ORCHESTRA TO PERFORM FOR LEEBRON INAUGURATION

Office of News and Media Relations
Lindsey Fiedler
Assistant Editor, Rice News
713-348-6772
Email: lfiedler@rice.edu

Although the inauguration is still more than two months away, plans are already in place for the ceremony inducting David Leebron as the seventh president of Rice University. The Oct. 2 investiture ceremony will be the highlight of two days’ events designed to give all members of the Rice community a chance to participate in the inauguration.

Initiating the weekend activities will be the delivery of the official summons to Leebron Friday afternoon, Oct. 1. Following tradition established with the 1971 inauguration of Norman Hackerman, the board chairman and university marshal, robed in academic regalia, will knock on the door of the president’s house, summoning the president to his investiture ceremony.

Receptions for staff and special guests will be held Friday afternoon, as well as registration of the hundreds of expected delegates arriving to attend the inauguration. Representatives of more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign institutions and professional and learned societies will be invited to the ceremony. The day will be capped with an inaugural concert by the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra.

The official investiture ceremony is set for 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, in the Academic Quadrangle. Approximately 3,000 guests are expected to attend the event, which will be open to the public.

Following the investiture will be a reception for students and alumni in Rice Memorial Center. Select guests will then attend a reception and luncheon at the Hilton Americas Hotel.

At Leebron’s suggestion, the keynote address at the luncheon will be presented by Mamphela Ramphele, a South African who rose from activist in the anti-apartheid struggle to become one of the four managing directors of the World Bank.

Another invitation-only event will be held Saturday evening at the Warwick Hotel, featuring a performance by renowned pianist and Shepherd School professor Jon Kimura Parker.

“We scheduled the weekend so that everyone who is connected to Rice and the general public could attend at least one event, and we believe we’ve accomplished that,” said Mary Bixby, executive director of the presidential inauguration committee that has planned the weekend’s events.

The 16-member committee, which has been meeting since April, is co-chaired by Robert Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities, and Karen Hess Rogers, Rice alumna and emerita member of the Rice Board of Trustees.

Other committee members are John Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History; Anne Chao, Rice doctoral candidate in history and wife of Rice trustee Albert Chao; Mark Davis, director of alumni affairs; Kyle Frazier, past president of the Association of Rice Alumni; Melissa Kean, deputy to the president; Greg Marshall, director of University Relations; Derrick Matthews, president of the Student Association; Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences; Joanna Papakonstantinou, president of the Graduate Student Association; Hally Beth Poindexter, alumna and professor emerita of kinesiology; Russell Price, maintenance manager in Facilities and Engineering; Mark Scheid, ex officio and assistant to the president; and Bixby, executive director of Friends of Fondren Library.

Several of these committee members have served on past inaugural committees. Patten served as co-chair on the committee that planned Malcolm Gillis’ inauguration. Matthews, Price, Marshall, Poindexter and Brown also served on the Gillis inaugural committee. In fact, both Poindexter ’47 and Brown ’38 have ties to the university spanning back to Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, who served from 1907 to 1946. Leebron took office July 1, succeeding Malcolm Gillis.