Rice fumbles graduate student issues during Ike

By Staff Editorial     9/25/08 7:00pm

When Hurricane Ike headed towards Houston last weekend, Rice did a great job communicating with undergraduates about shelter and food. However, graduate students seemed to be left out of the loop (See story, page 1). It wasn't until Thursday evening that graduate students received any definitive word about plans for Hurricane Ike from Dean of Graduate Students Paula Sanders, who e-mailed graduate students notifying them that they could not seek shelter at Rice because the school would be closed Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Students housed in the Rice Graduate Apartments were told they may be able to find shelter at Rice. Unsurprisingly, this e-mail threw a wrench into the plans of everyone who had made an evacuation to Rice part of their safety plans. Then, the Crisis Management Team e-mailed graduate students Friday morning to inform them that Rice would provide shelter in the Janice and Robert McNair Hall and the Rice Memorial Center until Monday, but it would only be provided for students living in the Graduate Apartments, who were under mandatory evacuation.

The notification of shelter was not the only piece of information lost in the storm. Graduate students said they did not receive an e-mail informing them of the dry-campus policy during the storm. Some blame Valhalla's closure on this miscommunication.

Furthermore, one of the points of the Vision for the Second Century concerns an aim for growth in Rice's graduate programs. If Rice hopes to build a graduate program here, first it needs to prove that it cares about its graduate students.

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All in all, the question of whether or not graduate students would receive shelter should have been a no-brainer: absolutely. Rice should take care of its own by providing shelter at the very least, just as the city of Houston provided shelters around town to its own. If Rice officials didn't question this, they might have been able to communicate earlier (and more clearly) with graduate students and inform them of the university's evacuation plan.

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