Alumni College Heads West to Bay Area

Alumni College Heads West to Bay Area

BY MICHAEL CINELLI
Rice News Staff
October 21, 1999

Last year Rice invaded Washington, D.C., home of some world-renowned private universities such as Georgetown and American. More than 100 blue-and-gray loyalists turned out to renew a little Owl academic “fever” as part of an Alumni College road show.

From a room overlooking the White House at the Hay Adams Hotel, John Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, delivered a rousing lecture on Thomas Jefferson.

This year Rice’s Alumni College takes faculty west on Oct. 23 to showcase their talents to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they will be close to the campuses of higher-education stalwarts such as Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco.

With about 1,400 alumni and parents of current students living in the area–the largest concentration of Rice followers outside of Texas–the Bay Area Alumni College Weekend could provide the spark needed to formally establish a network of Owl supporters who could help raise the university’s visibility on the West Coast.

“There is a dual purpose to this year’s Bay Area Alumni College,” said Ann Peterson, assistant director of alumni affairs. “In addition to the traditional program of providing alums and parents of students the opportunity to take a class from some of Rice’s top faculty, we plan on conducting a survey of those who attend–and mailing it to those who can’t make it–to try and jump-start an alumni group out there.”

The Alumni College program began in 1995 with three days of on-campus classes, plays and recitals. The on-the-road version offers students four class sessions during a daylong event, with two professors lecturing concurrently during each session.

Boles will be on hand at the Stanford Park Hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., providing historical background on Rice in a lecture titled “In Search of a President: Edgar Odell Lovett Comes to Rice.”

Joining Boles will be:

* Ronald Sass, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and professor of chemistry and education, who will talk about “Climate Change: Past, Present and Future”;

* Spike Gildea, associate professor of linguistics, who will lecture on “Anthropological Linguistics: Studying Languages Among Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon”;

* Jennifer West, the Theodore N. Law Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, who will discuss “Engineering of Cells and Tissues: Applications in the Cardiovascular System”;

* Arthur Gottschalk, associate professor of composition and theory, who will talk about “Music in Film”;

* Vicki Colvin, assistant professor of chemistry, who will lecture on “Nanotechnology: Science Fiction and Science Fact”;

* Michael Carroll, the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Professor of Engineering, who will discuss “Engineering and the Arts”; and

* Dennis Huston, professor of English, who will talk about “The Language of Film: How the Camera Shapes Our Perception of the World We See Through It.”

One Bay Area alum has already told Peterson he is disappointed that he will miss Huston’s presentation at the Alumni College event.

“But he said he plans on going to Chicago later this year to hear Dennis’ lecture,” she said.