essay, which would usually improve significantly by the end.” A mathematics major, Dudek spent this spring semester in Oxford as a School of Social Sciences Gateway ambassador. Although freshmen make up a large number of individual appointments, the center’s appeal is designed to be broad based. “We’ve had sophomores, juniors, seniors, grad students and postdocs who have made appointments to come in and sit down with our peer consultants,” Wilson added. Rice students have sought advice on assignments related to every major discipline, from English and education to architecture, business and biochemistry. Jing Wang, an international graduate student in anthropology, is one of the center’s regular customers. “I think it’s really useful and necessary to have this kind of center, and the instructors are kind and patient,” she said. Wang has gotten help with personal statements for fellowships, funding proposals and the like.

The Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication (CWOVC)

JENNIFER SHADE WILSON DIRECTOR

KYUNG-HEE BAE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

ELIZABETH FESTA ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

SHAR’-LIN VENIER ANDERSON

PROGRAM COORDINATOR

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 43

In addition to this kind of individualized attention, the center sponsors workshops on academic fundamentals like note taking, critical reading and email etiquette as well as more advanced topics like oral presentations, writing style and paper revision. For non-native English speakers, there are sessions to help students improve their listening, speaking and grammar skills. Students come in for help with cover letters, journal articles, dissertation chapters, technical reports and even museum catalog entries — all manner of assignments. They can record, practice and evaluate their oral presentations and research posters in a specially equipped “smart room.”

Faculty request advice on designing syllabi, especially for the freshmen seminars, said Wilson. She and Volz lead a faculty writing retreat each year for the Office of Faculty Development. Rice’s service-oriented and curricular approach to communication sets it apart from other university-based writing centers. “I think Rice is unique, but not alone, in taking a multimodal approach to communication … but the vast majority of institutions focus on writing support,” said Volz. To this end, a lot of the center’s work takes place outside its Fondren Library hub, as staff take on a number of specialized projects across campus. For example, Festa serves as kind of a go-to

A TOPICAL WONDERLAND SUPPLANTS THE COMPOSITION COURSE First-year Writing-Intensive Seminars

T’S ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC SCENES OF THE BELOVED 1939 CLASSIC “THE WIZARD OF OZ.” As a giant tornado snakes across the darkening Kansas plains, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the farmhands seek shelter in a storm cellar. Arriving too late to take shelter underground and struggling against a fierce wind, Dorothy (clutching her dog, Toto) finds her way 44

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

to a bedroom. She’s knocked unconscious by a window, and in the next scene, the house spirals up into the twister. Awakening, Dorothy sees familiar and frightening characters parading by. When the house finally plummets from the sky and lands with a thud, a strange and literally colorful new world beckons. When Heather Elliott Neill ’12, a fellow in the

resource for faculty, who come to her with requests for workshops that are tailored to specific course assignments, projects, requirements and more. Among her many specialized projects, she has worked with Rice’s Center for Civic Leadership on capstone presentations; with Kurt Stallmann, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music, to help students craft personal artists’ statements; and with the Program in Poverty, Justice and Human Capabilities to create digital stories about students’ international service work. Read more about the students involved in these projects at ricemagazine. atavist.com.

PWC, played this scene for a class of freshmen last fall, all eyes were glued to the screen. No doubt most of the students had seen this movie countless times. And yet, as Neill pointed out, none of this scene’s delightful details were included in L. Frank Baum’s original stories about Oz. In fact, Neill said, “There’s no indication that Oz is a dream.” She asked, what was the same and what was different — and why? What can Rice freshmen learn from reading Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and other classic children’s novels like “Treasure Island,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Anne of Green Gables”? FWIS 181: The Golden

… each three-credit-hour seminar is capped at 15 students, allowing for a “no hiding in the back row” experience. Age of Children’s Literature, or How Alice (in Wonderland) Became Harry Potter’s Great-Great-Great Grandmother, is one of 75 First-Year Writing-Intensive Seminars. Required for new undergraduate students, each three-credit-hour seminar is capped at 15 students, allowing for a “no hiding in the back row” experience for new students and facilitating lots of discussion. Gone is the stand-alone, essay-focused composition course of yore. In its place is a fascinating variety of topical courses — graphic novels, medical humanities, contemporary American poetry, immigrant experience, race and culture, global health perspectives or Houston’s bayous, for example — in which communication is embedded in the syllabus. “From the beginning, there was this desire to have a first-year seminar program that would introduce students to foundational communication skills that they would need throughout their careers,” said Volz. “In that course, they focus on how to formulate questions, how to define problems, how to gather and select evidence, and how to build a thesisdriven argument.” Some classes even manage to do more, such as making the city of Houston itself part of the syllabus. In FWIS 187: Exploring the Science and History of Houston’s

Bayous, students spent the semester exploring Houston’s watersheds, especially the bayous that form such a visible part of our urbanized environmental heritage. Carrie Masiello, associate professor of earth science, built in a number of communication assignments, including interviews, summaries and class presentations. Field trips and guest lecturers were a prominent part of her course design. And Masiello used an ongoing local, political and environmental issue — the proposed Memorial Park Demonstration Project — to hold students’ interest. “I strongly believe that students solve problems best when they’re interested in them,” said Masiello. After taking field trips to see and assess the health of Buffalo Bayou, students put their questions to two Rice experts visiting the class, Jeff Nittrouer, assistant professor of earth science, and Evan Siemann, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of BioSciences. “This topic was a rich vein for us,” Masiello said. “The scientific literature on the topic is approachable, and there has been so much public communication about the project. A large body of Web pages, YouTube videos, government documents and, of course, the scientific literature created opportunities for them to naturally reflect on what it means to communi-

cate publicly, accurately and persuasively.” With the goal of introducing writing and other communication modes as a tool for learning and critical inquiry, Rice set out in 2011 to overhaul its introductory writing curriculum — a feat not unlike passing new legislation in the statehouse. The FWIS program was up and running by fall 2012 in concert with the Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication. A great deal of pedagogical training supports FWIS courses, which are taught by faculty from many departments. “While faculty have autonomy in designing their courses, we do try to support consistency across the range of courses, in terms of the learning objectives and the amount of writing, for example,” Volz said. “Our staff leads a weeklong pedagogical training program, consults with faculty on assignment design and reviews draft syllabi with an eye on the sequence of assignments and the balance of content and communication goals. “Many faculty think that content has to be sacrificed to make room for communication,” Volz said. “We work with faculty to use communication assignments as a tool to help learn the material — not just show what they already know.”

First-year WritingIntensive Seminars (FWIS)

DAVID FERRIS ASSOCIATE FACULTY DIRECTOR

DAVID MESSMER ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 45

LEARNING HOW TO PRONOUNCE AND TO PRESENT RESEARCH

English as a Second Language instruction

HEN YU LIU, A RICE DOCTORAL STUDENT IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, stepped up to the podium at the 2014 Screech Competition, he faced a number of hurdles. First, like all of the two dozen contestants, he had just 90 seconds to deliver his pitch to a packed McMurtry Auditorium. Second, his topic, “stability monitoring of drill-string,” sounded pretty dry. Finally, his first language was Mandarin Chinese, yet the rapid-fire delivery would be in English. The clock began to tick. Before revealing how Liu did in the competition, let’s find out how he got to the podium. Some context: Under President David Leebron’s leadership, Rice’s international student body has grown 99 percent in the past decade. In fall 2014, international students made up 22.8 percent of the student body as a whole.

For graduate students, the percentage is much higher — almost 40 percent. To better serve these students, the Program in Writing and Communication now includes a significant English as a Second Language component. In addition to for-credit seminars, there are short-term workshops and, of course, individual consultations through the writing center. The seminars, UNIV 601 and 602, focus respectively on oral communication and academic writing skills. Liu had enrolled in UNIV 601, the seminar designed to “introduce students to expectations and assumptions of North American audiences, strategies for expressing ideas in individual and group conversations, and oral and visual skills needed for academic presentations.” Lecturer Katerina Belik, a linguist and experienced ESL teacher from Russia,

ESL seminars … are “safe places” to build fluency and to learn from one another. 46

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

regularly teaches the course and helped Liu practice his presentation. “I think my English is adequate for daily life and work communication, but my public speaking skills are not sufficiently trained. The class helped me to improve,” said Liu, who’s now graduated and works at Shell Oil Company. In her seminars, Belik advocates using a lot of visual aids to explain research — slides, posters, blackboards, objects or videos — but not to overwhelm this information with unnecessary text. “Show your slides to someone who can’t read your language,” she recently advised a class of about 10 graduate students whose first languages included Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Chinese. “Your audience should be able to understand your message by just looking at the slide.” When discussing the range of visual aids a presenter can use, she made sure the students understood that they themselves were part of the presentation. “The most important concept UNIV 601 embedded into my mind is good communication is focused on delivering the key message effectively,” Liu said. “Different techniques like body language, stress and pause, tailoring speech for specific audiences, and a well-designed opener and ending can be employed.” Practice doesn’t hurt either. Liu said he spent about eight hours on his 90-second Screech entry. Back to the competition.

A confident Liu grabbed the mic with one hand and held up an index finger with the other. “Question: What’s the gasoline price today? Three dollars, I just checked. The energy revolution — hydraulic fracturing — is giving the United States true energy independence. But why are you paying a high price for gas?” Liu’s attention-grabbing hook about gas prices worked like magic to focus the audience’s attention. They soon learned how his research can make drilling operations more cost effective and efficient — potentially leading to cheaper gas for consumers — us! By the time Liu expertly navigated the short time frame without going over a second, he had become a contender. In fact, he came in third overall, a solid showing in a competitive field. The ESL seminars are “in high demand,” said Volz. She has heard students express that these are “safe places” to build fluency and to learn from one another as well as to become part of a community where they can test out their ideas and improve vocabulary. The stakes may not be as high in these settings as in research group meetings, she noted, where advisers and more senior students are present. They’re also not as high as in a whole auditorium full of strangers, all focused on you, while the clock is ticking.

BEYOND FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS Communication-in-the-Disciplines

HEN IT COMES TO COMMUNICATING RESEARCH, POSTERS ARE THE “LINGUA FRANCA” OF STUDENTS, ESPECIALLY IN THE SCIENCES. Whether participating in a competition, conference or class project, the research poster takes center stage. So, Kenneth Cox and Rick Strait, longtime teachers in Rice’s chemical and biomolecular engineering (CHBE) department, have some key advice for students: Rethink the poster. “It’s about a team of people selling ideas,” said Cox, professor in the practice and the department’s director of undergraduate studies. “The poster is supporting information.” In their senior design courses, they push the primacy of communication as a skill that will make a difference in their students’ careers. Cox is blunt in his advocacy: “I don’t care how sharp you are, how creative you are, what results you get. Out in the real world, if you’re not able to communicate, it goes nowhere.” Cox and Strait are enthusiastic participants in a pilot program at Rice that helps faculty members integrate writing, speaking and visual design assignments into upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. The Communication-in-the-Disciplines (CID) pilot is another part of Rice’s PWC. This pilot program emphasizes

I don’t care how sharp you are, how creative you are, what results you get. Out in the real world, if you’re not able to communicate, it goes nowhere. ―Kenneth Cox discipline-specific modes of inquiry, genres and conventions, said Volz. The CID idea grew out of composition studies, where “writing across the curriculum” encouraged students to learn to write in a way that crossed disciplinary boundaries and yet be respectful of those differences, said Helena Michie, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and chair of the faculty advisory board for the Program in Writing and Communication. “The idea is that for students who have declared their major, it is very important to learn certain discipline-specific techniques of communication,” Michie said. “The structures will be different but every academic paper requires a structure. English papers are not history papers are not sociology papers are not bioengineering papers.” In the CHBE department, faculty identified required courses for the major at the sophomore, junior and senior

level and requested help integrating communication into the curriculum. Volz and Bae worked with students and faculty to implement curricular changes, starting with fundamentals at the sophomore level and building stepby-step from there. “We’re teaching students at every level of their program how to write a report and how to present professionally,” Bae said, “and also how to add visual elements.” Strait, an adjunct professor who joined Rice after retiring from a career in the oil and gas industry, co-teaches the senior capstone design course with Cox. This capstone course synthesizes years of study by the student and culminates in a team project. Strait encourages students to expand their idea of what a presentation format can be — change up the shape of the poster, add multimedia to the presentation or incorporate audience-pleasing graphics, such as cartoons. S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 47

“I want to add a little sizzle to their steak,” Strait said. “You have to be a salesman — even if you’ve got a great idea.” Senior Luis Villa, a chemical and biomolecular engineering major, said, “Learning and practicing communication skills have really helped me succeed in my internships outside the university.” Villa has interned at BP and will join ExxonMobil after graduation. “Almost all our professors in classes where presentations or posters were required have dedicated time to helping us prepare for them,” said Villa, who is part of a capstone team that’s designing a plant to sustainably produce both water and fuel for a site in Kenya. Last fall, a second pilot gained momentum. The Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality houses an interdisciplinary academic program with a strong research and public service component. Undergraduates can major in the study of women, gender and sexuality, while graduate students may earn a certificate to complement their field of study. The center also houses a twoyear postdoctoral fellowship program.

Rosemary Hennessy, the L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English literature, directs the center, which was invited to be a part of the CID pilot by Volz and Michie. Hennessy quickly came to realize that the pilot offered a natural fit for their curriculum — many courses integrated all kinds of written, oral and visual communications in their assignments and projects already. For example, the undergraduate honors’ theses included a public presentation. At the freshman and sophomore level, two significant oral history projects are ongoing, one aimed at preserving Houston’s LGBT history and another at documenting women who have worked at Rice. Students enrolled in the department’s Seminar and Practicum in Engaged Research present their research and service findings in posters and other formats. By launching a CID pilot, Hennessy and her fellow faculty members would build upon what they’d already accomplished, adding a layer of intention to the center’s engaged research curricula. “We were able to

recognize something that we had done as a faculty over time — that is, incorporating written, oral and visual communication throughout the curriculum — and make it better,” Hennessy said. One specific area that the faculty chose to address through the CID pilot was presentations to interdisciplinary and nonacademic audiences. In some cases, this involves summarizing research via a poster, a mode of communication that Hennessy, being from the humanities side of academia, was unfamiliar with. In the English department, she said, “We don’t do posters. I didn’t know where to begin, so thank goodness the communications center was there.” Bae helped students evaluate their research posters and create short (90 second) and longer (three minute) poster talks. “She was great in helping students see what worked and what didn’t in older posters,” Hennessy said, adding that Bae’s suggestions were as specific as what kind of graphs or charts are most appropriate for certain kinds of data and

As we’re trying to teach students to be better communicators, we need to ask how do we become better communicators ourselves? ―Rosemary Hennessy

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

Communication-inthe-Disciplines (CID) HELENA MICHIE

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, AGNES CULLEN ARNOLD PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES, CHAIR OF FACULTY ADVISORY BOARD FOR THE PROGRAM IN WRITING AND COMMUNICATION

how to choose the colors for a poster. Sharing research in this way can be very effective, making complex ideas easier to grasp in a short amount of time. Hennessy sees an opportunity for faculty to get in on this training as well, improving the same communications skills their students are working on, thus becoming more effective models. “As we’re trying to teach students to be better communicators, we need to ask how do we become better communicators ourselves?”

arts & letters

creative ideas and endeavors

2015 Campbell Lecture Series: Michael Petry Over the course of three evening lectures (April 7–9) Michael Petry ’81, a witty, Texas-born multimedia artist, author and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, displayed his gift for storytelling to show the personal and professional influences and artistic collaborations that have defined his career for more than three decades.

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

ndeed, since earning his bachelor’s degree at Rice in 1981, the El Paso native has made a name for himself as an internationally exhibited artist of large-scale installations. In his first talk, titled “Growing Up in Public,” Petry presented an overview of his works and discussed them in reference to his time at Rice (1978–81) and how these initial influences continue to be reflected in his work. At Rice, Petry majored in mathematical sciences. From the first

moment he stepped onto campus, his distinctive flair stood out. Sporting an Afro hairstyle, Petry arrived at Sid Richardson College wearing “bell-bottoms and five-inch platforms,” he said. “It was really something to behold. I was actually the only person at Rice with platform heels at the time. It was exciting, and it was fun.” He was outspoken and daring in pursuing his early artistic interests. “When I was at Rice, I was kind of the bane of the school,” Petry said. “I would go at night into the public spaces, and

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 49

arts & Letters

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

ABOVE Petry presenting at the Campbell Lecture Series. RIGHT AND FACING PAGE Petry’s latest work, “AT the Core of the Algorithm,” located at the Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston through May 30. On the facing page, a picture of its previous showing at GlazenHuis in Belgium.

Art of Ethics,” in which he highlighted the roles played by artists, institutions and audiences in presenting art in an unethical world. A Houston exhibition of Petry’s latest work, “AT the Core of the Algorithm,” was on view this spring at Hiram Butler Gallery. The large-scale, glass installation, completely remade from its recent showing at GlazenHuis in Belgium, is based on an algorithm devised by Petry, in collaboration with highly skilled glassblowers, and derived from the mathematical notion of the multiverse. View Michael Petry’s 2015 Campbell Lecture Series talks: http://campbell.rice.edu. —Jeff Falk

The Campbell Lecture Series was made possible by a gift from Rice alumnus T.C. Campbell ’34 through the Campbell Fund. Each year, the series brings a distinguished humanities scholar to campus to give lectures on a topic of broad humanistic interest. Through special arrangements with the University of Chicago Press, each lecture is later published as a book. Previous Campbell lecturers include Robert Pinsky (2005), Ha Jin (2006), Alix Ohlin (2007), Stephen Greenblatt (2008), James Cuno (2009), Zadie Smith (2010), Stanley Fish (2012), Patrick Summers (2013) and Robert Wilson (2014).

J E F F F I T LO W, TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

I’d make an installation and I’d just put it up without any permission. The next day I would hear from various members, ‘Who put that (expletive) up?’ And then they’d go, ‘Michael, take that down.’” After graduating, he moved to England, where he’s lived ever since — long enough to acquire an endearing hint of a British accent. He earned a master’s degree from London Guildhall University and a doctorate from London’s Middlesex University and is a fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors and a brother of the Art Workers’ Guild. A seemingly tireless creative force, he rose quickly to acclaim as a leading avant-garde artist and curator. “Sometimes you know where you should be,” Petry said, “and for me it was Europe. I needed to be there artistically.” His work has crossed different media — installation, sculpture, performance and video — and touched on various themes, ranging from sexuality and identity to celebrity and science and mythical allusion. His 1999 video installation at Rice Gallery, “The History of the World,” consisted of a mound of 72 tons of sand, which was illuminated by the flickering light of a large-scale video projection overhead. As visitors stepped on the sand, the projected image shifted and changed. “When you go and see some of my work, how you respond to it is the honest answer to the question, What is it? It’s whatever you think it is. Art is a dialogue; it’s not a lecture,” Petry said, in summing up his craft. The second talk, “Reading a Life,” focused on Petry’s work as an author. He’s written several groundbreaking books sprung from his projects, including a daring artistic exploration of homoeroticism in the arts, “Hidden Histories: 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual Arts,” which was published in 2004 and is considered the first major survey of the subject. The latest is “Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still-Life tradition,” based on an exhibition, which Petry curated, opening in Norway in June before traveling across Europe. He finished the series with “The

arts & Letters

Common Practice 21C: MUSIC FESTIVAL EXPLORES CLASSICAL, CONTEMPORARY AND CROSS-CULTURAL MUSIC

M I C H A E L P E T RY, H O U STO N P U B L I C M E D I A

Select publications BY MICHAEL PETRY

Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still-Life tradition (Thames & Hudson, 2013)

The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship

(Thames & Hudson, 2012)

Hidden Histories: 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual Arts

(Artmedia Press, 2004)

RICE STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND HOUSTON’S ASIAN AND ARTS COMMUNITIES GATHERED FOR COMMON PRACTICE 21C : CLASSICAL, CONTEMPORARY AND CROSS-CULTURAL MUSIC, a three-day music festival hosted by the Shepherd School of Music in March. In a celebration of common elements that span both real and perceived divides between Eastern and Western classical music, Common Practice 21C brought together international guest artists and Shepherd School faculty and students with an interest in exploring the intersections between these types of music. Concerts, lectures and a student composers’ reading session showcased music from Taiwan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan and the United States. Highlights included an evening concert in which guest artists performed on traditional Chinese instruments, including the pipa (a handheld, four-stringed instrument that is plucked); the zheng (also a plucked string instrument, similar to a zither); and the sheng (a mouth organ with numerous pipes). The festival was organized by Shih-Hui Chen, professor of composition and theory. “In Western music, the Common Practice era — roughly 1600 to 1900 — was defined by its adherence to customary harmonic and melodic practices. Similarly, older Chinese music remained grounded in its own traditional perspective and performance practice,” Chen explained. “I believe strongly that in our age of digital communication, perceived barriers between countries and continents have shifted, bringing humanity closer together while blurring the lines between cultures. My desire for the future is to nurture the creation of a second Common Practice in music, one that transcends ethnocentric barriers.” —Holli Clements S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 51

arts & Letters

A Fairy Tale of Music

H Crook Honored Congratulations to Elizabeth Crook ’82, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Jesse H. Jones Fiction Award for “Monday, Monday,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Read our Q&A with Crook in the Summer 2014 issue of Rice Magazine: ricemagazine.info/278

Magazine Recognized

ansel and Gretel is a tale that’s been told for centuries, and in March, the classic opera, which premiered in Weimar, Germany, in 1893, was performed at the Shepherd School of Music. Conducted by Richard Bado, professor of opera and director of Rice’s Opera Studies Program, the classic opera, written by Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), was sung in German with English surtitles at the Wortham Opera Theatre in Rice’s Alice Pratt Brown Hall. Nadia Fayad, a mezzo-soprano and the recipient of the Renée Fleming Endowed Scholarship in Voice, played Hansel. Graduate student Alexandra Smither, a soprano and recent graduate of the University of Toronto as well as the recipient of the Leo W. and Frances C. Atkinson Memorial Scholarship in Voice at the Shepherd School, partnered with Fayad as Gretel. “Every role comes with its own challenges. The challenge with Gretel was definitely stamina,” said Smither, who added that she and Fayad were onstage for almost the entirety of the opera. “This required us to pace ourselves both physically and emotionally, so that when we reached the end, we still had enough voice left to sing the final numbers.” To add to the drama, though not intentionally, Smither came down with a bad cold the day before the opera opened. Extra coaching, plus a quick trip to a local ENT, kept her in voice.

“I was so impressed with the performance,” said Ben Hoff ’17, an engineering student and frequent attendee of Shepherd School events. “Events like these are Rice’s best–kept secret.” Pat Diamond, who runs the Yale Summer Conservatory for Actors and teaches acting at the Manhattan School of Music, was the stage director for the production. According to Bado, Diamond’s approach to stage direction emphasizes “the struggles of a family in turmoil learning the value of faith over fear.” The set — kept minimalistic with a forest of simple gray hues and two panels that unhinged into the family home and witch’s house — was designed by Ann Bartek, a Princess Grace Award recipient and a member of USA 829, a labor union and professional association of designers, artists and craftspeople. “The current talent level throughout the opera program right now is pretty unreal,” said Samuel Waters ’16, a student in the opera department and the J. Thomas and Nancy Moore Eubank Endowed Scholarship in Voice. “I’ve seen this show a number of times at the professional and collegiate level, and this cast was unrivaled. The orchestra, staging, costuming and singing were of the highest quality you could see and hear anywhere.” For more information on Shepherd School events: ricemagazine.info/279

—Leticia Trevino ’16

T E D WA S H I N GTO N

The Spring 2014 issue of Rice Magazine received a silver award in the category of publications and periodicals (magazines) at the 2015 Case (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) District IV Accolades competition.

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

arts & Letters

CA LE N DAR

Imaginative Framework RSA students examine ingenuity of row houses in Rice Gallery installation

or three months this spring, Rice Gallery hosted an installation by students of the Rice School of Architecture (RSA) and their professor, Jesús Vassallo, in collaboration with Tokyo firm and small-house specialist Atelier Bow-Wow. The collaborative project, titled “Shotgun,” began as a seminar taught last fall by Vassallo, an assistant professor of architecture, and was intended from the start as a comprehensive look at shotgun houses: small, thin structures so named because they have an unimpeded view from the front door to the back. The structures have been the focus of preservation efforts in Houston, particularly in the Third Ward’s Project Row Houses, which has a long history of collaboration with the RSA’s Rice Building Workshop. The framework for students’ ideas to reimagine shotgun houses is an actual frame that morphs characteristics of row-house construction into a five-bay skeleton. Inside are drawings, models and descriptions of concepts to expand the practical use of shotgun houses, along with a history of their development and images of current houses shot by students during their visits to Houston’s Third and Fifth Wards. “I have done some work designing houses, and I think the most successful are those that look at themselves,” Vassallo said. “When you are in the house and able to look at the garden, I want to see through the garden to another part of the house. That way, you are made aware of how the house sits on the land and how the different parts of the house relate to each other. This is a case where it’s successful.” Working with Vassallo and gallery personnel, the students built the structure over three weeks, based on ideas developed with Vassallo and Atelier Bow-Wow principals Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. “Just like you can see projects inside that try to reinterpret the shotgun, this piece is also a reinterpretation of the shotgun,” said graduate student Pablo Ruiz of the frame that nearly fills the gallery space. “It’s a way to look at things in a new way.” See a video about the making of “Shotgun”: ricemagazine.info/280 —Mike Williams

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 53

arts & Letters

oughly two dozen Rice students gathered in Rayzor Hall in late March to hear from one of Houston’s most famous temporary residents: Jón Gnarr, the Icelandic punk-rock comedian who became mayor of Reykjavík. Gnarr is at Rice this spring as the first writer-in-residence at the university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. “I am very many things, and sometimes I’m so many things, I get confused what I am,” the self-deprecating Gnarr told the students in Culture, Energy and the Environment: An Introduction to Energy Humanities, an environmental studies course taught by center postdoctoral fellow Matthew SchneiderMayerson. Since Gnarr made a name for himself as teenage bass player in a punk band called Nefrennsli (Runny Nose), he has forged a career as an actor, comedian, playwright, author, elected official and, as evident 54

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

in his remarks to the Rice students, a passionate voice for climate-change awareness. As Gnarr explained, his foray into politics in 2009 was anything but planned. With Iceland in the grip of the global financial crisis and the country’s three largest banks having collapsed under foreign debt, he had lost his Reykjavík advertising job. He became an avid consumer of news reports on the crisis and began to focus on his comedy. Audiences loved his running joke about how politicians could never just say, “I don’t know.” After shows, people would often tell him that he should go into politics.

So, Gnarr decided to register a new party and run for mayor. “I would call my political party the Best Party, because it’s the best. It was idiotically funny.” On election night, his Best Party shocked the political establishment, winning the election with nearly 35 percent of the vote and taking six of 15 seats on the Reykjavík City Council. Suddenly, Gnarr was one of Iceland’s most powerful politicians and had to tackle serious issues: The small city (only about the size of Beaumont, Texas) was on the verge of bankruptcy. He made the kind of tough, unpopular decisions that such times require: He raised fees, merged schools and laid off city workers. At the same time, he tried to lighten the mood and bring humor to the office — appearing, for example, in drag at the city’s gay-pride parade.

While at Rice, Gnarr has been working on building bridges between the academic world of energy and environmental research and the arts and media. Gnarr said he has been worried about climate change for years, while his country has mostly been focused on economic development, often to the detriment of the country’s natural habitat. “It’s very hard (in Iceland) to get out information on climate change. ... People are not very informed, and they’re very skeptical.” Dominic Boyer, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences and professor of anthropology, had written a paper on the Best Party that caught Gnarr’s eye, which in turn led to a conversation and Boyer’s subsequent invitation to Gnarr to come to Rice. Watch a video: ricemagazine.info/281 —Jeff Falk

C O U RT E SY P H OTO J Ó N G N A R R

Gnarr: Climate change is not a joke

arts & Letters

Books and music Spare Not the Brave: The Special Activities Group in Korea by Richard L. Kiper ’76 (Kent State University Press, 2014) Kiper recounts the often–overlooked history of the Special Activities Group (SAG), an elite combat unit of the Korean War. He mainly uses primary sources supplemented with oral histories, official reports, maps and his 26 years of experience to give a more complete depiction of the involvement of SAG during the war. Kiper received his Master of Arts in history from Rice and is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes

The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by J. Sears McGee ’64 (Stanford University Press, 2015)

Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602–1650) was a puritan and a member of England’s Long Parliament. By compiling D’Ewes’ autobiography, personal journals and correspondence, McGee presents the first biography of D’Ewes and gives readers a comprehensive view of a 17th-century English gentleman during a tumultuous time. McGee is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

edited by Scott Dodson ’96 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Dodson chronicles the achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a legal icon. The book includes testimonies from law scholars and court watchers for a more complete look at Ginsburg’s career. Dodson graduated from Rice with a Bachelor of Arts in biology. He is currently a professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

American Lyricism: Piano Music by American Composers

Connections: Music for Viola and Piano

Poetry in Motion

Although the pieces are very diverse, all five composers included in this album are American and work with tonality. The CD includes “Toccata” by Pierre Jalbert, professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music.

Connections presents two of the greatest works for viola and piano by two of the most well-recognized composers of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. Van der Werff is a professor of viola at the Shepherd School of Music. The CD also offers a three–movement work by Karim Al–Zand, an associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School.

The CD features music by Adrienne Albert, Dan Locklair, Claude Debussy, Manuel Moreno-Buendia and Sonny Burnette. Violist of The Fire Pink Trio, Sheila Browne, graduated from the Shepherd School of Music in 2001 with amaster’s degree in music.

Christopher Atzinger

Ivo-Jan van der Werff and Simon Marlow

The Fire Pink Trio

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e 55

family album

Before there was KTRU

... there was KOWL by

melissa Fitzsimons kean ’96 Centennial Historian

STUDENT-RUN RADIO AT RICE BEGAN IN 1967 WITH A TWO-WATT STATION, KHCR, broadcasting news and music from the basement of Hanszen College (KHCR = Hanszen College Radio). In 1968, it moved into the Rice Memorial Center and changed its name to KOWL, broadcasting on 580-AM. It was short-lived — by the end of 1969, Rice had a licensed FM station with the familiar call letters KTRU. KOWL’s greatest moment probably came during the campus crisis that surrounded the appointment of William Masterson as Rice’s president in February 1969. They did their best to cover the rapidly changing situation and stayed on the air throughout most of those tense five days. Reporters for the Houston news outlets, hungry for information about the dramatic events, were forced to sit in their cars in the Rice parking lot, the only place they could reliably pick up the station’s weak signal. The station

R i c e M a g a z in e | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5

was not well known ARE YOU IN THIS PHOTO? We’re trying to identify these even on campus, so KOWL founders. they stuck up fliers all Write to us: over advertising their ricemagazine@rice.edu coverage of the crisis. Today, those venerable call letters are licensed to an AM radio station in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. An earlier version of this article appeared on Melissa Kean’s popular blog, Rice History Corner. In her almost daily posts, Kean sleuths, solves puzzles and unearths stories behind the photos, objects and ephemera that reside in Rice University’s archives. Read the blog: http://ricehistorycorner.com/

S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z in e â&#x20AC;&#x192; 57

Rice University, Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892

Willy Week Walks Photographed by JE FF FITLOW

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit #7549 Houston, Texas

OVERSIZED BUBBLE BALLS AREN’T AN UNUSUAL SIGHT ON CAMPUS — well, at least not during Willy Week, a weeklong celebration honoring the university’s founder, William Marsh Rice. Festivities include picnics, parties and college pranks and culminate with the annual Beer Bike competition. This year, perhaps a new college tradition was introduced when members of Sid Rich and Lovett colleges donned clear plastic orbs and bounced and rolled their way across the rugby field in a friendly match of bubble soccer. Play ended at sundown, but not before “soccer mom” snacks — Goldfish and Fruit Gushers — were shared with weary bubble ball participants. —Tracey Rhoades