The Educators

By Chris Warren

They’ve all traveled wildly different paths. Lewis Duncan gazed at the skies and, amazed, eventually became a rocket scientist. Lynda de la Viña saw that her Mexican American mother was unafraid to pursue her education at a time when that path was frowned on, and took note. Charlene Evans was undaunted by obstacles to her determination to put college in her future. Sean Ferguson wanted to be mayor of Detroit, Kevin Wildes a lawyer.

What they have in common is the route their various paths took through Rice University. Coming from different places, arriving with different interests, and pursuing different goals, each left Rice more confident and more committed. Yet despite their varied journeys, these Rice graduates all landed at a similar destination: the upper echelons of higher education. But that’s the beauty of education. It changes people’s direction, it provides a calling, and it’s the great equalizer. Not that anybody needs to preach to these five accomplished Rice alumni about the power of learning. It’s something they see every day and something they all drew from their varied experiences at Rice.

The Reverend Kevin Wildes

Resolute Decisions

Like a lot of hopeful New Orleanians, the Reverend Kevin Wildes initially thought that Hurricane Katrina had largely spared his city. Wildes, a Jesuit priest and the president of Loyola University, opted to ride out the storm on campus so he could quickly assess the impact Katrina would have on the school’s immediate future. At first, things looked promising. “On Monday, after the hurricane, not just the campus but the whole city was in pretty good shape,” he says. “I thought we would be able to reopen in four or five weeks.”

Reverend Kevin Wildes

Then, as the whole world now knows, the city’s levees broke, and one of America’s worst natural disasters ensued. Although the campus escaped significant damage, Katrina’s almost wholesale destruction of New Orleans eliminated any possibility that Loyola would host a fall semester. Instead, Wildes and his staff had to scramble on a number of fronts, including getting students placed at more than 500 universities across the United States, as well as doing the hard work required to ensure that the campus would be operational again come January.

It certainly was not a role Wildes envisioned when he became Loyola’s president in 2004. A well-regarded scholar and teacher who holds advanced degrees in theology and philosophy, including a PhD from Rice, Wildes only recently had made the move to the administrative side of higher education. Still, he felt that his extensive experience in bioethics—the subject of his dissertation and much of his professional work—gave him some measure of preparation. “In bioethics, a lot of what I did for a long time was in terms of clinical ethics, which is to say, hospital consultation and clinical decision making with patients,” he says. “I think, in the end, that prepped me for this more than anything else because you have to make decisions. You can’t just sit back and think about it.”

By at least one measure, the decisions have been the right ones: 90 percent of Loyola’s students—three-quarters of whom come from outside New Orleans—reenrolled, overcoming any wariness they or their parents might have had about returning to the city. The fact that so many Loyola students have returned and are committed to helping rebuild New Orleans is a testament to what Wildes sees as the essence of a Jesuit education. “Part of what a Jesuit education is is to be humanistic, and it also has very strong ethical implications,” he says. “It’s not only that we’re here to help people grow intellectually and spiritually as human beings; it’s also so that, as they grow, they might serve other human beings.”

People helping each other grow is something Wildes experienced firsthand during his time at Rice. In particular, he formed friendships that helped create opportunities for him as his career progressed. “Professors Baruch Brody and Tris Engelhardt, especially, were outstanding,” he says.“They were great mentors in the best sense of the word—not only intellectually and in terms of doing my work but also professionally and everything else. They opened all kinds of doors for me, and they were wonderful. I loved my time at Rice.”

That enthusiasm for a lively academic life is a quality Wildes nurtures among Loyola’s students. But understandably, with so many pressing matters to deal with, he has had little time lately to ponder Loyola’s mission, a task that normally absorbs most of his energy. And even though the school and the city will be recovering for years to come, Wildes realizes that his essential work remains the same. “It is really how to improve the quality of our undergraduate education, the quality of the programs we offer, and the quality of life for faculty members in both their teaching and research,” he says. “The school is good; there are a lot of good things going on and a lot of strengths. But I’m restless, and I think you can always get better.”

One constant, though, is Loyola’s commitment to New Orleans. “The history of the university goes back to the 18th century, and the Jesuits were among the first people here, so we’ve been tied to the city for a long time,” Wildes says. “I don’t think that is going to change.”

Lewis Duncan

Principles in Action

Lewis Duncan could have been excused if he felt slightly unwelcome after taking over the presidency of Rollins College in summer 2004. Within the first six weeks of his tenure at the central Florida school, Duncan had to guide Rollins through three hurricanes—Charley, Frances, and Jeanne. “They assured me that hurricanes did not hit central Florida,” Duncan, who had previously been dean at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, recalls with a laugh.

Lewis Duncan

Despite the initial rough weather—which, on the bright side, afforded the shelter-bound new president a unique opportunity to meet students, faculty, and staff—Duncan’s transition to the helm of Rollins has been exceedingly smooth. Unlike many small liberal arts schools whose Greek philosophy-inspired mission is to produce reflective students, Rollins has been guided for decades by the theories of the educational philosopher John Dewey. “He talked about the need to graduate not just reflective human beings,” says Duncan, “but reflexive human beings who are willing to act on their education.”

Rollins, which is ranked No. 1 among schools of its size in the South on U.S. News & World Report’s 2006 list of America’s Best Colleges, found in Duncan someone who shares that action-oriented view. And to contribute fully to society, says Duncan, liberal arts students need to be as comfortable with physics as they are with Plato. “Liberal education is educating our students so that they will be not just spectators but participants in some of the great issues and challenges and debates that will be part of their lives,” he says. “As we look at the 21st century, it’s certainly important to understand philosophy and cultures and economics and politics. But I think it’s also essential to understand science and technology.”

Duncan’s conviction is hardly a surprise, given the fact that his own career has melded action and contemplation, science and liberal arts. As a child growing up in West Virginia, he remembers his parents taking him outside to search the night sky for signs of what was then an active Cold War space race. “Those little lights, those satellites, started going overhead, and that was it for me,” he says. “I was going to be a space scientist of some kind.” His parents, neither of whom had attended college, did more than encourage their son’s dreams. They actually moved the family to Bellaire, Texas, so he could attend a school that was rated one of the nation’s best for science and math.

Duncan excelled in science, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics and a master’s and doctorate in space physics from Rice. He put that training into action in a variety of venues, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he helped design and build sensors that can verify compliance with nuclear nonproliferation treaties. He even worked alongside astronaut Sally Ride while he was a Carnegie Foundation science fellow at Stanford. With an office just a couple doors away from both the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the former secretary of defense, William Perry, Duncan worked with policymakers to better understand how technology could be used to make decisions.

Eventually, Duncan left Stanford for a series of positions in higher education, first at Clemson University in South Carolina, later at the University of Tulsa and Dartmouth, and now at Rollins. Not surprisingly, the many facets of his work today have a familiar motivation. “We’re going to use the resources and the trajectory of the school,” he says, “to step up to greater national leadership in this concept of applied or practical liberal education.”

Even with his sights on national leadership, Duncan makes sure he spends time every year both teaching freshmen and conducting research with undergraduates. His commitment to always teach undergraduates has its genesis in his time at Rice. “As a student at Rice, I was deeply impressed that, as a freshman, I took history from Frank Vandiver, who was interim president of the university,” he says. Duncan also recalls taking chemistry from Nobel laureate Robert Curl and other courses from distinguished academics. “It was transforming in the sense that I recognized both the value of having these outstanding teachers and the symbolism of Rice putting such wonderful teachers at the introductory level.”

Charlene Evans

Building the Future

In the days after Charlene Evans finished her master’s and PhD in English at Rice, she handed in a form that all new graduates were required to complete. As Evans recalls it, the woman who collected the questionnaires looked at hers in surprise, as if she’d never seen those answers before. “They ask the question, where did your father go to school? How far did he go?” Evans says. “My father finished the third grade, and my mother finished the ninth grade.”

Charlene Evans

Judging by the woman’s reaction, there clearly weren’t a lot of other PhDs with Evans’s background, hailing as she did from a modest family in La Marque, Texas, where her father—who had spent time riding in rodeos and as a calf roper—worked at a chemical plant. That’s not to say, however, that her parents didn’t understand the importance of education. They always encouraged their young daughter’s insatiable curiosity and told her that she could accomplish anything she wanted. As Evans’s career blossomed, her mother gleefully told any visitor to their home about her daughter who had graduated from Rice.

Early on, Evans realized, too, that a good education could take her places. “For a little black girl in the South at that time, I looked at education as the way out,” she says. That passion for learning made her very much at home as a student and, later, in a career spent entirely in education, including the last 29 years with Texas Southern University, the second-largest historically black college in the United States.

Always an excellent student, Evans earned degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and Atlanta University as well as at Rice. “I’ve been privileged to have studied at some of the finest institutions in the nation,” she says. “I think that gives me a level of confidence that maybe I wouldn’t have had before.”

That confidence blossomed during her graduate studies at Rice, where Evans was particularly inspired by Robert Patton, her Victorian literature professor. “All my professors at Rice were capable,” she recalls, “but Patton had this panoramic, encyclopedic array of information.” Recently, Evans received a call from Patton, one that meant a great deal to her. “He was so excited to know I was in a leadership position at TSU,” says Evans. “He said, ‘I want you to know that we are so proud of you.’”

Currently the senior vice president of university relations and ombudsman, Evans has held a wide array of positions in her nearly three decades at Texas Southern—she began as an instructor and was promoted to assistant professor, then associate professor and English department chair before making the move to administration. It was a transition, she says, that she never planned. In the 1980s, an article appeared in the Houston Chronicle saying that the faculty senate at Texas Southern wanted the school to join either the University of Texas or the Texas A&M system. Houston city leaders called Evans and asked her if the story was true. “I said, ‘No. We like our autonomy,’” she says. “My career in administration began when I spoke out.”

Evans continues to speak out on behalf of Texas Southern. “I’m basically responsible for promoting and repositioning Texas Southern University in the higher education community,” she says. “I work to enhance the image and credibility of Texas Southern University among our constituencies: the alumni and the community.” It’s a story worth telling. Not only does the school boast distinguished alumni like former U.S. representatives Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland, but the past five years have seen annual growth in enrollment, substantial increases in alumni giving, and the school’s first capital campaign.

Evans is modest about her role in Texas Southern’s progress. But as the school, which has an open-admissions policy, moves toward its goal of becoming a top-tier urban institution, there are few people who understand as well as she the importance of quality and access in education. “Everyone deserves the chance for an education,” she says. “But although we are an open-admissions institution, that doesn’t mean the quality of education is diluted in any way.”

Lynda de la Viña

Trailblazing

If you want to understand how Lynda de la Viña came to be such a pioneer, just look at her mother’s life. “I think back about my mother, who was Mexican American, and how she completed high school in 1934. That just was not done,” she says. “Then, when she graduated, she was a bookkeeper at Woolworth’s for a number of years, and that was not done either, by women or Mexican Americans.”

Lynda de la Viña

Fortunately, de la Viña, like her mother, hasn’t paid any attention to what is considered acceptable, opting instead to pursue things that pique her curiosity. The result has been a career full of firsts, beginning at Rice, where she completed her master’s and then went on to become the first Mexican American woman in the United States to receive a PhD in economics.

Earning that pair of graduate degrees was validating. “For someone who was not so confident of what they were capable of doing, even though I had a high grade point average and lots of opportunities, I think Rice gave me the confidence to know that I could compete,” she says. Not that her time at Rice didn’t have its challenges. De la Viña ended up writing a second dissertation when her first one coincided with a book published by a researcher at another university. Still, she remembers that her professors remained confident that she would finish—and flourish. “Just finishing and saying I have a degree from Rice, after coming from the Lower Rio Grande Valley, was part of starting the process of developing the confidence to know that I could continue in my career at the highest levels.”

That career took her to the U.S. Treasury Department, where, from 1998 to 2001, de la Viña was the first Mexican American woman to serve at the secretarial level. In 2001, she became the first Hispanic dean of a U.S. business school when she took on that role at Johns Hopkins University, and in 2004, she became dean of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s (UTSA) College of Business, the first Hispanic female dean of business in the University of Texas system.

Beyond her service in government and higher education, de la Viña also has founded a number of successful companies, including Operational Technologies Corporation. Clearly, hers has been a varied career. But it’s a career that can be better understood through the passion that attracts de la Viña to her challenges. “I like to build things,” she says. “I’m pretty much an entrepreneur, whether it’s as an academic entrepreneur or a business entrepreneur.”

These days, de la Viña is working hard on building the national and international reputation of the UTSA College of Business (COB). Her detailed five-year plan calls for building on the strengths inherent in the school’s location and student body. As the business world becomes increasingly global, she says, UTSA’s diversity is more and more of a plus. The school is ranked among the top MBA programs for minorities and is second in the country in the number of undergraduate business degrees it awards to Hispanic students. “Students from UTSA will have the cross-cultural experiences that companies are going to need as they meet the needs of new clients,” she says.

To bolster students’ international knowledge and experience, de la Viña recently brought in Victoria Jones to serve as director of the school’s Business Studies for the Americas program. Jones, a former associate dean at Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Brazil, also is executive secretary of the Business Association of Latin American Studies. “It means that, very quickly, we’ll become recognized in that area,” de la Viña says. UTSA’s focus on the international goes beyond this hemisphere, as well, by increasing opportunities for students to study and get work experience in China, Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian countries. De la Viña has built a formidable program in China, and, she says, “UTSA COB is better known in China than in the U.S. at this time.”

Myriad other changes have taken place during de la Viña’s relatively short tenure, including the hiring of dozens of new faculty, the establishment of three endowed chairs, and the school’s designation as a center of academic excellence by the National Security Agency. “It’s all part of putting together the puzzle of how you take a college of business that has excellent infrastructure and faculty and, frankly, not a brand name, and develop it to national prominence,” she says.

Only recently, as de la Viña has spent more time in the community talking about the importance of diversity, has she begun to realize how much of a role model she is. Often, people will approach her after a talk and ask her how she’s accomplished so much. “I’ve never consciously done anything just to be first. It’s just happened that way,” she says. “But only now am I starting to realize that those things, which I did simply because they were what I wanted to do and what I was determined to do, have had a greater impact.”

Sean Ferguson

Making a Difference

When Sean Ferguson applied to the MBA program at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, he had a very specific career goal in mind: to become mayor of Detroit. A native of the Motor City, Ferguson was keenly aware of Detroit’s less-than-stellar image in the media, and he wanted to do something about it. “I felt that it’s a much better place than people give it credit for,” he explains.

Sean Ferguson

He still feels that way, but his keen focus on becoming mayor of his hometown has dulled somewhat now that he’s started a family and established roots in Houston. An increasing aversion to cold weather hasn’t helped, either. Still, the deep-seated motivation that propelled Ferguson toward public service remains. “When I get done on this earth, I don’t want to be known for making the most money,” he says. “I want to be known for making an impact on society and my community.”

Ferguson found the ideal way to make that difference as director of the MBA program at his alma mater, the Jones School, a job he began last fall. “Traditionally, MBAs are not as attracted to these kinds of jobs because they’re not as lucrative as investment banking or management consulting,” says Ferguson, who worked as a business line manager for Procter & Gamble’s Bounty paper towels brand and in the consulting and software industries before returning to Rice. “Personally, I wanted to go to the place where I could have the biggest impact.”

In his new position at the Jones School, Ferguson, not surprisingly, spends a lot of time singing the school’s praises. Being a graduate of the Jones School, he says, makes it easy. In his work in the corporate world, he had the chance to compare Rice graduates with people from other business schools and found that Rice stacked up well. “I had the opportunity to see my skills in practice and see other Rice graduates’ skills in practice. And what I found was that we really have a top-notch product,” he says. “That was a big driver for me getting involved in the program. I’m an advocate for it and I believe in it, which make it much easier for me to sell.”

Intent on taking advantage of his opportunity, Ferguson strives for the most ambitious of goals: to ensure that Rice offers the very best business school experience available in the United States. One way he’s working to accomplish that is by developing initiatives that augment and complement classroom work, such as expanding international programs and mentoring opportunities with Houston-area executives. Ferguson, who was co-chair of the student body and treasurer of the Black Graduate Students Association while at the Jones School, is enthusiastic about the role student clubs can play. “Students learn all this good stuff in the classroom,” he says, “but when they participate in clubs, they can apply some of the things they’ve learned and engage in leadership activities.”

To Ferguson’s mind, the one prerequisite for improving the student experience is to make the MBA office itself operate as smoothly as possible. “I worked in operations at Procter & Gamble and as a management consultant, and I think I have an eye for obtaining operational efficiencies,” he says. “Academia, historically, probably has not been as operationally efficient as Fortune 500 companies. I think there is a lot of opportunity to bring corporate and business best practices into academia.”

Incorporating some of these approaches, Ferguson believes, will allow the Jones School to adapt to a rapidly changing world. As the needs of students, their future employers, and society evolve, so too must the Jones School. “I don’t think universities are going to continue to operate under the same model as the last hundred years. Students are going to have to be more adaptable, they’re going to have to understand how to better apply academic theories, and they’re going to need a different kind of experience,” he says. “In order to keep up and stay competitive, we are going to have to adjust our model to provide what all the stakeholders require.”