Rice receives $25 million naming gift from alumnus Robert Klein for a new social sciences building

Rice University has received a $25 million gift from alumnus Robert Klein to name a new School of Social Sciences building. The Rice Board of Trustees approved the proposal at its March 22 meeting.

The Robert A. Klein Hall for Social Sciences will house the majority of the school’s current academic departments, institutes and centers. It will be built on campus near the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and Jesse H. Jones School of Graduate Business.

“We are tremendously grateful to Bob Klein for such a visionary and generous gift at time when the social sciences are growing rapidly in importance both at Rice and in the world,” Rice President David Leebron said. “With a location in close proximity to the Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Jones Graduate School of Business, this new addition to our campus will facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary study and create a policy-oriented corridor at Rice that will further contribute to solutions for the pressing problems of our city, our nation and our planet.”

Robert Klein

Klein has a Master of Arts (1975) and a doctorate, summa cum laude (1976), both in economics, from Rice. He also has a Bachelor of Science degree with highest honors in chemical engineering (1969) from Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.

He is currently a director of the renewable energy firm Riverbank Power, which develops, constructs and operates hydropower facilities in North and South America. The company’s run-of-river and pumped storage hydropower projects represent the world’s largest hydropower development pipeline.

Since beginning his career in 1969 as a research engineer and later a senior economist with Shell Oil Company in Texas, Klein has held senior management positions in the energy, risk-management and energy-trading industries, including petrochemicals general manager of Vista Chemicals in Houston, senior vice president of commercial and trading for PacifiCorp in Portland, Ore., and group energy risk director for Scottish Power in Glasgow, Scotland. Before joining Riverbank in October 2010, Klein served as chief financial officer and chief commercial officer for Symbiotics Energy LLC, a hydropower developer later acquired by Riverbank.

“I’ve been blessed with good fortune in business and wanted to share that with Rice,” Klein said. His years at Rice were “the richest part of my education,” he said, and he added that he has fond memories of rigorous political and social discussions with his fellow students over coffee at Sammy’s Lounge in the student center. “At Rice I learned how to realize George Bernard Shaw’s philosophy – ‘Imagine what you desire, will what you imagine and create what you will.’”

For the past two years, Klein has served on the School of Social Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board. He said the new building will help “foster interaction among faculty and graduate students and enrich both.”

“I am thrilled to have one of our very own Social Sciences graduates’ names on this building,” said Lyn Ragsdale, dean of the School of Social Sciences. “The building will be a testament to Bob Klein’s remarkable talent and success as well as his courage and unflagging determination in life. He has been an extremely valuable member of our advisory board and understands that Rice cannot be a truly top university without a distinctive facility to accommodate the growth and the importance of the social sciences.”

More than one-third of Rice undergraduates choose a major in one of the social science departments, which include anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology, all of which also offer Ph.D. programs, and the school has conferred the most undergraduate degrees at Rice during the past 10 years. It offers interdisciplinary programs in cognitive sciences, managerial studies and policy studies and houses five research institutes and centers: the Douglas S. Harlan Program in State Elections, Campaigns and Politics; the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas; the Kinder Institute for Urban Research; the Shell Center for Sustainability; and the Social Sciences Research Institute.

Ragsdale, the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Chair of Public Affairs and a professor of political science, said three of the top five majors at Rice are in economics (No. 1), psychology (No. 2) and political science (No. 5). As Rice began the 30 percent expansion of its undergraduate student body in 2006, the number of undergraduate student majors in the School of Social Sciences began to expand as well – from 642 in 2006 to 1,044 in 2012 – a 63 percent increase, Ragsdale said.

Planning for the new building’s design is in progress, and dates for construction will be determined in the near future.

Riverbank Power is privately held and includes among its shareholders BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager with $3.45 trillion in assets under management, and La Caisse de dépôt et Placement du Québec, the pension and insurance fund manager for the province of Québec. La Caisse is Canada’s largest pension plan with $131.6 billion in assets under management and a shareholder in more than 4,000 businesses internationally. Riverbank’s chairman is David Peterson, the former premier of the province of Ontario (1985-1990) and founding chairman of the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club Inc.