Rice to Honor Distinguished Alumni During Commencement

CONTACT: Michael Cinelli
PHONE: (713) 831-4794

RICE TO HONOR DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI DURING COMMENCEMENT

From shaping pottery to protecting Americans
from deadly viruses, and from ministering from an Episcopal Church
pulpit to teaching creative writing, four distinguished Rice
University alumni have made major contributions to society during
their careers.

France Franck ’48, a pottery artist, Clarence James “C.J.”
Peters ’62, chief of the Special Pathogens branch of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Clad E. Payne ’54, an
Episcopal bishop in Texas, and George Guion Williams ’23, author and
literature professor, will be honored during commencement activities
at Rice on Saturday, May 11.

Franck spent her college years and graduate school days trying
to find a personal means of expression. She wrote poetry but felt
that she could not fuse thoughts and words at their full potential.
It was her chance meeting with pottery that opened her to a world of
forms with which to mold her ideas and feelings.

“When I had my first contact with pottery,” she says, “I found
that the freshness and a lack of association I had about this art
offered a free and unexplored world that attracted me very much.”

Today, Franck is one of the leading ceramists in the world. Her
work has been exhibited at the renowned Geneva Baur Collection in
Switzerland, at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, at the
Takashimaya Art Gallery in Tokyo, and elsewhere.

Most recently, she was named Chevalier in France’s Order of Arts
and Letters-a distinguished mark of recognition from the French
government for creative achievement and for contribution to French
and world culture in the field of arts and letters.

Peters has one of the most serious jobs in the country: to
protect the American public from deadly viruses. His job is to stop
infectious diseases such as the Ebola virus from exploding into
lethal epidemics.

“My branch [of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]
is concerned with diseases for which we have no vaccines,” he says.”One of the things we try to do is understand what viruses do
overseas before they show up on our doorsteps.”

The case Peters will be remembered for is the 1989 outbreak of
the Ebola Reston virus near Washington, D.C. In Zaire, where the
Ebola erupted in 1976, the virus killed 80 percent of the people it
infected.
The Washington crisis was chronicled in a New Yorker article and
later in a 1994 bestseller The Hot Zone both written by Richard
Preston, and in the movie Outbreak. In this horrifying story, Peters
emerges as one of the heroes that managed to keep the incident under
control.

Payne was well into a career as a chemical engineer when the
calling to the ministry became so strong that he left the security
of a major Texas corporation and moved with his wife to Berkeley,
California to prepare for the Episcopal priesthood.
He became a deacon, then a priest, and has now risen to one of
the highest positions in the Episcopal Church. Last year, Payne was
elected bishop of the diocese of Texas, responsible for 158 churches
in the southeast corner of the state.

As bishop, one of his main concerns is to increase membership
and discipleship in the church. His focus is on seeing the diocese
of Texas as one church of miraculous expectation.

“We have been declining nationally as a church for the past
three decades,” he says, “and though in Texas we haven’t declined,
we haven’t been growing.”

Williams was at Rice for nearly half a century. He was 17 when
he started as a freshman in 1919 and 66 when he left in 1968,
retiring as an English professor at the university. During those
decades, Williams became an author of eight books and a legendary
teacher of creative writing and literature.

Some of the best writers to come out of Texas-John Graves ’42,
David Westheimer ’37, William Goyen ’37, J.P. Miller ’41, and Larry
McMurtry ’60-were among the hundreds of students he taught.

“Writing is a means by which an individual grows-by which he
passes intellectually and spiritually from a realm of nebulous
suggestion into a realm of valid experience,” Williams wrote in his
textbook, Creative Writing, which was adopted by more than 400
colleges and was in print for 37 years.

He also tried to instill in students the need to express their
own ideas.”Everybody is afraid to depend on oneself,” he says. “I always
told my students that through all their scholastic lives they have
been trained to remember what other people said. But now, in my
creative writing class, they must produce ideas themselves.”

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