The sit-ins to remove William Marsh Rice’s statue from the Founder’s Memorial expanded to include projections of messages onto Lovett Hall on Oct. 5, which prompted Rice University Police Department to respond and shut down the display. The sit-ins have continued for over 40 days, with 14 people attending Monday’s sit-in and two additional students on Zoom.
Half-black, half-clear plastic clamshells, often with bits of food and utensils stuffed inside, pile up every day in trash cans across campus — clamshell and clamshell and clamshell, one per student per meal, seven days a week, 14 weeks a semester.
Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman cancelled all in-person events at McMurtry College starting Oct. 2 after three off-campus students and one on-campus student from McMurtry tested positive for COVID-19. Gorman made her decision in conjunction with the McMurtry magisters and the Rice Crisis Management Team.
Ghostbusters are on campus. They’re not a fictional group of men fighting supernatural beings, but a team of Housing and Dining staff led by Noel Romero, tasked with sanitizing hand-touched surface areas and performing other duties that help to stop the spread of COVID-19 around campus. The Ghostbusters team, along with many other H&D staff members, are trained to use an electrostatic sprayer, which uses a positively charged disinfectant that coats surfaces and cleans them.
After weeks of campus being fully dry, Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman sent out an email on Sept. 17 outlining plans to allow for “public events with alcohol” on Rice’s campus. The email, which was sent to various residential college student leaders, presents the guidelines and considerations for colleges to host events with alcohol, including the necessity for a dry, alcohol-free college event before hosting events serving alcohol. According to college chief justices, this decision may be the first step toward an eventual wet campus.
Rice Theatre will premiere a livestreamed performance of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” this Friday, Oct. 9 at 8 p.m. CST. The play, originally published in 1895 with the subtitle, “a trivial comedy for serious people,” narrates the double lives of two men, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who both pretend to be named “Ernest” and deceive their lovers in doing so. Directed by Christina Keefe, director of the Rice Theatre Program, the production will be available to view online as well as to a select live audience who must abide by Rice’s social distancing protocol. All actors will be wearing masks and remaining at least six feet apart on stage, painting a stark portrait of how the pandemic has changed performance art.
“Screw Yer Roommate,” the mass blind date event hosted each year by the Rice Program Council was held again this year, despite COVID-19-specific challenges. This year the event had a hybrid format, with both an in-person and virtual option to allow remote students to participate.
When Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman first emailed the undergraduate student body back in March to announce that classes would be shifting to a remote learning format due to the unfolding pandemic, she took extra care to address the class of 2020.
When plans to demolish the Rice Media Center were initially announced in April 2019, Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby stated that the teardown process would occur before the end of 2020. Today, with those plans having been ruptured by the coronavirus pandemic, the Media Center faces an uncertain future. However, Rice’s recently announced plans for a new visual and dramatic arts building suggest that the arts community will remain alive and well on campus.
Filled with elaborate dance routines, emotional poetry and comedy skits that elicit roars of laughter, Africayé never ceases to catch the eye of students across campus. At the helm of the organization behind this lively cultural event this year is Eden Desta, current president of the Rice African Student Association.
What really is democracy? What does it mean to be a democracy and what does it entail? The Moody Center for the Arts’s new fall exhibition, “States of Mind: Art and American Democracy,” seeks to answer these questions, although perhaps not in the way you might imagine. Moody’s newest exhibit, organized by Associate Curator Ylinka Barotto, introduces new perspectives and angles from artists telling their own stories in their own ways, particularly focusing on national issues affecting Texas. Its goal is to drive new thoughts and deeper revelations in viewers. Art, after all, is not about giving direct answers, but coming to your own.
Rice Coffeehouse reopened its doors last Monday after shutting down in mid-March amid the pandemic, carrying out a soft reopening plan it has been shaping for months, according to Brendan Wong, the general manager of Coffeehouse.
Construction of the new Sid Richardson College building is on schedule to be completed by the start of the spring semester and will be ready for occupancy when students return in the spring, according to Anzilla Gilmore, senior project manager for new Sid.
A group of Rice students have continued the summer protest to remove the Founder’s Memorial through daily sit-ins in front of the Founder’s Memorial since Aug. 31. Shifa Abdul Rahman, a junior at Lovett College, organized the sit-ins to advocate for the immediate removal of the statue.
Any Google search of COVID-19 will bring up lists of symptoms — fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath and more — but these lists don’t always account for everything. Missing is the impact the disease has had on the mental health of people, regardless of whether they contracted the virus or not.
On a sweltering day in August, groups of students across campus braced themselves for the daunting task ahead of them: spending hours helping new students move into their dorms. Move-in day kicks off Orientation Week every year, and nearly all Rice students are familiar with the ritual of sweaty, beaming advisors running back and forth with labeled cardboard boxes as incoming students start exploring their new home.
U.S. News & World Report’s Top 20 colleges have adopted varying reopening plans and testing strategies for the fall semester. Rice, which has maintained a low positivity rate on COVID tests, joins only five other Top 20 institutions — the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and Cornell University — in offering a hybrid or in-person classroom experience for the fall.
A group of Rice students have continued the summer movement to remove William Marsh Rice’s statue through daily sit-ins in front of the Founder’s Memorial since Aug. 31. Shifa Abdul Rahman, a junior at Lovett College, organized the sit-ins to push for the administration to remove the statue immediately.
The Welch Foundation announced that it will donate $100 million to establish the Welch Institute for Advanced Materials at Rice University, the largest single gift that Rice University has ever received and the largest in the Welch Foundation’s 65-year history.
