New, better speaker selection process

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SA changes system to avoid additional commencement hassles

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by Maya Balakrishnan

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Last week, concerned students met with President Malcolm Gillis and came up with a proposal for improving the speaker selection process. According to the proposal, the process will begin two years before each commencement, which will minimize the risk that the speakers chosen will have prior engagements.

In September, a five-member committee will meet; by January, the group will have developed a short list of potential speakers consisting of six internationally or nationally-known individuals, three regionally-known speakers and one speaker from the Rice community.

The SA will appoint three of the committee members, the Graduate Student Association will appoint one, and the final committee member will be chosen from Rice faculty.

These new changes will streamline the process considerably and will lessen the burden on students in the committee, according to SA President Maryana Iskander.

"They can come up with a creative list of names without having to put out numerous polls to the students," Iskander said.

After the class has ranked the 10 potential speakers, the list will be handed over to Gillis, who will begin contacting the candidates. This system leaves adequate time in the second year for confirming the speaker.

Rice has not always had a commencement speaker. Until 1992, Rice has relied on internal speakers; it has only been in the recent past that the university has acquired renowned national speakers such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former President Jimmy Carter to speak at the graduating ceremonies.

"We realized that [the speaker selection process] hasn't been working for the past couple of years," SA Internal Vice President Michael Munson said. "It was this year that we actually came up with a solution."

According to Iskander, finding a commencement speaker has been a problem for the past two years.

"Two years ago, none of the five people we chose could speak at commencement, and we were left in an awkward position," she said. "So this year we tried to come up with a foolproof system that would work every year."

The SA conducted a survey in the beginning of October to find out how to approach this problem. The results indicated that students do want a speaker at commencement and that most prefer a national speaker.

Also, the survey found that if national speakers are unavailable, students would support inviting a regional speaker of high quality or a successful Rice alumus.

Customarily, a Speaker Selection Committee convenes a year in advance of the actual event. This committee fulfills its duty of finding an appropriate speaker through a series of steps. First, the committee, composed of representative juniors and faculty members, composes a list of 20 potential speakers.

In order to narrow down their list, the committee presents the list of speakers to the students in a poll. From these polls, the top five speakers are ranked, and their names are forwarded to President Malcolm Gillis, who calls each speaker until he finds one who agrees to speak at commencement.

However, recent attempts using the current process have been unsuccessful. Unable to secure any of the speakers on the list presented to him, Gillis has been forced to invite a contact or colleague to speak at commencement, one who did not reflect the students' choice.

Part of the problem in attracting nationally-recognized or well-known speakers is that Rice does not offer honorary degrees or large speaker fees. Moreover, nationally-recognized speakers may find larger campuses more conducive to their own situations and find that Rice's relatively small audience is insufficient incentive to speak here, Munson said.

"Often, extremely well-known speakers would rather speak to large audiences which could hear their new ideas," Munson said. "Whereas Rice University is small and its audience would number about 1,000, somewhere like University of Texas would have a much larger audience."

Another problem with the current system is that the well-known speakers students choose are in high demand and often engaged a year in advance. Hence, it is difficult for Gillis to acquire such speakers under the present selection system's timeline.

Applications for the 1998 and 1999 speaker selection committees are now being accepted.

This item appeared in the News section of the November 1, 1996 issue.

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