At Rice, our richly diverse community is deeply grounded in a culture of care, compassion and understanding. This offers an ideal environment for reflection and dialogue surrounding complex issues.
Rice Reflects is an initiative of the Office of the Provost to highlight opportunities for students, faculty and staff to have constructive conversations across differences, informed by scholarly expertise from within and outside the Rice community. The events and educational offerings address ideological, political, religious, cultural and other differences.
Rice Reflects builds on the Conversations on the Middle East offered for students last spring, with a wider audience and a broader focus.
Academic Freedom and Free Expression
Free Expression
In Spring 2023, PEN America, a national nonprofit organization that works to protect free expression worldwide, led a “Campus for All” seminar focused on issues at the intersection of free expression and inclusion on university campuses. The Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion hosted the seminar.
This January, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel will visit campus and hold a small-group student discussion about the ideas in her book “Dare to Speak." The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is hosting related programming throughout the academic year.
Global Conflict
Personal Connections Amid Conflict
Sandy Tolan, author of international bestseller The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East and professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will speak about tragedy and conflict in Israel and Palestine and share some reflections on reconciliation in spring 2025. An audience Q&A and reception will follow.
World Religions and Conflict
The Jewish Studies Department hosted “Disentangling the Multiple Claims over Israel/Palestine” featuring Ilan Troen, professor emeritus of the Sam and Anna Lopin Chair of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University, founding director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University and founding academic director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.
Cultural Differences
Houston Histories
The Glasscock School of Continuing Studies is offering a community course this fall developed and taught by University Historian Portia Hopkins, who will highlight and celebrate Houston’s multiple, interwoven histories and diverse communities. The course features visits from community guests and a Saturday “Houston on the Go” bus tour of downtown, the Eldorado Ballroom, the League of United Latin American Citizens Clubhouse and Chinatown.
Ongoing Programming
The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion facilitates a wide variety of programming that spans the breadth of the diversity at Rice. Two foundational opportunities for undergraduate students include Critical Dialogues on Diversity and Analyzing Diversity.
2024 Presidential Election
Election 2024 Playbook
As the nation prepared to elect its next president, Rice and the Baker Institute for Public Policy launched a new initiative – the Election 2024 Policy Playbook – to build a more informed, productive discourse. The Policy Playbook presented context, data, and expert perspectives from the institute’s world-class faculty on the most pressing issues of the day: border policy, energy security, AI and emerging tech, economic policy, and national security.
Flexible Morals: A Key Reason American Voters Support Divisive Misinformation
Minjae Kim, assistant professor of organizational behavior and sociology, shared a fresh perspective on misinformation and its role in American politics during the Rice Business Partners’ Faculty Roundtable Luncheon on Oct. 23. His research found that American voters from both major political parties sometimes support misinformation knowingly. Surveys reveal that both Democratic and Republican voters recognize some misinformation as factually incorrect yet still endorse it based on their moral flexibility, highlighting that addressing misinformation may require not just fact-checking but also the moral framing of information in contemporary politics.
Humanities Innovations: Historical Perspectives
In October, the School of Humanities hosted “Historical Perspectives on the 2024 Presidential Election,” a conversation featuring Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor of Humanities in the Department of History, CNN presidential historian and Grammy Award winner; and W. Caleb McDaniel, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities, professor of history, and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Lifelong Civic Leadership Forum: Putting People Back in Democracy
In September, the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, the Center for Civic Leadership, and community organizations hosted a free, nonpartisan event geared toward putting people back into democracy and putting democracy in action by equipping participants to practice lifelong civic engagement that is far deeper and more powerful than only engaging around elections.
Religious Tolerance and Pluralism
Religious diversity at Rice
Elaine Howard Ecklund, Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, professor of sociology, and director of the Boniuk Institute, and Kerby Goff, associate director of research for the Boniuk Institute, presented results from a recent survey on student religiosity, perceptions of religious discrimination and needs for religious accommodation and religious tolerance at Rice. This event was the first in the Rice Reflects series.
Antisemitism
In September, Naomi Greenspan, director of improving the Campus Climate Initiative at the Academic Engagement Network, led a voluntary, half-day workshop on “Jewish Inclusion and Effective Responses to Antisemitism in the Context of Academic Freedom and Free Speech” for university leaders, faculty and staff from the Offices of the Dean of Undergraduates, Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Please check back periodically for new Rice Reflects events added throughout the academic year.