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The Rice Thresher
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by Leslie Liu thresher editorial staff
Dees also spoke at Rice on Jan. 26 as part of the President's Lecture Series. "I thought the students would resonate nicely with such a man, particularly given his accomplishments in the past year alone," President Malcolm Gillis said. In September, Dees won a case against the Aryan Nation in which a jury awarded $6.3 million to a woman and her son after a white supremacist leader allowed guards from his Aryan Nations compound to chase them down and shoot at them in 1998. The verdict is expected to bankrupt the organization. "He's an outstanding civil rights lawyer and has probably done as much as any single person has in the last 20 years to put out of business hate groups that have engaged in physical violence," Sociology Department Professor Chandler Davidson said. Davidson, who introduced Dees last January, teaches a social inequality class at Rice. "He's an important figure in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and for racial tolerance," Davidson said. "His Southern Poverty Law Center spends a lot of money on programs that are essentially adopted by schools to teach tolerance." Dees serves as chief trial counsel and chair of the executive committee for the SPLC, which specializes in lawsuits involving civil rights violations and racially motivated crimes, and the education project he is involved in is called "Teaching Tolerance." Since co-founding the center in 1971, Dees pushed for the construction of a Civil Rights Memorial dedicated in 1989 in Montgomery, Ala., won lawsuits that bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan and imprisoned perpetrators of hate crimes. Dees was portrayed by Wayne Rogers in Ghosts of Mississippi, a 1996 film about the life of slain civil rights worker Medgar Evers. Also, on Monday, HBO premiered a documentary narrated by Dees called "HATE.COM: Extremists on the Internet," which examines the growing use of the Internet as a way to spread extremists ideas. Dees'engagement was settled unusually late in the year. Last spring and through the summer, Gillis and Assistant to the President Mark Scheid contacted eight of the 11 speakers recommended by the 2001 Commencement Speaker Committee, but each declined the invitation to speak. "I ran through the list of credible speakers and found that in most cases, the people we wanted were either already committed or had required terms, like honorary degrees, that we could not meet," Gillis said. For example, entertainer Bill Cosby initially expressed interest, but when he found out Rice does not grant honorary degrees, he declined the offer. "I can tell you that the faculty and the board will probably not seriously consider any proposals to begin giving honorary degrees," Gillis said. Gillis said he hopes the 2002 Commencement Speaker Committee will have some suggestions ready by April 1, 2001. Usually, class members vote on a list of nominees, and top vote-getters are submitted for consideration.
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