Matriculation: Class of 2009

Matriculation: Class of 2009

David Leebron

7:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 14
Stude Hall, Alice Pratt Brown Hall
Rice President David Leebron

Members of the Class of 2009, on behalf of the deans, masters, faculty, staff and all members of the university community, welcome to Rice.

You look much happier than your parents and other relatives did a few hours ago.

One of my still relatively new responsibilities as president of the university is to welcome each new group of students at this matriculation ceremony. I know that all of you are pretty smart, but I suspect that not all of you know precisely what the word “matriculation” means. It does not mean merely to begin. It means, rather, the official admission to membership. Thus, it celebrates not just the beginning of your education here, but rather your becoming a member of the community.

In many ways, like you, I am still at the beginning of my journey at Rice. We share some similarities. We are both enthusiastic about what we have found at Rice, but also looking for positive ways to contribute. Like many of you, I came from far away — New York City, to be exact — to join the Rice community.

I admit there are some differences between you and me. You live in small dorm rooms; I live in a giant house. You have a lot of hair; I don’t. I don’t have to take another final exam; you do. You will get carded if you go into a bar in Houston; sadly, I won’t. Your parents have now left; when I go home, my kids will want me to read to them. Before you came here, many of you probably took a couple weeks and traveled or visited your families; and so, in fact, did I.

I want to tell you two stories about my travels, one from a trip I took last summer and one from a trip I took this summer. Last summer, just before the beginning of the year, we went to Philadelphia to visit my parents. We took our children to Sesame Place — that’s an amusement park with the Muppets outside Philadelphia. While we were wandering around, we had the most astonishing coincidence. I ran into my college roommate, with his two young children. It was such a joy to see him. He is a medical researcher and grant administrator at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. My point is a simple one: you will make lifelong friendships while you are in college, and the more different and more varied they are, the more rewarding they will be after you leave Rice.

This past summer, I traveled to China for several weeks. I visited universities and met with some of our graduates. A very recent Rice graduate is a newscaster on a Chinese television station; another owns, among other things, restaurants in Shanghai and Hong Kong. A third heads up all the Asia operations of one the world’s largest investment banking enterprises. So, today, as I mentioned, you join a community. It is not merely the small, welcoming community of your residential college, but the community of the Class of 2009, the community of all the students returning next week, the community of faculty and staff and the community of all Rice alumni. You will find members of this community wherever you go, all over the world, and they will serve you well. In fact, in this class here tonight there are fellow students who traveled to Houston from the Bahamas, Bahrain, China, Cyprus, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. Your being part of an international community at Rice may begin with the person sitting right next to you in this auditorium, or at lunch or dinner tomorrow.

The fundamental question both you and all of us here on the stage, and many not here, is “How can we best prepare you for the world beyond Rice?” I am sure of one thing: We cannot do it simply by preparing you for today’s world. If we know anything at all, it is that the world will continue to change, that the challenges of tomorrow will be different from the challenges today. I think back to when I was in school. And although it was, in fact, in the last century, it was not so long ago. Advanced technology, at least for an individual student, meant you had an electric typewriter, an instrument that now is becoming hard to find. Most people got about six television channels. A few students had calculators; none owned a computer. Terrorism was not something that affected our daily lives in America. And no one thought you could engineer things at the molecular level. When I went to Shanghai over 20 years ago, it was a relatively quiet and backward city that offered little at home or for export. Today, it is one of the world’s great metropolises, where almost everything is available and many goods are made for shipment to markets around the globe.

You can either fear change or embrace it, regard it as threat or opportunity. One of my favorite stories is the story of the Betamax, which was the first consumer videocassette recorder sold. We are now living at the end of the VCR technology, as DVD players, TiVo® and other digital recording devices are turning the VCR into an historical artifact. The history of the videocassette recorder demonstrates the difference between fearing change and embracing it.

Videocassette recorders first reached consumers as I got out of law school. I was living in Los Angeles and a friend of mine purchased one of the early VCR models, a Betamax made by Sony. The movie companies were afraid of the VCR, and they sued Sony to stop making the device. People said the VCR would allow consumers to watch movies at home and that would spell the end of the movie industry.

That, of course, didn’t happen. Not only were movies more successful than ever, but the VCR was the greatest benefit to the movie industry that could have been imagined. Soon, half of movie revenues and sometimes more came from videotape sales and rentals. The thing the industry had so feared was the very thing that made it more profitable than ever. Sometimes the changes we are most afraid of are the ones that will lead us to new and better places.

You have arrived at Rice at an exciting time. We are asking ourselves the hard questions about our future, engaging in a wide-ranging conversation about how we can be even better, about how we can assure our success in a world that has changed, and will continue to change, at a rapid pace. We look forward not only to teaching you, but learning from you as we confront these tasks.

Although you just arrived today, I already know something about you and can say with confidence that this new group of students consists of an incredibly varied group of people. You come from small towns and big cities, from as close as down the street and from as far away as Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. Some of you are the products of close-knit extended families; others of you were raised by single parents. In the Class of 2009, there are 380 high school varsity athletes, 187 club presidents, 31 editors-in-chief of school newspapers and yearbooks, 121 members of student government, 145 who were active in drama clubs or speech or debate teams and 200 who claim to be able to debate you in more than one language. These highly accomplished people are now your classmates and your future friends. You all know you are here not to compete with one another but to learn from one another. So within and without your colleges, engage with the people who are like you and engage with the people who are different from you. You will learn from both, and the diversity in your classmates will be one of the great treasures of your experience here.

That diversity is reflected, no doubt, also in your differing reactions to leaving your families today. Some of you, no doubt, thought this day just couldn’t get here fast enough. Others of you were not as sure about being left in a new and unfamiliar place. As I told your families earlier today, I remember, albeit vaguely, being dropped off at college by my parents and having this distinct sense that I was on my own. You have no reason to feel that way because you are not on your own. Even before you arrived, over the course of the summer, you have corresponded with your Orientation Week advisers, upperclassmen who are on campus to introduce you to the most distinctive and welcoming feature of the Rice undergraduate experience — the residential college system.

The colleges are your new homes in many senses of the word. They are quite literally your homes in the sense that they are the places where you will now eat and sleep. But they are your new homes in a much more important sense. Your college is also a home in that it provides a safe and comfortable space for you to decide what you want to make of your time at Rice. Deciding what you want to make of your time at Rice is the single most important question that you must ask yourself tonight and during this Orientation Week and the weeks, months and years ahead.

You may decide to contribute to both the intellectual and social life of your college. You may decide to make your contribution on a campus-wide level, becoming involved in activities and events that bring students together from all colleges. You may decide that your contribution will be made alongside a professor in a scientific research lab or in the field investigating the complexities of human behavior. Many of you will engage in athletics, whether at the varsity, club sport or intramural level. You may decide to do all of these things, and even more.

There are many ways to feel inadequate. I learned a new one recently: hearing that your law school classmate has just been named to the Supreme Court. Several newspapers called me after the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the United States Supreme Court and interviewed me about the appointment. I talked to the Washington Post for about 20 minutes. Now with apologies to the 31 high schools newspaper and yearbook editors-in-chief, the result was what usually happens: they took the most trivial thing I said and quoted it for 5 million people. What I said was that I recall that almost every day we would go down the street for ice cream, to a store that sold a lot of flavors, and John would invariably order vanilla chocolate chip.

Now I have nothing against vanilla chocolate chip, even though I think any half-reasonable person would prefer mint chocolate chip. And while I am willing to concede that perhaps by law school it is okay to order the same ice cream every day (we know what people say about lawyers), that ought not be your approach to college.

So let me say this: If you start finding your experience here entirely comfortable, you are doing something wrong. I will say that again: If you start finding your experience here entirely comfortable, you are doing something wrong. Now is the time to try new things, some for the first time. Take an art class, even though anything not expressed in numbers starts to give you hives. Play an intramural club sport, even if you aren’t very coordinated. Speak up, even if you are afraid. I ask you to take these risks — trying things that you may not be initially very good at — because I know what will happen if you don’t perform at the highest level (something that I know will be new to most of you). You will walk home to your college and find the support of your masters, your roommates and your friends, who could not care less if you tripped over yourself playing in your first club soccer game or if you didn’t get the highest grade in your art class or if in some other way you thought you made a fool of yourself. They will be proud of you for trying something new. And you will learn something about yourself and about other people.

One person once quipped that “College is a fountain of knowledge, where some students come to drink, some to sip, but most come just to gargle.” College ought instead to be an intellectual gymnasium, and you can exercise your mind only when you choose to pursue some things in great depth, and not only on the classroom field, but outside it as well. Seize the opportunities to discuss the issues of the day and to hear from the extraordinary people who visit our campus to lecture and participate in your learning.

One thing you will hear me talk a lot about this year is Houston, the place we all call home when we are at Rice. As those of you from Houston already know, and those of you from other places will soon discover, this is an amazing and vibrant city. It is full of things to do, places to go and people to meet. I encourage you to go beyond the hedges and come up with creative ways to engage with the city. We have given you a passport to the city — to its transportation, to its museums and even to the zoo. Use it to turn Houston into another source of learning and enjoyment while you are at Rice.

Now as I close, the temptation is tell you about my first year at college, and to draw on that in trying to give you some advice. I will resist that temptation, with one exception that isn’t really about me. At some point in the late fall my freshman year, I was in my room when there came a knock on the door. I opened it, and a man stood there. And he seemed old — really old — although I think he was probably younger than I am now. He said that he had lived in that room, and he wanted to come see it again, to revisit his college experience, because it had been so extraordinary. And he mentioned how much he would have liked to come back and have the chance to do it all again. Well, I didn’t understand this at the time. What is it that would bring someone back 20 years later in this way? I can tell you one thing: It’s not because of the substantive knowledge that he had learned or because he excelled in his classes, because he double-majored or worse, triple-majored. It is because there is something so special that can happen during these years that you will cherish it, and build upon it, for your entire lives. And that will happen to you if you seize this experience to the fullest — beyond your classes, beyond your rooms, beyond your colleges and beyond even the hedges that define this fabulous campus. And so, as you go through this year and the next three, ask yourselves occasionally: Am I making the choices and having the kind of experiences that will bring me back two or five decades from now just for the chance to remember them?

So use this opportunity wisely: Pursue your passions, explore the world around you and try lots of flavors of ice cream. A great adventure awaits you. Bon voyage.