Jack Hardcastle

“Congratulations on completing a rigorous, four-year education at an internationally renown University of the highest caliber. Please accept this plastic tube and enclosed poster. Next.”

In the time that I have been here nothing Rice has done has infuriated me as much as this latest insult. Instead of receiving our diplomas at Commencement, the University will present us with some inconsequential token until the real documents can be printed and mailed home six to eight weeks later, as though we had ordered x-ray vision goggles out of the back of a comic book.

They have offered a dozen different excuses for this, and they all vary depending on which administrator you talk to. I was told by one that it was a money issue. The next told me the money wasn’t a problem, but that the manpower required is too great and the logistics challenge is becoming insurmountable. The third said that the outcry from alumni who inadvertently destroyed their diplomas last year was the biggest factor.

It turns out that champagne is the number one cause of death for sheepskin diplomas. It is followed in a close second by “beach ball damage.” This, and this alone, is the primary reason we will not be receiving our diplomas this May 13. “About 30” of last year’s alums complained that they destroyed their diploma by spilling something on it, beating beach balls with it, or in transporting home. Let me just say that if you cannot be trusted to protect and cherish your diploma then you are not worthy of the honor it bestows. Perhaps the University should hold on to yours; they can keep it in the basement of the Allen Center, under glass, and you can visit it during business hours.

By mailing it home, the University is able to order the diplomas the Monday after Commencement. They figure they can save us the trouble of having to transport them by mailing them to our parents’ homes. What about those students (surely a sizable proportion) who will not be home eight weeks after graduation, and who do not yet know where they will be? How many students stay in the Houston area because of jobs, or go to some other city because of graduate school? Mailing the diplomas doesn’t save Rice any logistical or economic costs, and still places a transport burden on hundreds of graduates. Rice isn’t doing this for us - it’s doing it to be just like other schools. Schools smaller than Rice give out diplomas as Commencement, and schools much bigger than Rice do not. This university has a Napoleon complex about itself. It feels that it is a big university trapped in a small university’s body. Wrong. We are a small university, and we need to embrace it. We are not “on the cusp” of some divide between the tiny liberal arts colleges and the big 50,000-student state schools. We are a small, well-rounded university with a lot to offer. We should praise the fact that we take good care of our students (both graduate and undergraduate) instead of trying to be just like our older, bigger cousins on the coasts. I don’t care if other schools don’t give out diplomas at Commencement. We are not other schools, and we need to stop compulsively comparing ourselves to them. I did not come here because I wanted a Harvard-like education. I came because I wanted a Rice education.

This disaster was made possible because the administration does not foster communication with the students. Nobody in the Registrar’s office ever bothered to contact anyone besides the Student Association President when this decision was made last summer, and with all due respect to the outgoing administration, it did not accurately represent the 1200 graduates this year. The college presidents weren’t even asked to comment on the issue until after the point-of-no-return. This decision should have been made public at the first possible opportunity, not a month before graduation. Rice has done a lot of aggravating things that I can recall - dozens that I was personally witness to. However, this is a truly unforgivable error at the cost of our class. This affront will leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of my life. Development Office take note: don’t expect much from the Class of 2006. Perhaps I’ll just mail you a poster in six to eight weeks.

Jack Hardcastle, Wiess senior