[SA EVP] August Faculty Senate Recap

[SA External Vice President]

Happy Wednesday, Owls!

On August 23rd, I attended the Rice Faculty Senate! Here is a quick recap of some of the topics that were covered:

• Current Working Groups
• Admissions
• Non-Tenure Track

• Message from President DesRoches
• About 1200 students enrolled for the Class of 2027 --> new goal moving forward!
• The Class of 2027 is a diverse class with 1/3 of them being underrepresented students
• Replaced 9 Vice Presidents and have conducted 65 tenure track searches (largest number of searches in Rice history!)
• Rice is working on new research investments in the following areas:
• Medical Humanities
• Rice Sustainability
• Rice Advanced Materials Institute
• Plan to announce new institutes and centers in the coming weeks 
• Updates on new facilities
• Engineering and Science Building is OPEN, and students can use Tetra in the new Cafe there!
• Continue work on the expansion of the Architecture Building
• Planning to expand the Jones Building/VADA 
• Old Sid demolition underworks --> will be replaced with 2 new colleges by 2025-ish
• The addition of 2 new colleges will get Rice back to the norm of having 400 students per college
• The goal is to get to 4,800 students by the Fall of 2024
• Enhancing Student Success Resources
• Growing the RESP and RISE programs
• Creating a centralized tutoring service at Rice

• Strategic Planning Process Updates from Provost Dittmar
• Undergraduates are incredibly important, so Rice wants to make sure we have support to be successful by working on these things:
• Student and faculty diversity
• Developing more well-rounded students
• Students with target disabilities
• Increasing academic support (centralized tutoring service)
• Research 
• Enhancing global processes with research and increasing research opportunities abroad
• More basic and translational research 
• Creating a national lab partnership

Let me know if you have any questions about any topics the faculty discussed, and I would be more than happy to expand on them for you :)

Best,

Crystal Unegbu (she/her) External Vice President Rice University Student Association w: sa.rice.edu e: sa...@rice.edu