Rice University in Houston has been in the news of late due to its new President, former Columbia Law Dean David Leebron. Leebron has an interesting task before him, because Rice is both an excellent, and underperforming, university, for reasons I'll explain.
Let's start with the excellence. Rice has an exceptional undergraduate student body; many of our best students at UT Law every year are from Rice, and two of my most distinguished colleagues, Thomas McGarity (UT Law '74) and Ronald Mann (UT Law 85) are Rice graduates. This year, we have an outstanding candidate on the teaching market, Christopher Lund, who was a Rice grad and who, like McGarity and Mann, also compiled an exemplary academic record at UT Law. One of the ten or fifteen most selective colleges in the country, Rice also offers one of the best student-faculty ratios in the nation.
Even more significant, the faculty is quite strong, but--and here's the underperformance--it's not as strong as it should be. Rice has top 25ish graduate faculties in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering, but can claim a similar status in almost none of the social sciences or humanities. Part of the difficulty is size: most departments are quite small. Take Rice's Philosophy Department, which has only a dozen-or-so faculty, yet has extremely high per capita quality, and an excellent track record of hiring, as indicated by the schools that have raided that department over the last half-dozen-or-so years: Keith DeRose went to Yale, Christopher Hitchcock to Cal Tech, Larry Temkin to Rutgers, Kenneth Waters to Minnesota, Nomy Arpaly to Brown. If Rice had held them all, it would surely be on the cusp of the top 25, as opposed to ranking around 40.
Rice should have the resources to move forward as a research university. Rice's gross endowment ranks 17th in the nation, just behind Duke, and ahead of Cornell, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Brown, NYU, and many others. More significant is that the value of its endowment per student is $640,569, making Rice the 12th wealthiest school in the country, and putting it well ahead of schools with larger gross endowments (like Emory University [359,169 per student] and Washington University in St. Louis [317,849 per student]), and even further ahead of schools like Duke which don't even rank in the top 30 for the per student value of the endowment. Now it is true that at Rice, unlike these other schools, the endowment is used, in part, to keep the tuition relatively low compared to peer schools. That is plainly an advantage in terms of maintaining an outstanding student body. But one imagines that some of this great wealth could also be utilized to strengthen the faculty in some target areas.
Finally, Rice is located in the 4th largest city in the United States (meaning ample professional opportunities for spouses)--and in the most attractive and appealing part of that city as well. Houston is a city much mocked, for its lack of zoning, its traffic problems, and its appalling summer heat. But the reality is that it has extraordinary cultural and culinary offerings, many of which are conveniently located near the Rice campus. There are many stronger universities in far less appealing locations. Rice's location should be a plus overall.
So will President Leebron pull it off? Some may remember that in the 1970s, Duke was not regarded as a major research university. Some of that transformation in perception was due to effective public relations, but some of it was due to utilizing wealth to mobilize certain departments in to top-flight units. (English was the best-known, and has since fallen apart.) Can Rice do the same? If I were President of Rice, I'd start with Philosophy and History, two central humanities disciplines in any serious university, and two that are relatively cheap to develop. Both are already rather good at Rice, despite their small size. Add a half-dozen faculty lines, say, to the Rice Philosophy Department, and there's no reason it shouldn't be a top 20ish PhD program.
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