by Ross Cooper

I’m pretty familiar with you as the head of our division, and I know that you’re involved with the students with your teaching.  What else are you involved with on campus?  What does your day look like?

“Those two things pretty much encompass everything.  I do teach.  I’m a member of the Chemistry faculty and have been since 1983.  I’ve been teaching non-stop since I became Dean.  I teach General Chemistry every Fall.  Sometimes in the past, I have taught in the Spring, but it’s a little easier on my schedule to teach in the Fall.  And then this year for the first time, I am co-teaching a freshman writing intensive seminar to thirteen freshmen.  Part of the Program in Writing Communication, one of the requirements is every new student has to take a first-year writing intensive seminar.  It’s a requirement for graduation.  They can’t -not- take it.  And there are lots of opportunities.  There are eighty sections offered, and we’re offering one of them this semester.”

What inspired your involvement in the writing intensive seminar?

“When I became Dean, one of my highest priorities was to have a freshmen seminar program.  I felt like our students needed to have that intense academic experience in their very first year.  They needed to learn how to take ownership of their own learning, which you do in a seminar program, because you know that you have to make a contribution in class, you need to add to the body of knowledge in class, you need to learn from other people in the class.  You’re not just a passive recipient of knowledge, and seminars do that by their structure.

“A lot of us felt like that experience needed to happen as early as possible in a student’s career, preferably their first year here.  At the same time, the faculty were interested in creating a communications program–writing, oral and visual–to strengthen our student’s ability to communicate in all forms, both during their time at Rice and then of course as a skill that they would take after they graduate.

“During courses of discussion, these two ideas fused together.  The students are all taking a writing intensive course that is a seminar, but they are topically based seminars.  So it could be whatever the professor wants to talk about.  The faculty really led the way, but since I was part of the imagining of what we might do, I’ve been interested since then in trying my hand at it.  Since I imagined this program existing, now that it does exit, I wanted to find out if we’d actually pulled it off by being a part of it.  We’d been thinking about it for a while, and finally decided this was the year to go ahead and do so.

“My team teacher, my co-teacher, is my wife, Paula.  What’s interesting is we have a chemist and a journalist/lawyer/high school teacher fused together along with a graduate student in religious studies teaching this course collectively together.  What is it that draws us all together?  It is critical thinking, that we’re teaching a course in critical thinking.  We think that that’s one of those fundamental things that every student could benefit from and we’re focusing this specific course on this topic.”

What’s it like to work with your wife?

“Fantastic.  She and I had the wonderful experience of being college masters together for twelve years.  And that’s a very cooperative, joint-working relationship.  We tag-team, we back each other up, we brainstorm, we bounce ideas off each other.  We commiserate in bad times and celebrate in good times.  It’s a phenomenal, invigorating experience to get to do that with the person you’re closest to in your life.  We knew that we wanted to do this together.  And it has paid off in wonderful ways, hopefully for our students, but certainly for us, because it has provided that same kind of invigoration.  We spend our weekends and our dinners talking about ideas for things that we can do in class and lesson plans that we would like to introduce, and questions we would like our students to explore, and assignments we would like to give to our students.  So that’s been fantastic.  The different perspectives we can bring to this is also really important.

“Paula was a high school teacher for five years, and the main course she taught in high school was a critical thinking seminar.  So in part what we have done is to take the fundamental elements of what she was teaching there and really try to pare it down, because a high school course lasts a whole year.  A high school year is thirty six weeks.  A college semester is fourteen, so we really had to contract the information down and pick and choose the topics that we were going to hit on here.”

How did you and your wife meet?

“We actually met for the first time in high school.  We fell in love in college.  We were both at the University of Texas together.  She graduated a year before I did, and we got married right after I graduated, so we’ve been married thirty seven years now.”

Congratulations.

“Yeah!  Thanks.”

I’ve heard a lot about your grandson already, and I also heard mention of a granddaughter?

“Granddaughter just born [February 20]!  Our grandson is now three.  He’s Parker Emmett.  Our granddaughter is Corinne Jane.”

Are they all here in Houston?

“No, they live in Tacoma, Washington, so they’re a long way away, which is frustrating.  On the day that Corinne was going to be born, I would have loved to just drop everything and get out there, but it takes almost a day to get to Tacoma.  If they had been in Austin or San Antonio, I would have just gotten in a car and left, but going to Tacoma takes a day to get out there and a day to get back.”

I’m assuming you do phone calls, Skype video and things like that?

“We do a lot of FaceTime with our iPhones.  It’s very convenient.  We e-mail back and forth, we use photo stream to share pictures with each other, so we stay in really close communication, but there’s nothing like being there in person, so it’s very frustrating to not be there all the time.  We’re a very, very close family, but being physically distant is challenging.”

I wanted to ask you a bit about Houston, because it seems like you’ve been a resident here for a long time.

“Thirty-two years, yeah.”

What are some of your favorite things to do around the city and what things do you think separate it from places you’ve been?

“First and foremost I’ll say that what we really love about the city is that it’s been a great place to raise our children.  The weather most of the year is such that you can be outdoors.  We played softball with both of our girls, we go to the swimming pool, we take long bike rides, we spend a lot of time outdoors together.  I always felt like that was one of the great strengths of the city is that it’s a wonderful open environment where you can be outdoors with your kids doing physical activities and we did a lot of that.

“That’s changed, obviously, with the kids not here so we don’t get to do quite so many of those things, but Paula and I make a very deliberate effort to get out on our bicycles every weekend and go for pretty long bike rides.  We like to ride along Hermann Park, along Brays Bayou.  Our favorite place in Houston now is the new Buffalo Bayou Park.  It extends from the north side of downtown west to Shepherd.  We were out there a couple weeks ago there was a Fun Run going on.  It was like a rock-and-roll fun run or something.  They had live bands all up and down Allen Parkway.  We’re riding our bikes along and there are all these live performance bands.  It was fantastic, just fantastic.  I think Houston really does have a vibrant outdoor scene.  That is probably our favorite thing.”

What about cuisine?  Any favorite restaurants you’d recommend?

“You name it!  Our home restaurant, the one that we go to for comfort, good food, memories and so forth is a place called Spanish Village.  It’s like walking into Cheers.  Everybody knows your name when you walk in.  The owner there, John Medina, is a fabulous person who watches out for his customers.  I walk in and he says, “Welcome home.”  The food is terrific.  The margaritas are without question the best in the world.  And it’s just a very comfortable environment, a very authentic kind of place.  I think the family has owned the business for sixty-five years now or something like that.  It’s pretty close to campus, over on Almeda near Southmore.

“For Asian food, our favorite is Kam’s, which is on Montrose just north of the freeway.  Again, very close to campus so it’s easy for people to get to.  Great lunch specials.  Always, always high-quality food.

“Number one favorite–I’m surprised I didn’t start with this–is Gatlin’s barbecue.  Greg Gatlin is a Rice alum, from class of ’02.  He opened this restaurant I guess five years ago, and he’s now incredibly famous.  USA Today did an article on Houston within the last two or three days, and Greg and his restaurant are featured in this article about Houston.  There’s a photograph in Intercontinental Airport of like seven of the best chefs in Houston, and Greg is one of them.  It’s unbelievably good.  Gatlin’s is fantastic.”

Someone had mentioned to me that you’d taken up playing guitar/practicing guitar?  How’s that going?

“Actually, I’ve been playing guitar since I’d been a freshman in college.  I’m not good. *laughs*  I’m limited in what I can do.  I mostly play folk songs.  My favorite songwriter is Townes van Zandt.  Townes was out of Austin.  Principally, we used to listen to him play all the time when my wife and I were students at Texas.  And almost all the first songs I learned how to play were Townes van Zandt songs.  I play some Lyle Lovett.  I play some Bob Dylan, a little bit of Bruce Springsteen–the stuff that I can manage.”

Any possibility of you breaking out the guitar at the next DoU event?

“There are platforms and occasions.  I have performed publicly on campus at talent show nights.  When we were at Wiess, they used to have a Coffeehouse night every semester, and I would perform or my wife and I would perform together.  One time my daughter and I performed together.  One time Dr. Bill and I performed together.  Actually probably more than once with Dr. Bill.  Recently, there was a talent show with Brown.  They asked me to play, and I played there.  Like I said, I’m not good, but I really enjoy it.  It’s a lot of fun, and I think people enjoy just having the experience of me singing something.

Students on campus and student initiatives on campus: do you have your eyes on anyone or any particular thing that’s happening right now?  Things that you’re looking out for?

“Yeah!  The things that I’m most excited about are mostly initiatives that are taking place collaboratively between the students and people in my division.  There’s a lot of activity out there of student initiatives through the colleges or through the Center for Civic Leadership.  Almost everybody in my organization is involved in programming for students.

“The interesting thing about what we do in our division is we provide experiences which reinforce and complement the work that they’re doing in their classes.  We provide an experiential component as well as a classroom component that complements the rest of their program.  I think what’s really exciting is that the students’ Rice Education of the Future initiative and the President’s Initiative for Students are pushing us, pushing the university, in the direction of more experiential learning as a major, maybe even dominant, component of what Rice students will do when they come here.

“The president’s been speaking about this:  that twenty or thirty years ago, people came to college to take classes.  We now have asked our students the question, “What is the reason why you come here?” and although classes are still very high on the list, there are all these other experiences that they would like to gain, whether it is getting involved in design work, or helping to create policy, or engaging the community, doing laboratory research, doing creative works in design.  Any of these kinds of activities are things that our students are telling us are the greatest impact on their lives, and what’s fun is that points directly at all of us in this division, because that’s what we do.  Those are the experiences that we provide to our students.

“So it’s interesting to see that, I think in many regards, the people in our division have been thrust into leadership roles in devising, creating, and implementing programs to significantly enhance our students’ experiences here.  So it’s a really exciting time, I think, to be in this division.  The Center for Civic Leadership–it sounds a little redundant–but they took a real leadership role in this by structuring themselves to be able to offer this new Certificate in Civic Leadership.  It might be a little bit of a stretch, but I think it’s accurate to say it’s the first academic credential at Rice which has a combined curricular/co-curricular set of requirements.  It’s experiential and classroom and the two very carefully woven together.  That’s huge.  This represents a real innovation in what we provide to our students here.  Our students have been a driving force in this because they have let us know that these are the kinds of things that they think are important to them, and we agree.”