Common Reading weaves new students into Rice’s fabric
‘House at Sugar Beach’ spurs intellectual discourse

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

From a slave ship in Cameroon in 1775, Peter Potter wrote his boss about the business of buying and selling human beings. About 200 years later, from a mansion on Liberia’s Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper began mentally writing a memoir about a coup that changed her life. And now, about 20 years later, from a residential college room, a Rice freshman writes an e-mail to his parents about his first week of university life.

Book talk by the author Helene Cooper comes to Rice Sept. 3   HELENE COOPER Mark your calendars: Helene Cooper, author of “The House at Sugar Beach,” will speak at Rice at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 3 in Tudor Fieldhouse. The event is free and open to the university community. Cooper is the White House correspondent for the New York Times. Prior to that assignment, she had been the diplomatic correspondent and an assistant editorial page editor for the New York Times and had spent 12 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. She was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Despite vastly different time periods and in markedly different situations, Potter, Cooper and the Rice freshman have something substantial in common: All are writing from a moment of great change and adjustment.

“1775 was the beginning of the end of Peter Potter’s world,” said Alexander Byrd, associate professor of history, in his faculty lecture during O-week. With the start of the American Revolution and a change in the moral foundation of the time, Byrd said, the world as Potter knew it was changing drastically. “I doubt Mr. Potter gave much thought to that. That’s a lesson for all of you. Give some serious thought to your place in the world and your place in time.”

Byrd used the example of Potter to relate to this year’s Common Reading book, Cooper’s “The House at Sugar Beach.” In turn, O-week coordinators used the book to relate to the O-week experience.

Cooper was a teenager when her world came crashing down in 1980, and she learned to compartmentalize the changes going on around and within her. As chronicled in her book, her childhood in Liberia was filled with servants, flashy cars and country homes, but all that disappeared when a group of soldiers staged a coup and assassinated Liberian President William Tolbert and executed his cabinet, which included Cooper’s uncle. Cooper and her family fled to America and tried to assimilate into a strange culture.

As Sid Richardson College sophomore Ashton Gooding led his O-week group in a discussion of “The House at Sugar Beach,” he drew from his own experience to talk about the difficulties of assimilation. A native of Chicago, he found Rice’s Southern charm a bit unsettling at first.

“People were saying ‘ya’ll’ all the time,” Gooding said. “I know it sounds strange at first, but before long, you find yourself saying it.”

Sure enough, he next asked, “What are ya’ll finding is different now that you’re away from home?”

From his own O-week experience, Gooding found the Common Reading program helped him connect to Rice.

“Even though the book is neither mandatory or required for any class, I think it became apparent to me that the intellectual life at Rice was top-notch,” Gooding said. “To me it felt like the university cared for my interests.”

Rice’s fabric

In addition to launching discussions about the transition to college, the Common Reading program aims to further weave new students into the intellectual fabric of Rice.

“We hope the book gives students something in common to talk about but also welcomes them into our intellectual community,” said Matt Taylor, adviser to the dean of undergraduates. “We want new students to get a sense of how we at Rice talk about things. Students here — the entire community here — values intellectual discourse. It’s cool to talk on a deeper level.”

Taylor said that point is driven home by the peer-led Common Reading discussions. In developing the Common Reading program, piloted three years ago, students urged the planning team to have the discussion structured by students.

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“It shows incoming students that it’s okay to talk about something like a book you have read, even in day-to-day life, because it’s something that happens all the time at Rice, even while eating in the serveries,” said Kait Chura, a Duncan College adviser. “Intellectual conversation is something that every Rice student should be prepared for, considering it happens anywhere from your Lifetime Physical Activity Program class to your organic chemistry class.”

Taylor and his team in the Dean of Undergraduates Office worked with O-week advisers to develop Common Reading questions, then turned the program over to the advisers. They also received training from Byrd about how to talk about some of the more difficult issues and themes presented in the book.

“I enjoyed the book as I read it but also recognized the importance of the group discussion that would later result,” said Chura, who was an O-week adviser last year for Sid Richardson College. “In ‘The House at Sugar Beach,’ I was looking for things that could be discussed if the freshmen couldn’t relate to the book.”

An engaging story

Each year the Common Reading book is selected by a committee made up of students, faculty and staff. The committee is charged with finding a book that will engage students and take on a topic or theme with roots in a pressing social issue. After soliciting input from the broader university, the group makes its decision and sends out copies of the book to all incoming students.

“We work to find a book that will appeal to a wide variety of people and spark discussions and create opportunities for discourse,” Taylor said. “In ‘The House at Sugar Beach’ we have a book that exposes students to something new — the story of the Liberian coup — but has something familiar. It’s an American story, an African story, an immigrant story. A story about change; we can all relate to that.”

As part of the Common Reading program, Cooper will come to Rice to speak about “The House at Sugar Beach” and her experiences at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 3 in Tudor Fieldhouse. While new students are encouraged to attend, the event is open to the university community. At 7:30 p.m. Sept. 16, Rice Media Center will show “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a documentary about the women’s movement in Liberia. The screening is free and open to the public.

In addition to those events, the Dean of Undergraduates Office is organizing dinner dialogues next month for first-year students to continue to discuss their transition and the issues raised in the book.