About Us

The Program for Communication Excellence is a new program at Rice established to help Rice achieve President Leebron’s vision for the University:

We must provide a holistic undergraduate experience that equips our students with the knowledge, the skills, and the values to make a distinctive impact in the world. This requires that we reexamine the undergraduate curriculum, as well as focus on enhanced research opportunities, training in communication skills, and leadership development for our students. . . .  Our approach to communication must recognize that our students will succeed if they can effectively interact not only with colleagues in their own and other professional and academic disciplines, but also perhaps equally importantly, with nonacademic constituencies. In many fields, the days of the sole investigator are numbered, as problems today are being solved by teams of academicians, researchers, and policymakers working across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Success in this environment will require our students to effectively communicate their knowledge and ideas to a wide and varied range of audiences within and outside the academy and their profession. We must provide and support the teaching of communication skills to our undergraduate students.

Achieving this grand vision for Rice requires a strong program in communication.  The ability to communicate effectively is the key to any relationship and the crucial ingredient in converting knowledge into action.  Putting ideas into words and pictures is a crucial step in organizing thoughts.  Communicating clearly and thinking clearly are interlinked and interdependent.

By “communication,” we mean all of the ways in which we capture and convey information.  Professionals in all disciplines communicate daily, with the ability to do so effectively influencing their success and that of their organizations.  As the world becomes increasingly complicated, both technologically and sociologically, the need to be able to communicate effectively, across broad intellectual, cultural, and sociological divides, has become increasingly important. 

Rice plans to lead the way in making communication an integral part of the undergraduate experience.  Expanding the emphasis on excellence in communication that was introduced into the curriculum by the highly successful Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication, we plan to build a distinctive approach to instruction in communication for all of our students.  Our goal is to offer instruction, coaching, and in and out-of-class experiences in all forms of communication—written, oral, interpersonal, cross-cultural, and team. 

We plan to position our communication program so that it reaches all students across the curriculum as part of their general education to ensure that our students obtain the level of communication excellence needed to be the global citizens we hope they become.