Narrative

Great cities need great universities. Great universities need great cities. Rice and Houston need each other. The dynamic, diverse, rapidly growing Houston metropolitan area provides energy, resources, an unparalleled research site, and the creative tensions needed to push knowledge forward. It serves as a rich natural setting for understanding global cities. As a leading university, Rice can provide Houston and other growing cities important resources (such as knowledge production, internships, and public symposia) that can serve their populations, neighborhoods, and organizations, helping to identify and address issues that arise from urban growth and diversity.

We draw upon and expand the Chicago School of Sociology, which developed nearly one hundred years ago. In 1900, Chicago had 1.7 million people. It was a large, thriving, rising city full of immigrants with big city problems and big city advantages. By 1930, Chicago's population had exploded to 3.4 million people. During this period of rapid growth, the University of Chicago developed the Chicago School of Sociology in which teams of students and faculty spent their time out in communities, studying this growth and the people and systems of Chicago. The Chicago School became the dominant sociological program in the nation until at least the second world war, coming to define American sociology, helping establish the University of Chicago's top reputation, and indirectly, helping establish Chicago as a world-class city.

Houston is in many ways the Chicago of our current century. In 2000, it had 1.9 million people. It is projected that by 2030 the city of Houston could be 3.5 million people or more, with an additional 5 million people in the Houston region (for a total of 8.5 million people). Its rapid growth is fueled by immigrants who move by the hundreds to Houston each and every day. The economy continues to expand in cutting-edge areas. Houston is becoming a national and international economic force.

But unlike Chicago, which developed in the industrial era, Houston is developing in a post-industrial era, a time of new technologies, new organizational types, new transportation systems, new communication and entertainment systems, changing economies, more global interconnections, lower population densities, and a much more racially, ethnically, spatially, and religiously diverse streams of immigrants (they do not primarily come from Europe, as was the case with Chicago, but from every corner of the world, and they do not just go to central cities, as in the past, but directly to suburbs as well). CORRUL will spearhead the development of the Houston School of Study to understand the changes, growth, development, and human and organizational relations of the Houston region and post-industrial cities in general. It will borrow the best from the Chicago School (such as using the city as a laboratory, studying communities by actually going to the communities, developing a unique perspective of study), but will go beyond that School to adapt to the new century and integrate research, learning, and outreach. The Chicago School developed at a time when sociology was attempting to carve out its own space. This meant they focused mostly on establishing a sociological perspective, and bristled at the idea of integrating academic study with bettering communities. CORRUL, adapting to a new time, will not be limited to sociology and will invite application of knowledge to policies and problems in the service not only of the academy but of the broader community as well.