Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/489418
t m c ยป p u l s e | a p r i l 2 0 1 5 12 We have also continued a century- long process of broadening the university. Rice was initially the Rice Institute, with a strong focus on science and engineering, because in the words of our founder, that's what Houston needed. We must continue to invest in those core strengths. But over the past few years, we have also put a lot of emphasis on the arts, including art on the campus. We now have some of the best campus art anywhere, includ- ing major pieces by James Turrell, Jaume Plensa and Mark di Suvero. We were also very fortunate to bene- fit from the generosity of the Brown Foundation in helping us establish an art history Ph.D. program. We are about to, with the generosity of the Moody Foundation, open a new Moody Center for the Arts. So we have made a whole new commitment to the arts on this campus. Of course, we already had the Shepherd School of Music, which was spectacular and among the best in the world. We are hopeful it will be even more spectacular, and we are working to build a new center for music and the performing arts. These projects, together with the existing Media Center, will create a whole new arts part of our campus. And I think that's going to change the image of Rice into more of an arts destination. Q | With your background, I always thought there were two components of Rice that you must have consid- ered strategically: establishing a law school and a medical school. Did you ever consider adding a law school? A | Yes, we did. When I arrived, people would often ask me questions about Rice starting a law school, and what I said to them was, 'If someone came to me and gave me a check for $200 million and said, 'This is for a law school,' I would be very inclined to take that check, with the permission of our trustees of course!' We hear a lot of enthusiasm about Rice having a law school, but it's not something we would do from our existing resources alone. But a law school would integrate really well with a number of the things that we do. Whether it's in engineer- ing or philosophy or economics or political science or history, these are all fields, plus many others, that have connections to law. So we have built relationships with other law schools in the city. But Rice does have a history of adding different pieces, whether it's the Shepherd School of Music or the Jones Graduate School of Business or the Baker Institute. But above all, we stand for the excellence of what we do, and we don't take on new ventures unless we see a pathway to achieving that excellence. We are really proud of what the Jones School, the Baker Institute and the Shepherd School have achieved. And the path isn't always straight or smooth. But those now are three extraordinary parts of this university, and getting better. Q | What about a medical school? A | In terms of Rice's position in the world of elite research universities, we have two disadvantages. One is size and the other is the lack of a medical school. And some of this really just goes more to reputation than anything else. Pound for pound, we are an extraordinarily productive research university. And in some areas, we are ranked top in the world for what our faculty accomplish. If you look, for example, at generation of NSF research dollars per faculty member, we do extremely well. The question is thus what are we going to do to grow that? We grew the university, and that was important because it gives us a bigger footprint, a more national footprint and a more international footprint. But then, of course, it wasn't that many years ago, before I got here, that Rice didn't have a big commitment to the biosciences. Under my predecessor, Malcolm Gillis, the university moved very substantially in that direction. And when I came in, we had the opportunity to build the Bioscience Research Collaborative at the intersection of Rice University and the Texas Medical Center. So we made a big additional push into the biosci- ences. We see the intersection, in partic- ular, of nanoscience and bioscience as extremely important. But there is now the increasingly important intersection between biosciences and computa- tional sciences, and materials science and medicine. These are areas where we aren't just good, we are really great. And so that is something we can provide to the medical center. One thought is that if we had a medical school, that's an opportunity for increased integration, perhaps more than we might be able to achieve just by building deeper relationships. So we explored that opportunity with the Baylor College of Medicine, when Baylor was facing some challenges, and for various reasons, that did not come to fruition. But what came out of that was that we wanted to deepen these rela- tionships. We might not be able to have a merger, but we wanted to deepen that relationship and others in the Texas Medical Center. Q | How would you describe Rice's relationship with the Texas Medical Center? A | In some ways, I think that rela- tionship is becoming more important. Physically, we sit just outside of the Texas Medical Center and we are one of its member institutions. And so while all of the infrastructure was important to us, and had consequences for us, we weren't so much a direct participant in that. We are not a provider of medical services. Our provost and I have a little debate. He likes to describe us as the Switzerland of the Texas Medical Center, and I, having studied some aspects of international law and history, prefer to describe us as the Sweden of the Texas Medical Center. There are several different types of neutrality, and the Swiss have one form, and the Swedes have a much more engaged and active form. That's the model I see us in: we don't compete with the other institutions within the Texas Medical Center, but we have things they very much want to have access to and be part of. And all of the institutions of the Texas Medical Center have research, teaching and activities that we want to be a part of. What is changing now is that the TMC is becoming a more substantive actor in helping create an integrated research and translational vision. When I interviewed Bobby Robbins, my reac- tion was, 'This is the guy,' and I thought we would never be able to recruit him. So I was very pleased when his appoint- ment was announced. The TMC board did a fantastic job in consulting with the various institutions on that search and executing that great hire. The Texas Medical Center has always done a great job. The question at the time of a leadership transition was whether the medical center was going to envision itself as something more, not only the infrastructure for us, but as a big part of the intellectual fabric and glue of the community. It's not going to all be easy, and one of the challenges for Houston is to get its extraordinary insti- tutions to appropriately work together. We have the largest medical center in the world, but our ambition must be to be the greatest medical center in the world. And we aren't there yet. But if we can get these institutions to all work together, we have a really good shot of being there, whether it is in areas like tissue engineering, personalized medi- cine, imaging or biocomputation. Rice may be comparatively small, but we are a big player in many of those things. Many people today talk about the threat to higher education from technology, but I like to talk about the opportunity from technology. For the full interview, visit TMCNews.org