Three Big Ideas

The Vision for the Second Century can be distilled into three principal areas.

Transforming extraordinary students into extraordinary leaders.
$400 million

The next generation of leaders will face incredible challenges that defy answers from any single discipline and demand innovative, sometimes unconventional, approaches. As the stakes continue to rise and the problems become more urgent, extraordinary thinkers must also become extraordinary leaders. At the heart of the Centennial Campaign are deep-seated commitments to preserving Rice’s distinctive undergraduate and graduate education and to preparing our students to lead in a rapidly changing world. These commitments shine through in a number of campaign priorities, all of which are designed to give our students the tools and the confidence to emerge as leaders.

Facing challenges. Generating solutions.
$310 million

Rice is small enough to adapt to changing educational and research environments, collegial enough to ignore the usual “silos” of discipline and department, friendly enough to welcome new ideas, historic enough to have a track record and young enough to be willing to try new things. For these reasons — and because Rice scholars embrace the opportunity to be involved in interdisciplinary, out-of-the-box work — Rice has been unusually productive in generating creative solutions to tough challenges. Ultimately, even the most practical solutions have to be built on a solid foundation. The Centennial Campaign looks at building that foundation by investing in basic research and by pooling our considerable intellectual resources into idea-percolating, interdisciplinary centers. When the campaign is complete, our areas of promise will become our newest examples of research preeminence.

Learning and leading locally and globally.
$290 million

Great cities and great universities must inspire and support each other. Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States, is a lively urban center that boasts rich diversity, a vibrant business community, distinguished arts and cultural institutions, and an international center for two particularly critical disciplines — health care and energy. The city’s geography and multicultural population make it a gateway to the international community and an ideal setting in which to prepare our students for leadership in a global workforce. Rice’s multinational and multidisciplinary efforts have laid the foundation for a unique community invigorated by international students and faculty, stimulated by faculty-driven research collaborations and infused with opportunities for students to explore unfamiliar cultures and perspectives, both in Houston and abroad.