Leebron highlights Rice’s progress, looks ahead in 2014 State of the University address

President David Leebron noted “how different the landscape of higher education is than when I arrived at Rice 10 years ago” in his State of the University address Sept. 24 in McMurtry Auditorium.

“No one had ever heard of a MOOC,” he said. And people weren’t asking whether going to college was worthwhile or broadly attacking intercollegiate athletics, he said.

Introduced by Faculty Senate Speaker James Weston, Leebron said the changing landscape has raised questions about the higher education model, access and affordability and financial sustainability. “And sexual assault is now a big part of the public’s perception of higher ed,” he said.

College rankings, whatever their flaws, do play a role in the public’s perception of educational quality, Leebron said, and he cited a number of rankings to show how Rice is faring among other universities. Rice is No. 19 in the most recent U.S News & World Report ranking of national universities, which is the “most influential” ranking, he said. “One thing that we have always done really well in is the quality of our student body, and that has been devalued in its weight in the U.S. News rankings,” Leebron said, but he added that Rice’s peer review score in U.S. News went up this year. Rice plans to give more attention to its graduation rate, he said, noting that a graduation rate of 90 percent or 92 percent makes a “huge difference” in the U.S. News rankings.

“In terms of almost every other ranking, Rice is one of the schools that shows up most consistently in a wide array of rankings at the top,” he said. For example, Rice is No. 2 for best quality of life and No. 6 for happiest students among the Princeton Review’s best colleges based on student surveys, and No. 11 in a New York Times ranking for economic diversity and access. In a new ranking by niche.com (formerly College Prowler), Rice was ranked No. 5 in the country.

Leebron presented a summary of changes in academic and administrative leadership at Rice that included two new deans — Peter Rossky as dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and Seiichi Matsuda as dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies — along with the appointments of Yousif Shamoo as vice provost for research, Paula Sanders as vice provost for academic affairs and Dan Carson as vice provost for strategic partnerships; the hiring of Antonio Merlo as chair of economics and David Wetter as chair of psychology; the appointment of 10 other new department chairs; and the hiring of Sonia Ryang as director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies and William Fulton as director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Caroline Levander will now report to Leebron as vice president for strategic initiatives and digital education. A new vice president for information technology will be appointed this year, and a provost search is underway. Leebron said he has a stable administrative team, with an average tenure of seven years among the vice presidents and athletics director.

About 125 faculty members provide leadership and governance at Rice by serving in administrative roles and chairing university committees. “That’s probably different than most research universities,” Leebron said. Though Rice is small, it still has a need for a large proportion of faculty leadership. And there’s an “amazing level of faculty participation” in governance, creating and funding new centers, developing new educational endeavors like the freshman writing program and massive open online courses (MOOCs), building new research and international collaborations and solving social problems, Leebron said.

Rice’s Priorities for the New Century are focused on four key areas: strategic academic priorities, strategic school investments, campus infrastructure investments and administrative effectiveness and efficiency. Leebron said he plans to be attentive to the needs of individual schools. “We will have to work with the deans and faculty of the schools to find what is it that will advance the school the most,” he said. “Is it something that is schoolwide, or in some cases, choosing certain departments and certain periods of time to make those investments?”

For a look at the state of education at Rice, Leebron shared examples of students’ feedback about what they regard as the most important and impactful aspects of their education: research opportunities, the freedom to follow their own path and feeling empowered to make a difference in the community.

“Thirty years ago, people came to college and thought that 75 percent of what they were getting here was classroom instruction, more or less, and that’s what they were paying for,” he said. Today students regard that as important, but much less in terms of the overall value they are getting from their educational experience. Rice’s three missions of education, research and service overlap much more than they did in the past, Leebron said. As part of the changing value proposition of education, today Rice invests more in other learning opportunities for students: research, entrepreneurial projects, digital education, civic engagement and community-based experiences, leadership, mentoring and international studies.

Students’ interest in research opportunities is reflected in the increased participation in the Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium – from 181 students in 2011 to 380 in 2014, with a focus that now includes engineering, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, Leebron said. “They are expanding their job opportunities when they get out of Rice.”

Students’ evaluations of course quality and instructor effectiveness have improved between 2007 and 2013, and for the 2014 spring semester, students rated their satisfaction with their major at least close to 4 or above on a 5-point scale where 5 represents “very satisfied.”

On the research front, awards during fiscal year 2014 were up 6 percent to $115.3 million, due to more support from foundations and other nonfederal funding sources at a time when federal funding is flat. “We’re taking a number of actions in a very difficult research environment,” Leebron said. Among the challenges he noted: strengthening Rice’s competitive position, supporting faculty efforts to write proposals, addressing facility and equipment requirements and improving research infrastructure.

Books written by Rice faculty also reflect Rice’s commitment to research. More than 15 books were published by faculty in the schools of Humanities, Social Sciences and Architecture, and some received scholarly honors for their work, such as the 2014 James Broussard Best First Book Prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic awarded to Assistant History Professor Caleb McDaniel.

Leebron presented demographics on the fall 2014 entering class and said that its makeup — 45 percent from Texas, 43 percent from other U.S. states and 12 percent from other countries — is “roughly about” what it is likely to remain in the near future.

Diversity among the 3,941 undergraduates enrolled at Rice this fall is significantly higher than the 2,766 students enrolled in fall 2003, when 44 percent of the class were minority students and only 3 percent were international. Today minority students represent more than half of the current undergraduate student body from the U.S. and international students are 12 percent of the undergraduates. Leebron said that the expansion of the student body has increased not only the ethnic diversity, but also the socio-economic diversity, with a very substantial increase in Pell grant recipients

Sixty percent of Rice’s current student population are undergraduates, and 40 percent are graduate students — a ratio that puts Rice in the middle in comparison with its peers without medical schools, Leebron said.

The current graduate student enrollment of 2,617 students is 22 percent higher than graduate enrollment during 2007. During that period, the number of graduate students seeking professional master’s degrees rose by nearly 600 percent, from 42 to 291. About one-fourth of the 276 doctoral students who entered Rice this fall are studying in areas other than science and engineering.

Regarding faculty demographics, Leebron said Rice looks “very similar” to a lot of other universities. “As successful as we have been with creating one of the most diverse student bodies at private universities in the country,” he said, Rice needs to do more to increase the diversity of its faculty. “We have to turn renewed attention to make sure we have the best practices in place,” he said.

In an overview of capital projects and plans, Leebron noted that construction of the Anderson-Clarke Center and the renovation of Jones College were completed this year, and the George R. Brown tennis facility is almost finished. On the “post-2015” list — depending on fundraising — are the Moody Center for the Arts, Klein Hall for Social Sciences, an opera theater, football facility and soccer and track facilities. Projects being reviewed include the Rice Memorial Center and student spaces, undergraduate teaching labs, office space, a parking facility near Allen Center, the improvement of Abercrombie Engineering Laboratory and general infrastructure requirements.

For the financial update, Leebron said Rice had a “pretty good year,” with preliminary revenues for fiscal year 2014 estimated at $596.3 million and preliminary expenses of $592 million. About 82 percent of operating expenses come from endowment distribution, net tuition revenue and grants and contracts. About 62 percent of operating expenses support instruction and departmental and sponsored research.

Leebron concluded his address with the logo for a new campaign to raise funds for undergraduate students: “KNOWLEDGE & OPPORTUNITY.” “We’re really trying to do two fundamental things,” he said: find, produce and disseminate knowledge and create opportunities to change the world. “It’s our task to bring those two things together in a world that hasn’t seen such change in higher education in at least half of century,” he said.

During a question-and-answer session, Leebron was asked if there’s anything in particular that causes him to worry about Rice. “I worry about our place in a world that is changing,” he said. “Size is a big problem with that.” Students come to Rice because it’s a comparatively small school with a low student-to-faculty ratio, but as more international universities rise above American universities in the world rankings, Rice needs to get better “pound per pound” than much of its competition and live up to its mission statement to be a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Leebron said. “We need to deliver something that’s special to our students, graduate and undergraduate.” Students need to come to Rice and feel that when they leave, they have experienced something special, he said.

Slides from the 2014 State of the University address are posted at http://www.professor.rice.edu/professor/Office_of_the_President.asp.