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Rice navigates growth amid changing landscape


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HOUSTON (AP) — From the western end of the Rice University campus, the BioScience Research Collaborative stands as a gleaming centerpiece in a wall of towers that make up the Texas Medical Center.

The collaborative, the largest and most expensive building Rice has ever constructed, could also stand as a monument to the university's growth and changes over the last decade, under the leadership of President David Leebron.

The building is part of Rice, but it towers beyond the hedges that have long enclosed the campus. It is part of $800 million in construction projects that have added or renovated more than a dozen buildings. More construction is on the horizon.

"It's both a necessity for and a symbol of being one of the top research universities in the country — and really putting a foothold in the Texas Medical Center," Leebron said about the collaborative.

Leebron, who celebrates his 10th anniversary at Rice this month, has led a sizeable expansion that has opened Rice up to the community around it. The decision to build the collaborative, plans for which had been kicked around for years, was one of Leebron's first on the job.

During Leebron's tenure, just about everything about Rice has grown, from its physical boundaries to its student body and its art collection. His supporters say Leebron has been a bold leader who will be remembered as one of Rice's best, largely because of how he has expanded Rice.

"It's always been powerful, but it's been sort of a small powerhouse," Deborah Harter, an associate professor of French studies who has served as a leader on Rice's faculty senate, said about Rice. "Universities in this country are changing. The pressures financially on them and on students are huge. It's impossible to tell where all that is going to go.

"But David Leebron doesn't want to simply wait and see. His nature at Rice is on top of and involved in all of the possibilities, so (Rice) can change and evolve as it needs to, as the landscape of higher education changes. I'm very proud of this president and I really do think he will be seen historically as one of our great presidents."

Some fear Rice's expansion will water down what makes the university special, however. Some classes at the small school have grown larger, for example. The undergraduate student-faculty ratio has grown slightly, though it's still lower than many peer institutions.

The university also caused a stir when it sold a popular radio station in 2011. Tuition, meanwhile, has nearly doubled over the last decade to $39,880. The tuition growth is really a shifting of costs, as Rice provides free education to many students and those from families earning less than $80,000 can attend Rice loan-free.

"He'll definitely be remembered for one reason or another," Joey Yang, who managed the student-run KTRU when it was sold, said of Leebron. "I think time will tell whether this whole growth path thing ends up being positive, or if, along the way, Rice loses a lot of what makes it unique."

Leebron says one of the first things that struck him about Rice was its location in the heart of a thriving city. So he's worked to connect Rice to the surrounding community.

Under Leebron's tenure, Rice expanded the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, where anyone in Houston can take courses in foreign languages, nonprofit management, liberal arts and more. The west end of campus also boasts the James Turrell Skyspace, which has become a major draw. And at the bioscience collaborative, Rice students and faculty work with their counterparts from other Houston universities, as well as with doctors and researchers from the Texas Medical Center.

"I want Houston to feel Rice is an important part of the city," Leebron told the Houston Chronicle (http://bit.ly/1obu0RN ). "We're a comparatively small university in a big city that's treated like a big university in a small city. Our goal is to make sure that relationship is reciprocal on all fronts."

Leebron has encouraged students to get off campus more, giving them free light rail and museum passes.

"There's a myth that Rice is hidden behind the hedges," said John Boles, Rice's William P. Hobby Professor of History, who has written multiple books about the history of the university. "Leebron particularly saw that we should make much of the fact that we are a university right in the middle of one of the most exciting cities in America. We are right exactly where we'd want to be — in the arts complex and medical complex. Leebron has taken advantage of that."

As Leebron has worked to open Rice up to Houston, he's also tried to give the university a larger geographical reach, with an extra push toward building an international student body.

Under Leebron, Rice's undergraduate student enrollment has expanded by 30 percent to about 3,800 students. Applications have increased as well, nearly doubling since 2007 to a record 17,731 in fall 2014.

The university, meanwhile, has built two new colleges to accommodate the growth, which Boles said shows Leebron's dedication to maintaining the residential college system for which Rice has become known. Adding the colleges also helped make sure that aspect of Rice culture wasn't watered down, Leebron said.

All of this has served Rice's ongoing quest to compete with national universities, especially Northeast Ivy League schools.

"I think students view President Leebron as having done a lot to move Rice kind of into a similar plane with a lot of peer schools," said Daniel Imas, a 21-year-old chemistry senior from Maryland, who said many of his friends had not heard of Rice.

"A significant portion of people have started applying and coming to school, largely I think because of his goals and the impact he's had," Imas said. "He in a lot of ways has prioritized making Rice competitive with our peer schools."

Rice students now come from 76 countries and from every state in the U.S. Two thousand Chinese students apply to Rice every year.

"You're either local or you're global," Leebron said. "Rice is truly world class. We have a reputation — we need to use that reputation."

A larger student body also means the university is building a larger alumni base. The university drew upon that as part of its centennial campaign, which raised a record-setting $1.1 billion between 2008 and 2013.

When Leebron arrived at Rice 10 years ago after serving as dean of Columbia Law School, his reserved nature stood in contrast to that of his extroverted predecessor, Stephen Malcolm Gillis, Boles said.

"I think some people thought he was rude and not particularly personable. I think maybe that's because he was coming from New York and coming to a Southern city," said Boles, who described Leebron as shy and "maybe kind of nerdy."

"He was very careful when he came in to really learn the place," Boles said. "You see him working a crowd, talking to people, he's amazingly funny and witty."

That paid off, as Leebron has earned the support of much of the faculty at Rice. Within his first year on campus, Leebron helped establish a faculty senate, which has since established a policy for relationships between faculty and graduate students, created guidelines for privacy and ownership of research and worked to get the faculty more involved in evaluating deans.

Leebron has almost never missed a meeting of the senate, Harter said.

Leebron hasn't avoided controversy. Some still lament the loss of Rice's radio station, the mostly secretive sale of which sparked protests in 2011. "Save KTRU" stickers can still be seen around campus, said Imas, the chemistry student.

Rice sold the station to the University of Houston for $9.5 million in 2011. Many saw the sale as a major cultural loss for Rice, and for Houston at large.

Looking back, Leebron said he still would have sold the station — it provided funding for the remodeling of the popular Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, planning of a new fine arts center and more — but he would have engaged the public from the beginning.

Leebron has left a significant mark on campus. The towering BRC is just one of several new buildings that have gone up over the last decade, including the two new colleges, a new recreation center and a new physics building. Leebron also has an eye for the visual arts, and has worked to bring pieces like the James Turrell skyspace and Plensa's "Mirror" sculptures.

The biggest art pieces have been donated, but Leebron carved out a half percent from all new construction budgets to purchase art to decorate the buildings.

The arts are key to Rice's continued westward expansion. A new opera house will be built over the sprawling parking lots on the west end of campus. The university is creating a visual arts program, to be housed in the planned Moody Center, which will replace the existing tennis courts. The plan is to create collaborations there with museums, like those with the medical center at the BioScience Research Collaborative.

The free museum passes for students are an early sign of that collaboration, said Don Morrison, a philosophy and classical studies professor and acting director of the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance at Rice, who also served for years as Leebron's faculty adviser.

Much remains to achieve, Leebron said, though he was neutral as to how long he'll be a part of it, saying he's enjoyed his decade in Houston, largely because of the support he's felt from the city.

"It's a constant project to be a top-tier research university," Leebron said. "What we want to preserve on this campus is, here are 300 acres in the middle of the fourth-largest city in the country. Three hundred acres that contribute to the success of the city."

___

Information from: Houston Chronicle, http://www.houstonchronicle.com

This is an AP Member Exchange shared by the Houston Chronicle

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