(11-03-2020 04:42 PM)Tomball Owl Wrote:  

(11-03-2020 04:09 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(11-03-2020 03:03 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(11-03-2020 12:23 PM)Tomball Owl Wrote:  

(11-03-2020 11:59 AM)georgewebb Wrote:  My sense is that a lot of things that happen at Rice (and perhaps especially the bad things) are more the latter than the former.

So why does Rice have to follow the crowd?

In many cases, there may not be much Rice could do one way or the other. As an example, most of the qualitative differences in campus life today from, say, the 1980s are due less to any changes that Rice has made and more to the fact that 20-year-olds today are different from 20-year-olds in the 1980s.

But yes, there are some trends we follow that are good, and some that are bad. There are also a few trends we buck that are good, and few that are bad.


How's that for an answer that says almost nothing?

I'd argue that it says quite a bit - mainly the bolded. Whether we like it or not, Rice is driven heavily to act by who their customers are and the type of student body that is attracted to Rice.

For example, I'd argue that even the sale of KTRU could be tied back to the changing of the student body. At the time of the sale, the student body was generally more interested in making fun of KTRU for their esoteric music choices, than listening to the esoteric music choices.

This isn't to say Rice isn't devoid of blame for all actions and how Rice decides to operate, but I often think of this when I hear complaints about what's happening on campus:

Maybe Rice should reexamine the type of student body it is trying attract? Careful what you ask for, you may get it?

Or maybe Rice is getting exactly what it wants, making it a very different school than many of the posters here attended, graduated from and supported for so many years, making it difficult for such supporters to continue that support.

I think it's a fair question to ask regarding the student body they're attracting based on their decisions to adjust cost of attendance, manage faculty, support extracurriculars, etc.

Has Rice's core mission and how it executes it changed significantly enough in the past XX years to also change the types of students it attracts? Or have younger generations also changed across the board, such that a student in say, 1980 wouldn't be interested in the type of university that Rice is today?