Opinion

Thinning the hedges at Rice University

A student walks past the archways in front of the Fondren Library at Rice University Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012, in Houston. Rice celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Seen across the quad through the center arch is Lovett Hall. less A student walks past the archways in front of the Fondren Library at Rice University Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012, in Houston. Rice celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Seen across the quad through the center ... more Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 87 Caption Close Thinning the hedges at Rice University 1 / 87 Back to Gallery

Edgar Odell Lovett, Rice University's first president, was a stately, solemn man, the former head of Princeton's department of mathematics and astronomy, with gravitas enough to make people take seriously the educational institution he was building on a patch of prairie swamp, three long unpaved miles from downtown Houston.

In 1912, when he addressed the 59 students who intended to be Rice Institute's first class, and the far larger number of Houstonians and international academic dignitaries who'd come to see the school's formal opening, Lovett stood in front of the Institute's first building - an intricate brick-and-carved-marble wedding cake of a structure, one whose Byzantine cloisters and columns with Venetian capitals looked as though they belonged in Italy, not on swampy prairie land where cowboys recently had rounded up longhorns. And in front of that flowery, formal building, he delivered a flowery, formal speech. Right off the bat, he compared the current moment to the age of Pericles.

Pericles on the prairie: The idea makes me laugh. But Lovett was just getting started. In the future, this brand-new enterprise, he declared, with stunning ambition, "is to be more than a university of Houston - it is to be a university of Texas, a university of the South, and later, let us hope in reality as in aspiration, one among national institutions, reflecting the national mind, one among the universities of the nations, fostering the international mind and spirit in cosmopolitan ways."

A hundred years later, like the building that's now named Lovett Hall, that speech seems better than ever.

And because of that, you have to pity David Leebron, Rice's current president. In writing a speech to celebrate Rice's 100th anniversary, Leebron has a tough act to follow.

More Information Rice centennial events Rice's Centennial Lecture Series is open to the public. For a complete list of events, and to register for lectures that require free tickets, visit centennial.rice.edu. Wednesday Centennial Walking Tours, leaving every 15 minutes, 2-4 p.m., Brochstein Pavilion. Geneticist J. Craig Ventner, "From Reading to Writing the Genetic Code," 3-4:15 p.m., Tudor Fieldhouse. "Four Short Talks: An Evening with Visionary Leaders Esther Dyson, Shirley Ann Jackson, Rem Koolhaas and J. Craig Ventner," 8-10 p.m., Tudor Fieldhouse. Thursday Architect Rem Koolhaas, "Architecture as a Global Practice," 10-11:15 a.m., Tudor Fieldhouse. Tech visionary Esther Dyson, "Traveling Behind the Scenes," 1-2 p.m., Tudor Fieldhouse. Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute president and theoretical physicist, "Valuing Science: Exploring our Past, Securing our Future," 3-4:15 p.m., Tudor Fieldhouse. World premiere of William Bolcom's Ninth Symphony, by the Shepherd School Symphony, 7:30-9 p.m., Stude Concert Hall. Friday Academic procession and centennial address by Rice President David W. Leebron, 9:30-11:15 a.m., Academic Quad. World premiere of William Bolcom's Ninth Symphony, by the Shepherd School Symphony, 7:30-9 p.m., Stude Concert Hall. Saturday Dedication of a statue of Edgar Odell Lovett, Rice's first president, 10:30-11:30 a.m., Keck Hall Lawn. Homecoming football game: Rice vs. UT-San Antonio. 2:30 p.m., Rice Stadium. Oct. 17 Chief Justice John G. Roberts, "A Conversation With the Chief Justice," 3-4 p.m., Tudor Fieldhouse.

Inconceivable

In some very obvious ways, Leebron isn't Lovett. Lovett was tall, WASP-y, cool and formal; Leebron is short, Jewish, warm and funny. Lovett wrote in long sentences, full of dependent clauses and classical references, sentences that bend and meander like bayous; Leebron tweets. Students and even faculty members maintained a respectful, awed distance from Lovett; Leebron is more likely to inspire jokes than distancing awe. (Students, for instance, love to point out his resemblance to Wallace Shawn's bald, fast-talking character in "The Princess Bride." "Inconceivable," they whisper.)

For months, Leebron has fretted openly about following Lovett's speech. He thinks he'll probably quote the part of Lovett's speech in which he refers to the campus's hedges. Those ligustrums, just behind the rows of live oaks, form the campus's sharp boundary, and when I was a student in the '80s, the world "beyond the hedges" seemed unimaginably far away.

When Leebron arrived at Rice in 2004, he considered tearing the ligustrums out. Rice, he thought, shouldn't be so separate from Houston: The city and the university need each other.

Instead, he settled for metaphorically thinning the hedges.

The recruitment office began touting Houston as an attraction, a compelling reason to come to Rice. Houston is, after all, a major urban center, diverse and lively, full of internships, museums, restaurants and clubs. "We have a campus as beautiful as in any small town, a campus that looks the way that students think a campus should look," says Leebron. "What other urban college has that? And anything you can do at one of those small-town colleges, with the beautiful campuses, you can do here tenfold."

Rice cut a deal to supply students with unlimited Metro passes, taking advantage of the campus's light-rail stop to send them out into Houston.

And it began emphasizing research that connects to the Houston area. The 5-year-old SSPEED Center (Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters) aims to prevent hurricane and tropical-storm damage along the Gulf Coast. The two-year-old Kinder Institute for Urban Research studies the issues facing big cities across the globe, but most especially those in its hometown. And the brand-new Energy and Environment Initiative (E2I) unites disciplines across campus in research whose relevance is obvious to Houston. And a new building just outside the hedges, the gorgeous 10-story BioScience Research Collaborative, blurs the boundary between Rice and the Texas Medical Center.

Under Leebron, Rice also makes more effort to lure Houstonians onto its campus.

The Brochstein Pavilion, the gorgeous glass-box coffee shop at the campus's center, was designed largely to give visitors a welcoming place to hang out. The university is planning a new, larger Continuing Studies building, able to house more classes for Houstonians. And Rice's public-art program - most especially, the new James Turrell "Twilight Epiphany" Skyspace - is clearly visitor bait. "It's not, in my view, worth having that art just for the people who go to school and work on this campus," says Leebron. "Turrell is a big commitment. It needs to be seen by more people than that."

Wine and spirit

"How you do get into your blood and bone the wine and spirit of this country!" Lovett declared in his 1912 speech. Lovett, who had never particularly thought about Houston until offered the Rice job, ended up spending his life here; he was president of Rice for an astounding 34 years.

Leebron has been at Rice for eight years - which is a long time, too, in an era when colleges seem to change presidents more often than they replace the dorm mattresses. Like Lovett, Leebron hadn't really thought about Houston before he lived here. But the place got into his blood and bone, too. And he saw to it that the city became more of the blood and bone of Rice.

lisa.gray@chron.com