Client: Rice University
Project/product: Viewbook

In 1993, Rice University agreed to host the G-7 economic summit. This meant that in addition to dozens of diplomats and economists, several hundred reporters would be descending on the campus. What story would they learn about Rice, and what story would they tell? Would they focus on a long-ago murder, or would they focus on the school's achievements and high academic standards?

We were hired to write a viewbook that would steer readers -- ranging from reporters to high school students -- toward the latter story. We interviewed students, faculty, and administrators, combed through the university archives, and wrote a brochure that effectively conveys the school's energy, warmth, and accomplishments.

Excerpt:
The mission of Rice university can be summarized simply: Rice aspires to be an intellectual center of excellence, focused on the student experience and purposefully conducted on a small scale, and unfailingly accessible to those who stand to benefit the most from its resources. Looking to the twenty-first century, Rice aspires and intends to serve as a model for educational accomplishment, setting the standard for institutions of the highest caliber.

Excellence has many facets. Rice is determined to offer focused and rigorous programs to both undergraduates and graduate students. The institution asks its faculty members to commit themselves to superlative teaching on the undergraduate level. And because Rice also asks its faculty to develop significant intellectual capital, it recruits only those scholars with the potential for conducting both world-class research and graduate education. The fruits of these related activities nourish and enrich the classroom experience, and are therefore an essential element of the educational process.

From its founding, Rice has been convinced that the mission, size, and quality of an academic enterprise are inseparable. President Edward Odell Lovett argued in 1912 that the challenge was to "keep the standards up and the numbers down." In 1945 an institutional self-review concluded that rice's mission was to provide "an especially good training for a limited number of students." Forty years later, in his inaugural address, President George Rupp promised that he and his faculty colleagues would remain "mindful of how great an asset is the relatively small scale of this institution."

Rice is blessed with a large endowment, which not only permits the pursuit of excellence on an intimate and human scale, but also ensures that students can be admitted regardless of their financial resources. The school's charter, written by William Marsh Rice in 1891, called for a free and nonsectarian education of the highest quality for both women and men. By the 1960s "free" and "of the highest quality" had become incompatible goals, and a modest tuition was first charged in 1965. But the founder's intent is still vigorously defended. Today, Rice is uniquely accessible: its tuition is only a fraction of that charged by other prestigious universities. As a result, the Rice student body is notable for its diversity, as well as its many collective and individual accomplishments.

Finally, Rice is committed to embodying and instilling the complex notion of responsibility. In recent years, Rice has made a renewed effort to serve its city and state, the nation, and the international community in creative and responsible ways. In the same spirit, it has tried to instill in its students an awareness of their responsibility to serve -- however they may choose, as individuals, to define that responsibility. It has devised a curriculum, a physical environment, and a social context that together support he development of broad-gauged and capable students, equipped to make major contributions across a range of endeavors.

Rice is an anomaly. It strains at the boundaries of established academic categories. And because Rice resists any easy categorizations, it is always at risk of being underreported or oversimplified.

At the same time, Rice is an institution of almost unbounded potential. In an era when other educational institutions have been forced to retrench and retreat, Rice University maintains a steady course. With care and confidence, Rice enhances its current activities -- especially when such an enhancement promises to support the institutional mission, sustain the standard of excellence, and strengthen Rice's position of academic leadership.