Rice in, and of, the World

In the last Sallyport, I wrote about the value of our university’s engagement with its home city. Each day, I learn more about the remarkable opportunities that Houston offers to the Rice community and the remarkable contributions that our faculty, staff, and students make to Houston. But Rice’s engagement is, of course, not limited to our city or our home state. It goes beyond those borders and indeed our nation’s borders to have an impact on the entire world.

How does a small great university make its presence felt nationally and internationally? We do this in ways both obvious and subtle, both close to home and far away.

On campus, we begin with our faculty and students. Rice truly has scoured the globe for excellence, and our faculty hails from countries all over the world: Argentina, Australia, the Cayman Islands, China, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Romania, and Turkey, to name but a few. Similarly, about 600 of our 4,800 students come from foreign countries. This international community is enhanced by a constant stream of global visitors. Despite the increasingly onerous restrictions on international visitors in the post-9/11 era, we have managed to increase the number of visiting faculty, researchers, and lecturers from abroad to almost 300. The Baker Institute for Public Policy brings world leaders to Rice, and Rice to the attention of the world. In the classroom, we teach languages, cultures, and political systems from around the globe, and our students go abroad to use and increase that knowledge. In this issue, Mark Scheid, executive director of International Programs and Scholarship, explains some of the ways that international education benefits the high proportion of our students who study abroad for part of their education.

Our students respond to this environment not only by seizing opportunities to study abroad or learn from foreign visitors but also by contributing to the wider world. As you can read in “Something About This Disaster,” Rice students organized an event to raise money to aid victims of the South Asian tsunami, and one student even traveled to India to help those in need.

Rice research has worldwide implications as well, as reflected in this issue’s stories on new technology for airport screening, defenses against deadly pathogens, insights into the workplace, and the effects of music on the human brain. Because the subjects of our research endeavors are not limited by national boundaries, we have formed teaching and research partnerships with comparable institutions around the globe. These include universities in Australia, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, and Turkey.

In addition, Rice projects its influence across the nation and world through our alumni. Our cover story is a particularly strong example of that, examining Rice’s impact on Silicon Valley. “Connecting the Dot-Coms” tells of a handful of innovative Rice alums who have helped drive and transform the computer industry and who continue to influence the U.S. and world economies through their accomplishments as venture capitalists.

Since Edgar Odell Lovett toured institutions around the globe to develop a plan for the creation of the Rice Institute, the world has continued to shrink dramatically through the forces of trade, migration, and communication. In such a global village, it is all the more vital that a great university and its faculty and students be international citizens, that their responsibility for human improvement and understanding know no boundaries. As I set forth in my first Sallyport column, Rice is not simply a small university that is great, but rather, a great university that is small. Such greatness entails connecting and contributing to the world beyond our city. We aspire here to an educational community of the highest quality—literally drawn from and extending to all parts of the world—precisely because our horizons are not determined by our size, but by the universe of our capability and ambition.

—David W. Leebron