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6/30/2004 12:20:00 AM

David W. Leebron

Leebron prepares to take the helm

BY TERRY SHEPARD

David W. Leebron takes office Thursday, July 1, as the seventh president of Rice University, a role for which he has been preparing since his appointment was announced in December.

“I have been listening, studying and consulting as widely as possible with deans, faculty, staff, students and graduates,” Leebron said. “I have learned an enormous amount about Rice, and have only grown in my enthusiasm for the opportunities and challenges we all will engage together. My predecessors, from Edgar Odell Lovett through Malcolm Gillis, have continuously built Rice and handed on a university that is poised to seize great opportunities and continue its remarkable progress in the years ahead.”

Assisting Leebron will be his first two appointments, both women with deep Rice roots. Melissa Fitzsimons Kean — Rice M.A. ’96, Ph.D. ’00 and postdoctoral research associate in engineering with a specialty in Rice history — begins
July 1 as deputy to the president. Maryana Iskander — Rice B.A. ’97, two-time president of the Student Association and Rhodes Scholar — starts Aug. 9 as adviser to the president.

“I am deeply pleased to be able to draw on the academic values and Rice experience that Maryana and Melissa bring,” the president-elect said. “I will call on their strengths in manifold areas as their duties evolve.

“I got to know Melissa well through her board-appointed role as executive director of the search that brought me to Rice. Since then, her knowledge of Rice history and the Rice faculty has made her invaluable in the transition process.

“Maryana provides another perspective of knowledge and insight into Rice, particularly its undergraduate life and education,” he said. “Add her experience as an alumna, a scholar and a person active in public service, and you have a tremendously versatile individual whose advice and work will benefit the university on a wide range of issues.”

Kean has published histories of Rice’s School of Continuing Studies and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and most recently has been researching the history of Rice’s science and engineering schools. Her five degrees include four in history — a Rice doctorate, Rice and Creighton master’s and an Iowa State bachelor’s — and a J.D. from the University of Iowa. In 2000, she won Rice’s John W. Gardner Award for Best Dissertation in the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently under revision for the University of Georgia Press is her book “At a Most Uncomfortable Speed: The Desegregation of the South’s Private Universities, 1945-64.”

As a Rice doctoral student, she served as the graduate student representative to the history department, 1997 Strategic Planning Committee, 1998 Affirmative Action committee and 1999 Ad Hoc Committee on Intellectual Property Policy.

Iskander, who earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2003, will return to Rice from Chicago, where she is a clerk with Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

The first sophomore ever elected president of Rice’s Student Association, she was re-elected to a second term and also was a William Marsh Rice Scholar, winner of numerous other awards and a founder of the Rice Women’s Conference in 1996. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship for public service and was elected a Rhodes Scholar, earning a master of science in comparative social policy at Trinity College, Oxford University. In 2002, she won one of 30 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans; Iskander is a naturalized U.S. citizen, having immigrated from Egypt. She is a director of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars and a past director of the Truman Scholars Association.

Her law school career includes founding the Yale Law School Project for Civil Rights and co-chairing the Yale Law Women organization. Iskander’s scholarly accomplishments include publication of the results of an empirical investigation on the effects of gender at Yale Law School and a paper that received a Yale Law School prize as the best student paper on taxation. Her professional experience includes time as an associate at the Houston office of McKinsey & Co.; consulting with W.L. Gore and Associates; and clerking in Houston at Vinson & Elkins and in New York at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Iskander and Kean will join Mark Scheid in assisting the president. All of the president’s and provost’s staffs will be found on the third and fourth floors of Allen Center. President-elect Leebron said the new location was chosen for multiple reasons.

“I want an accessible and open administration in all senses of the words,” he said. “First and most basic, Allen Center has modern elevators and is fully handicapped-accessible, which Lovett Hall simply is not. Allen Center space also allows for much more efficient and collaborative work by both the academic and administrative leadership. And finally, all those who come to the president’s or provost’s offices will be welcomed with light and views of the spectacular campus that defines Rice University today.”

Visitors to the fourth floor of Allen Center will step off the elevator to a glass-doored reception area with a view through to the Academic Quad. The offices of the president and the provost, which will retain campus mail stops MS-1 and MS-2, will be on the north side of the floor. The vice president for finance and administration, the budget office and related staff are scheduled to occupy the south side.

On the third floor, plans call for the vice provost for research and graduate studies and other provost’s office staff to be joined by human resources, the general counsel and the vice presidents for public affairs and resource development.

To make space for those changes, the Office of the Vice President for Investments and Treasurer will move from the fourth floor of Allen Center to some of the space vacated by the president and provost in Lovett Hall, and the staff of resource development will relocate from the third floor of Allen Center to the Greenbriar Building west of the stadium. Units currently in the Greenbriar Building, including buy-pay and several units of public affairs, will move to other space to be determined.