Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter turns 100 Tuesday, and Rice University is taking a look back at the 39th commander-in-chief’s connection to the university.
Carter has visited Rice on three separate occasions. The first was as the university’s commencement speaker May 8, 1993.
“Within us individually there should be a searching, a reaching, a grasping, or a quizzical attitude, a questioning of society, a questioning of ourselves,” Carter said in his speech. “How can I rejuvenate myself and apply in my life the true measures of success, which I've described already? Excellence comes from a repository that doesn't change, like the last 80 years here at Rice. How do we take that excellence in our life and a vision of America and a troubled world, (with) but one life – my own – and make it great? That's the challenge for us all. Certainly including me.”
His next trip was June 30, 2005, when he attended a meeting of the Commission on Federal Election Reform he co-chaired with James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who now serves as honorary chair of the Baker Institute for Public Policy. The last visit was May 20, 2008, when Carter participated in a discussion with Baker following the Baker Institute’s screening of the 2008 film “Recount.”
In addition, the institute’s Presidential Elections Program has worked with the Carter Center since 2020 to study election issues.
“Without question, he has had one of the greatest post-presidencies of any American president, and was really underestimated during his time in office,” said presidential historian and author Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor in Humanities at Rice. Brinkley has spent considerable time with the former president in the U.S. and abroad, and authored “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.”
Media are encouraged to download photos and Carter’s Rice commencement speech here: https://rice.app.box.com/folder/287068772704?s=s37oy7fjkm2o0xr8cbi8xbyl5fvq8x4i
Media with questions can reach out to Amy McCaig, senior media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu.