Rice Values
Rice faculty, staff and students share values that are essential to our success as a healthy community. Those values guide our decisions and behaviors and shape Rice’s culture. They come through in the way we treat each other and the welcome we extend to our visitors. These values can be recalled simply by our name — RICE — Responsibility, Integrity, Community and Excellence.
Responsibility
Responsibility is something fundamental to a mission-driven academic community.
We take responsibility for making Rice better, and also for our own happiness and success. We take responsibility for our actions and words and understand how they may impact our friends and colleagues. We especially take responsibility for our mistakes. That way we can learn from them and even translate failure into success.
Integrity
Integrity is one of the strongest threads in Rice’s cultural fabric.
In the classroom, office, lab, field of play, in our residential colleges and in our community engagement, we are guided by our commitment to honesty and doing what’s right. This value is embodied in the notion of Rice’s honor and our Honor Code. We accept nothing less than complete academic and research integrity.
Community
Our success as a community depends first and foremost on our respect for each other and how we reflect that respect in our everyday interactions.
That is especially important as we learn from and build friendships with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The Rice community cares about each member. We hope that individual acts add up to the culture of caring that we espouse. Our shorthand way of expressing this to others in need of some assistance: HCIH — How can I help? As part of our values, we extend hospitality and help to every member of our community.
Excellence
Excellence for Rice means that we are never satisfied with a good result, because we can always find ways to do even better.
— President Reginald DesRochesAt this university, we are dedicated to no upper limits. This is a place where the greatest problems of the world can and will be solved. It is in our DNA to go beyond the cusp of greatness to greatness itself.