The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 64, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, August 27, 1976 Page: 4 of 12
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Doody says Rice community has improved
The following are excepts from the
annual Faculty Address given by-
Terry Doody of the English
Department Thursday, August 19,
to welcome new students to the Rice
community.
Six years ago, when I first came to
Rice from graduate school at Cornell,
there was something about Rice that
didn't feel quite right, so I began
looking at the campus for clues to
Rice's nature. The first thing I noticed,
and you may have noticed this already,
is that the central quadrangle between
Lovett Hall and Fondren Library is not
a college quad at all; it is actually a
great natural preserve for privet
hedges. The privet hedge is not, as far
as I know, an endangered species, nor
is it anybody's idea of beautiful flora.
The hedges are barriers, though more
like walls than plants: they often make
the quad awkward to cross, and they
make the virtual center of the campus
useless as a place of congregation. On
the other hand, apparently, the hedges
do keep Lovett Hall and the library
from imploding into the vacuum
around Willie's statue.
The second thing I noticed was
Sammy's: it's a student center that
very few students use. One told me she
hadn't been there in three years. Now
the only truly compelling reasons for
using Sammy's are living off-campus
and asceticism, but it is still a natural
place for hanging out that not many
undergraduates hang out in. And until
the pub opened last year, there was no
place at Rice where lots of people
simply hang out.
As I began then to listen to the way
Rice people used to talk,I heard my first
performance of the Rice myth, which
tried to explain why people got a good
education here but had a lousy time
doing it. The cruder expression of the
myth laid all the blame on the typical
Rice girl. This explanation came, of
course, from the typical Rice boy, who
couldn't lay anything but the blame.
The more considered, sophisticated
expression of the myth, which I heard
from some upper-class-persons and
some of the faculty, held that life at
Rice was so boring and repressed
because the male and female colleges
were ... so far apart! This blew my little
Irish mind. I was beginning to think
that at Rice, geography is destiny: that
the life of the community here had been
determined by the landscaping of the
quad, Sammy's, and th distance
between the colleges. I also began to
fear t hat the emptiness around Willie's
tomb was infectious. Some
purportedly intelligent people were
trying to tell me that what is about four
city blocks between Jones and Lovett
colleges were as socially inhibiting as
Mother Herself.
What I began to hear next at Rice
was the silence. It was hard to get the
people in my courses to talk, and I was
more than a little worried about how I
was teaching until I realized that when
I heard the other faculty boasting, their
boast often was: I got them to talk
today, they participated in the class.
But that participation apparently
exhasted itself in the classroom. Every
student in the last six years who has
complained to me about Rice has
complained not so much about the
education it offers as much about the
community that it doesn't. And the
complaint takes a shape like this: no
one talks to anyone here, I can't find the
conversation I expected, I can't evei
find the conversation I need. Thi
complaint crosses all social and sexu;i
Faculty address to freshmen
describes the best and worst
of the Rice experience
boundaries, and it has been made t>
the faculty as well. It may be no mor.
accurate a perception than the on«
which saw the distance between
colleges as part of the requirement for a
degree in space science. It may well
have been that the talk here and the
quality of community were good, but
we all suffered from the high
expectations that got us to Rice in the
first place. Nontheless, it was and still
is a complaint that has to be taken
seriously because it grows from a
feeling that is real and very
discouraging: if you feel that no one is
going to talk to you anyhow, you won't
trek the sidewalks between the
colleges; you'll stay in your room or
hide in a carrel, where all the other
people at Rice who would be looking for
someone to talk to won't go looking for
you either. So, the strange Rice silence
has been felt by those it surrounds to be
a loneliness more acute that the
solftude intellectual work always
requires,and from thislonelinessgrows
the futility and doubt that ask: why,
exactly, am I here? What am I doing
here? What in the world is here?
Inherent in the difficulty of these
questions is figuring out what kind of
community a university should be, and
how this community is to be achieved. I
by blood kinship; we are united under
the imaginary goal of getting an
education that requires mechanical
procedures like the semester,
examinations, credits, majors, the
degree. Yet it should go without saying
that we live and work at Rice in a way
very different from the way in which
members of a corporation occupy the
building that houses their company.
Life at Rice is communal in so far as it
is, in Toennies' words, a kind of
"intimate, private, and exclusive
living together." The other hedges
that separate us from the immediate
neighborhood and greater city are
fortunate symbols of the possibility
that the university, if it cannot still be
the ivory tower of blessed memory, can
be a special and priviledged place. It is
still some kind of sanctuary, and it
excites in most of us the good
expectation that life here can be at
least different and at most better. At its
best, it can be life in a community
which, by definition, recognizes each
individual's dependency at the same
time it fosters his individuality, his
independence, his freedom. A society,
by definition, does not foster that
independence; a society exists for its
own sake and not for the sake of its
members, and it promotes among
'We are united under the imaginary
goal of getting an education..."
think this community has to be
achieved because it cannot be simply
assumed to exist already. It is at this
point, however, that we run into some
heavy bushes. In defining community,
the German social thinker Ferdinand
Toennies distinguishes it from society.
He uses the German terms
Gcmeinschaft and Gesellschaft in
a specifically formal way, and he says
that community is real and organic,
whereas society is imaginary and
mechanical. The root and model of a
community are the family, but the
mode of a society is a commercial
corporation. In many ways, a
university is more like a corporation
than a family. We are not united here
them, Toennies says, selfishness,
tension, competition.
You will be very lucky if you escape
the tension and competition here, yet
what gives Rice its real being is
exactly the quality of "understanding"
that Toennies says is essential to
community itself. His translator
explains that the word he uses to
signify understanding includes the
connotations of "similar sentiments,
hopes, aspirations, desires, attitudes,
emotions, and beliefs." To assume that
quality of understanding from the
members of a corporation smacks of
either a sentimental "togetherness" or
the kind of fascism which once inspired
IBM to require that its sales force wear
dark suits, only white shirts, and dull
ties. To ask that quality of
understanding from a university,
however, is not inordinate because here
our aspirtions and beliefs are
committed not to some product but to
the education and development of the
individual. We are here to learn, which
means we are here in order to change,
and if we change the life at Rice in
doing so, so much the better, because
that change will proceed from the
understanding which Toennies says is
based upon intimate knowledge of
each other.
We cannot expect a tight similarity
of personal constitution, experience, or
character among ourselves; in fact, too
much of this kind of similarity here can
produce the boredom of uniformity.
However, we can hope that our
deliberate presence together at Rice
does suppose a harmonious disposition
and intellectual attitude. And we
have to hope even more fervently that
all of us realize each of us must benefit
from "the direct interest of one being in
the life of the other, and readiness to
take part in his joy and sorrow."
In the last six years, the community
at Rice has improved with the
establishment of the co-ed colleges,
Willie's Pub, the Faculty Council, the
Self Study, a more energetic effort
toward recruiting you students, and
the first University Convocation,
which was held last winter under the
auspices of the Student Association in
order to give all of us a chance to think
out loud about what Rice is and should
be. That Convocation was a very
exciting couple of days for those who
participated in it; unfortunately, not
enough did. Too many people used the
opportunity to catch up or to maintain
standards, instead of taking the time to
examine what they were catching or
maintaining. There will be another
Convocation in November, and it will
need all of our support because it is the
only forum of its kind at Rice, the only
place where all of us can listen to each
other's "keener sounds." Until then
and beyond then, however, there is a lot
for all of us to do.
In the first place, we have to
recognize that Rice must be thought of
as a community and not only as an
institution that requires sound
management. Financial survival is not
a philosophy of education. Neither is
the word "Excellence," which is used
around here so reverently but so loosely
that it has become meaningless. A
philosophy of education would post
clear goals and concrete choices
toward these goals; "Excellence" by
itself leaves the goals abstract and
suggests that what we have chosen is
not to be lousy. Yet while we have an
excellent football stadium, we do not
have an excellent library.
In the second place, the faculty, I
think, would do well to remind itself
every day that we teach students first
and the matter of our disciplines
second. Things do not get taught
unless they are learned; and if they
aren't learned by somebody, they are
as useless as the quad. We could also
look, I think to teaching each other in
more organized ways than in the while
noise of shop talk. The Physics and
Philosophy Departments have
organized seminars; there may be
others that I don't know of. History and
English used to have them, but they
went the way of all flesh-apparently
toward the gym, which seems to be the
best place at Rice to meet someone from
outside your own department.
The most difficult burden, however,
remains with you, the students. You
(Continued on page 11)
the rice thresher, august 27, 1976 — page 4
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McFarland, Carla. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 64, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, August 27, 1976, newspaper, August 27, 1976; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245295/m1/4/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.