News

Hoot doing better than expected two months after move

The Hoot’s move from the north and south locations to the central location at the Rice Memorial Center is approaching its two-month anniversary.Initially the Hoot accepted that they might not do as well at their new location.“We were prepared to not do as well this semester because of the initial change, but we are doing way better than any of us expected,” general manager Joanna Weedlun said.Weedlun has been general manager of the Hoot since April 2014. Weedlun, a Hanszen College senior, said the Hoot’s move was strategic.“We wanted to move to a location that was central on campus [where] we could streamline our operation,” Weedlun said.The Hoot expected to lose revenue initially after this move but has been pleasantly surprised by the results thus far.“We came in and thought that this was going to be a great move for us down the line, but we have found that we are already exceeding business we thought we would do,” said Weedlun.The Hoot’s finance manager Amy White said the move has not contributed to a net gain or loss in revenue.“Looking at the data now, we are on par with our figures from last year,” White, a Duncan College junior, said.The Hoot is very happy with the consolidation effort, since they can now operate more efficiently from the one location.“The move has made it logistically a lot easier and saved expenses [with regards to] delivery to two locations and employees [for example],” White said. “From what we have seen this semester, we are very happy that we moved and are excited to see what the future will bring.”Even though the Hoot is satisfied with its move, some students are still disgruntled. Martel College sophomore Austin Au-Yeung was upset by the move.“I don’t look at the Hoot for [a] late night snack anymore because of the walk,” Au-Yeung said.Weedlun and the rest of the Hoot managers realized the potential inconvenience of the walk but believed it would actually be serving a greater part of the student body coming from buildings like Fondren Library and Anderson Hall.  “We knew moving the Hoot would be easier for people in academic buildings,” Weedlun said. “Also, the Hoot’s goal is to serve all of Rice, not just undergraduates. The move and increasing our operating hours enables us to serve the graduate student population as well.”For now, the Hoot seems content with the changes.Other student-run businesses have noticed the move as well.Martel College junior David Behrend, the current finance manager of Coffeehouse, said he noticed the change that the Hoot has brought to the student center.“In terms of sales, we haven’t seen a change in our numbers. However it seems like there are more people in Coffeehouse and the RMC in general at later hours than in previous semesters,” Behrend said.Jones College senior Victoria Chen, finance manager of Willy's Pubs said the Hoot’s move has been beneficial for Willy’s Pub.“I wouldn’t say the Hoot brings us more sales, but it does make the experience of trivia and Thursday a little better,” Chen said. “Having the Hoot enables our bartenders to sell more drinks, which is where we make most of the money, rather than wasting time making food.”

Wolfe discusses US approach to NTDs at Baker Institute conference

Mitchell Wolfe spoke on U.S. strategy, particularly at the U.S.-Mexico border, for neglected tropical diseases and health in general at the Baker Institute for Public Policy for “The United States and Mexico: Addressing a Shared Legacy of Neglected Tropical Diseases and Poverty,” a conference organized by the Baker Institute’s Center for Health and Biosciences and the Mexico Center in conjunction with Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine and the End Fund, on Sept. 29.Neglected tropical diseases are a group of parasitic and bacterial diseases that infect many people, especially children and those living in poverty, according to the Global Network for Tropical Disease.Wolfe is the deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Global Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.“I am a doctor and an epidemiologist,” Wolfe said. “Part of my job and our office is being health diplomats.”Wolfe said his office works to connect public health and foreign policy and draw that connection to advance policy.Wolfe further expanded on his definition of his job to explain diplomacy in his work. He said diplomacy is getting things on people’s agendas that might not have been there previously by working with foreign governments, individuals, NGOs and other entities to ultimately protect the health and security of Americans.According to Wolfe, the 2014 Ebola outbreak was an example of why the Department for Health and Human Services and his office specifically must maintain a global sense of diplomacy in their work.“The Ebola outbreak should remind people that diseases don’t respect borders,” Wolfe said. “At HHS, we have an obligation to act globally and have agencies such as the National Institutes of Health with depth and breadth. There is a real demand for us [at the Office of Global Health] to engage as diplomats with global stakeholders to ensure an organized and coordinated response to health issues.”Wolfe said he views the U.S.-Mexico border as a unique region due to its population, geography and disease patterns.“The U.S.-Mexico border is a very dynamic region,” Wolfe said. “It contains about 50 million largely underserved individuals suffering from poverty and facing poor health outcomes. The patterns of disease here are distinct from the rest of the U.S.”Wolfe views NTDs as a source of tremendous suffering because of their disfiguring and sometimes fatal impact. According to Wolfe, they are neglected because they persist only in the poorest, most marginalized areas.U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell and Mexico’s Secretary of Health Mercedes Juan Lopez head the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission. Wolfe deals with the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission through his office.“This commission was the result of a bilateral agreement to address health and wellness at the border and improve surveillance and reporting,” Wolfe said. “We [the Office of Global Health] and the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission are attempting to address health disparities and understand the ‘why,’ why there is such a concentration of NTDs at the border, why programs like ours that link public health and policy development are so important.”The Smith Clinic in Houston’s Greater Fifth Ward, a neighborhood that falls below the poverty line for a family of four, provides access to health care to Houston’s underprivileged, a population often impacted by NTDs.“Poverty is an overwhelming risk factor for NTDs,” Wolfe said. “It includes the lack of window screens, high unemployment and significant shortages of health care providers. The Smith Clinic is providing similar services here in Houston to what we are offering at the border.”Baker Institute for Public Policy intern Anjali Bhatla attended the talk and saw the conference’s importance for Houston and Rice.“Houston was the perfect city for this talk given that South Texas has the burden of NTDs,” Bhatla, a Baker College junior, said. “Hopefully this conference will spur interest in NTDs in Rice undergraduates.”

$8 million endowed to entrepreneurship center

With an $8 million endowment from the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, Rice University recently established the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to act as a bridge between researchers and entrepreneurs.The McNair Center is housed in the Baker Institute of Public Policy. Director Edward Egan, previously an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School in London, said the center will be equally focused on academic research and government policy recommendation and advising the local business scene.“We are policy first and foremost; policy also takes a couple different forms though,” Egan said. “At the ecosystem level, we start calling it strategy rather than policy. ” The center will devote much of its efforts towards web infrastructure, including creating a site which consolidates the center’s research projects. In order to build and present the knowledge properly, Egan said, the center will recruit a large number of student workers and volunteers.One of the center’s first projects is to host a database for patent data and present it in a format with which academics can do analysis.“One of the biggest challenges in research is [joining] data sets together and a single research takes a huge amount of time,” Egan said. “If a center is willing to step up, it can spread the cost [and generate] enormous gains.”The McNair Center will partner with the Doerr Institute for New Leaders to provide more comprehensive guidance to the student community.“Leadership is a crucial part of entrepreneurship,” Egan said. “Most of our input into the Doerr Institute will be in terms of student referrals and trying to build up the entrepreneur ecosystem.”The founding of the McNair Center coincides with a timely opportunity to drive change in the nation, Egan said, with elections coming up.“Politicians love to talk about jobs and small businesses,” Egan said. “Despite [all the] innovation policy and talk about entrepreneurship policy, there is not actually a lot happening.”Egan said he calls for students to come forward and get involved with entrepreneurship.“We can put all the resources in the world in place, [but] it is very hard to drive engagement,” Egan said. “We want students to be a part of driving entrepreneurship here at Rice.”Senthil Natarajan, managing director of student-led entrepreneurship platform Rice Launch, said he has concerns about the McNair Center’s  effectiveness given the multiple existing groups also dedicated to entrepreneurship, including Entrepreneurship @ Rice, Jones Graduate School Entrepreneurs Organization and OwlSpark.“From a practical standpoint, I’m worried about the over-saturation of so-called ‘initiatives’ all over campus,” Natarajan said. “It seems like at some point, there will be diminishing returns, and the startup community at Rice will become more fragmented than unified.”According to Natarajan, what Rice needs is consolidation of the system.“We need to focus on developing the pieces that we have, rather than trying to just brute force the development of our startup ecosystem by adding more and more pieces to the puzzle.”

SA to hold Senate meeting discussing results of Survey on Unwanted Sexual Experiences

The Student Association will hold a Senate meeting to discuss the Survey on Unwanted Sexual Experiences results, titled “It’s Up to Us.”The meeting will take place today at 8 p.m. in the Rice Memorial Center Grand Hall. Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson, Associate Vice Provost Matthew Taylor and representatives of the Wellbeing Office will be in attendance.  The Women’s Resource Center, Students Transforming Rice Into a Violence-Free Environment Coalition, and SA Wellbeing Committee will review the SUSE results prior to a group discussion.SA Wellbeing Committee Co-Chair Sanjana Ranganathan said she believes students have learned from the survey that many are affected by sexual misconduct.“I would highly recommend all students to attend, listen and participate,” Ranganathan, a Wiess College junior, said. “These issues aren’t gender-specific; they affect all of us as student and as humans, and it’s so important to remember that.”The residential college with the highest attendance will win a 50-inch flat-screen television.

McMurtry, H&D Plan to create design space

McMurtry College is planning to create a Design Space in its current TV room, which will be open to students across campus early next semester. This space will house a variety of design tools and software for students to create personal projects and host design-related gatherings. Rice Housing and Dining approached the McMurtry College student body in October last year to create a committee to plan the space. The college government approved the space this March. According to Eli Wilson, a member of the McMurtry Design Space committee, the function of the space is to be a creative area.“The McMurtry Design Space will be basically a combination of the [Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen] and art studios,” Wilson, a senior, said. “We’re combining their functions and relegating them down to the residential college scale. The Space is going to be where people will be able to realize their creative ideas.”Isaac Phillips, another member of the planning committee, said he envisions the Design Space as an interdisciplinary resource for students to use tools they might not have access to in class. According to Phillips, a junior, students want more interdisciplinary collaboration, but there is not currently any place on campus for student groups to work together on a project. He hopes the Design Space will meet that need.“If you’re not in the right major, you can’t gain access to certain buildings like the [Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen],” Phillips said. “Students want to widen their horizons and get hands-on experience, and the Design Space will help them do so ... At the McMurtry Design Space, students can work on individual projects and have access to tools for art, engineering and technology.”According to Wilson, the Design Space will have four uses: creating art, building models, giving students access to technology and holding gatherings. It is set to feature a wide variety of tools, including a laser cutter, Adobe Creative Suite, music writing programs and coding platforms such as Rhino. In addition to these tools, the committee plans to allocate ample space to potentially hold group meetings, so that students can hold design workshops in the future.All of the funding for the space has been provided by H&D. According to Phillips and Wilson, the planning committee has not been given a specific budget but everything the committee requested to purchase has been approved by H&D so far. “Once the space opens in spring 2016, access to the Design Space will be available to all interested students after taking a training quiz similar to that required for OEDK access,” Wilson said. According to Wilson and Phillips, the committee in charge of creating it has already received interest from members of other colleges to help create similar spaces at their own colleges. Therefore, the success of the McMurtry Design Space could set a powerful precedent for future residential college design spaces to follow.

SA looks into economic inequality

The Student Association is taking steps to address the challenges faced by low-income and first-generation college students. Lovett College President Griffin Thomas has proposed the creation of the Student Access and Success Working Group, which would aim to make the Rice experience more accessible for all students. “The idea is to reach out to the entire student body to collect information and create a list of a lot of the issues that first-generation and low-income students face,” Thomas, a junior, said. “Ideally it would be a completely comprehensive list. That’s going to be very difficult to do but we want to get a wide sample about these huge issues that they’re facing.” Thomas has clear goals for what he wants for the initiative by the end of the academic year. Once he gathers more information, Thomas said he aims to start helping low-income and first-generation students directly, working with organizations like Generation College in addition to the serveries and leadership development programs on campus. “Once that comprehensive list is created, our goal is going to be to try to rectify some of these problems,” Thomas said. “It could be small changes or large system changes. One of the ideas that has been thrown out is leadership development, because some of the low-income students can’t necessarily participate in some of the leadership activities on campus because they also have to work.”Griffin, however, said he believes Rice already does aid low-income and first-generation students, pointing to many of the resources that Rice provides.“At all universities low-income and first-generation students face challenges that other students don’t face,” Thomas said. “Rice actually has a lot more programs for these students [in comparison to other universities]. Our Office of Academic Advising and Office of Student Success Initiatives are very robust, as well as our peer academic advising network, our academic fellows program [and] our Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication.”The SA will vote on the Student Access and Success working group on Oct. 14. While the working group is currently a one-year initiative, Thomas sees it as a potential springboard for future change on campus. The future of the initiative itself is dependent on what SA leadership decides at the end of the year. “[The future of the program] depends on how the working group goes this semester,” Thomas said. “Putting these issues into the hearts and minds of students and administrators may be enough but I could also see it expanding into a standing committee or have an organization that works on it.” For now, Thomas said spreading awareness is the group’s primary objective. “We’re not going to be able to fix everything in one year — that’s just not feasible,” Thomas said. “[I want to be able to say] that we developed a list that brought the issues to light so that future students and administrators can’t say, ‘I didn’t know this was an issue.’ Second, ideally we’re going to start the process of trying to correct some of these things.” 

STRIVE coalition to spearhead sexual violence prevention efforts

In response to the need for a strong sexual violence prevention program, the Wellbeing Office recruited students to create the STRIVE Coalition: Students Transforming Rice Into a Violence-Free Environment in spring 2015. The group seeks to promote healthy relationships and connect students with resources on campus and is hoping to enact change following the release of results of the Survey on Unwanted Sexual Experiences.

Students launch club for women in business

Rice’s women are preparing to run the world as a part of the new club Rice Women in Business. Seniors spoke on a panel at the club’s inaugural event last Tuesday about their past internships and answered questions.

Administration defends increasing tuition costs

Rice tuition has increased roughly 142 percent in the last 15 years, according to Rice’s archived tuition records. The cost of tuition for students entering Rice in 2000 was $17,150, while the cost for students entering in the fall of 2015 was $41,560.

Rising number of student clubs prompts scrutiny from administration, SA

Student Activities plans to address the increasing number of student clubs according to Olivia Barker, Associate Director of Student Activities. This semester, there are 49 new student clubs and 239 reregistering clubs, while 42 clubs from last year did not complete their renewal or registration process.

The sixth president of Rice University passes away at age 74

Malcolm Gillis, the sixth president of Rice University, died of cancer on Sunday, Oct. 4. He was 74.

Rice to invest $150 million in tech research initiatives

Rice University President David Leebron announced a $150 million investment in strategic research initiatives last week. The three-part investment will fund Rice’s molecular nanotechnology research, establish a program in data sciences and promote a broad range of research competitiveness across the university, Leebron said. The investment draws from a combination of endowment, philanthropy and reallocation of resources.

Breakfast opens 15 minutes early

Students struggling to fit that most important meal of the day in before an 8 a.m. class can now enjoy a more relaxed breakfast thanks to a change in servery hours. Both West and Baker Serveries have begun opening their doors at 7:15 a.m. for continental breakfast, according to Student Association Senator Hannah Todd.

New college application set for

Survey on Unwanted Sexual Experiences results prompt discussion

The Rice Women’s Resource Center hosted a discussion on the results of the Survey on Unwanted Sexual Experiences, drawing undergraduate and graduate students as well as members of the administration. RWRC Co-Directors Cristell Perez and Sam Love organized and moderated the event on Wednesday, two days after the results were released.

KTRU returning to air after four years

Rice University’s student-run radio station, KTRU, will begin broadcasting on 96.1 FM on Friday, Oct. 2, according to a station press release. KTRU has been on 90.1 HD2, a digital format, since the sale of its previous FM frequency in 2011.

Rice ranks 28th in low-income accessibility

Rice ranked 28 out of 179 top colleges, both liberal arts and research universities, in an index of the best colleges for low-income students published in the New York Times last month

Rice remains top 5 in Niche ranking

Rice retained its No. 5 spot in the ranking of overall best college in America from Niche.com, which considers both quantitative numbers and student reviews. It ranked No. 10 for best value.

RTV rebrands, becomes Rice Video Productions

Rice Television is currently in the process of rebranding to Rice Video Productions, according to promotional materials put out by the organization.This is not the first time that the organization has changed its moniker. Until 2002, RTV was known as Rice Broadcast Television. Though the rebranding has precedent, it has not yet confirmed that the rebranding will occur. The rebranding must be approved by the Student Association in order for the change to be official, although the organization has gone through the process of changing its public image. According to SA Treasurer Sai Chilakapati, the rebranding has not yet been approved by the Senate.According to Patrick Huang, current station manager of RVP, the updated name is meant to better represent what the organization does.“It better encompasses what we do as an organization: produce a variety of different student video productions ranging from creative short films to documentary-style interviews and coverage of events run by other student organizations,” Huang, a Baker College senior, said.“With the ever ­increasing popularity of YouTube and online streaming services, the word ‘television’ has become outdated. We have been working on transitioning from being a solely television-based station to one that encompasses all kinds of video productions and maintains an online presence, and we wanted our name to reflect this transition.”According to Jeremy Kao, the RVP programming director, this shift will not come with a radical change in the services provided by RTV, as the organization has had an online presence through both its website and Facebook page.“The name change does not change our purpose or goals as an organization, and it will not affect our viewers,” Kao, a Hanszen College junior, said.The organization’s goal of creating a more modern public image and better connect with new students appears to be working so far, as Kao said RVP had noticed a marked increase in student interest during its fall recruiting sessions.This rebranding comes on the heels of a new blanket tax allocation method approved last spring. The new blanket tax allows for SA subsidiaries to better obtain an appropriate budget each year, instead of being locked in for multiple years at a time. The new name may lead to complications under this method, as RVP’s budget approved last spring was very similar to that of years’ past.“I cannot comment with certainty that there will be financial changes after rebranding,” Chilakapati said. “It will also be made note of so that the future treasurer, during the blanket tax process, does not mistake a change in budget as improper spending.”

Leebron named chair of Internet2 trustee board

Rice University President David Leebron has been elected as the newest chair on the board of trustees of Internet2, an advanced technology organization that operates the largest research and education network in the nation. He will take over the position beginning Nov. 1, according to the Rice News and Media release.The nonprofit organization was founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions, and according to its website, provides services for over 93,000 institutions across the U.S. Among its member institutions are 282 universities, 66 government agencies, 42 regional and state education networks, 86 leading corporations and more than 65 national research and education networking partners representing over 100 countries.“Internet 2 is a critical and remarkably innovative organization that is assuring we will have the connectivity, security and services that higher education and industry need for the research and education endeavors of the future,” Leebron said. “I am excited to become more involved in it.”Leebron will serve as vice chair to a 15-member board of trustees that includes university presidents, chief information officers, network researchers, discipline researchers and industry partners. The board, which is elected by representatives from member organizations, seeks to provide strategic direction, leadership and oversight to the Internet2 community.