" Rice in International Perspective: the Bremen Initiative "

In November 1997, a little over two years ago, a Rice University delegation visited Bremen, Germany at the invitation of the city-state government to investigate the possibility of an inter-national educational cooperation. As a consequence of that initial visit and many other contacts, International University Bremen was founded in Bremen in February of 1998, with the first student body to arrive in the fall of 2001. This new private research university will be the first of its kind in continental Europe, and will be modeled in many ways on contemporary American research universities, including many facets of Rice University itself. This colloquium will outline the story of this remarkable development in such a short period of time, in which Rice University has played such a significant role along with the other two key founders: the city-state of Bremen and its local public university, the University of Bremen.