Two years of Rice commencements set for Friday and Saturday

Doug Miller
713-348-6770
doug.miller@rice.edu

Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
jfalk@rice.edu

Two years of Rice commencements set for Friday and Saturday
Last year’s graduates finally return to their alma mater to celebrate ceremony postponed by pandemic

HOUSTON — (May 11, 2021) — Rice University students from two academic class years disrupted by the global pandemic will finally celebrate their graduation in a series of outdoor commencement ceremonies scheduled for this weekend.

Photo by Brandon Martin

Class of 2021 graduates will formally receive their degrees, doctorates and diplomas in events scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Then, on Saturday evening, Class of 2020 undergraduates will return to their alma mater for the in-person commencement they hoped to attend last year before the pandemic shifted the ceremony online.

Historic Rice Stadium will host the university’s commencement for the first time. The ceremonies are usually held in the university’s Academic Quad, but the spacious stadium will allow families and other guests of graduates to safely attend while following social distancing guidelines. The ceremonies will be held outdoors, rain or shine.

Nicholas Kristof, the renowned New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, will deliver the commencement address. Kristof was scheduled to speak at last year’s event before the pandemic led the university to convert the commencement into an online video production.

The address will highlight two days of ceremonies honoring the two years of graduates. Doctoral and advanced degrees for 2020 and 2021 graduates will be conferred following Kristof’s speech on Saturday, May 15. Individual recognition of graduating students will take place on Friday and Saturday, May 14 and 15, during four separate ceremonies at which each degree recipient will be named, presented and congratulated.

Also, a series of ceremonial marches on both afternoons will allow the undergraduates to participate in a venerated Rice ritual. By long-standing tradition, new students attending their freshman orientation march into the Academic Quad through Lovett Hall’s Sallyport, then scrupulously avoid walking under it for the rest of their years at Rice. On commencement day, they traditionally celebrate by marching out of the quad the way they entered, symbolically leaving the campus and carrying the wisdom acquired at Rice into the wider world.

With the commencement ceremonies moving to Rice Stadium on the other side of the campus, Class of 2021 graduates carrying the banners of their residential colleges will march through the Sallyport in a series of processions on Friday morning. Class of 2020 graduates who missed the opportunity to follow this tradition due to the panemic will finally have their chance on Saturday afternoon.

The Rice Stadium commencement events will be livestreamed on the university’s website.

A schedule of major commencement events is shown below; all times are CDT. For more details, visit commencement.rice.edu.

Friday, May 14

8:30 a.m.
Commencement ceremony for MBA Class of 2020 and Class of 2021 from the Jones Graduate School of Business
(August 2019, December 2019, May 2020, August 2020, December 2020 and May 2021 Master of Business Administration recipients)

7:30 p.m.
Commencement ceremony for Class of 2021 undergraduates
(August 2020, December 2020 and May 2021)

Saturday, May 15

8:30 a.m.
Commencement ceremony for Class of 2020 and Class of 2021 advanced degree and doctoral students (includes Bachelor of Architecture and Artist Diploma recipients)
(August 2019, December 2019, May 2020, August 2020, December 2020 and May 2021)

7:30 p.m.
Commencement ceremony for Class of 2020 undergraduates
(August 2019, December 2019 and May 2020)

-30-

This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.