Visitors unfamiliar with Rice University’s Common Reading program may want to learn more here before reading this article.

Dear Common Reading, this is for you. I think you should ponder this candid review. You’re hogwash, you’re toothless, you’re gonna be great. I believe in you truly, but first I berate. A text is a means, not an end to pursue. An author’s deficient with one point of view. To your book-centric past please now say adieu for a transfiguration I here beg of you. Oh Common Reading, I must beat you blue but I’ll do it with love; I’ll do it for you.

Your name, to be frank, is an earful of sigh. No import, no fanfare, no reason to fly. This gift with a spine is just one I don’t want. It’s pressure; it’s hazing; a high school haunt. This shared ID is a humorous plea. I’m Hanszen! I’m MechE! I’m Three Cups of Tea! This dialogue’s missing a who, where and how. Professor Plum in the library by the candlestick now? Your issues are passive, enslaved by a book. What’s cheaper? What’s easy? Where shouldn’t we look? You’re present at orientation each year. Those freshmen, those suckers! Upperclassmen drink beer. And most sorry yet, you’re still thinking small. We’re Rice and we’re hedged, but we can be tall.

You salute our new presence by having us read or sit in a theater to hear of a need. But what of our talents, our minds and our hearts? We’re not just some sponges; we’ve got moving parts! How ’bout motive and fervor, a year to muse and a name for the headlines, a name for the news? How ’bout movies to watch, a speech to peruse, books (yes, that’s plural!), whatever we choose? How ’bout action in numbers, a movement by us? How ’bout journals and papers as forums for fuss? How ’bout courses and theses and projects galore in theme with the subject that’s set at the fore?

Give us voices, not welcomes, and loudly we’ll call; give us people who listen, together we’ll squall; give us events so large that as armies we’ll brawl; give us meat for consumption, to interest, enthrall. Give us reason for ruckus, not discussion in lieu; give us cause to create a big hullabaloo. A reading, you see, is a sob and a snore. Give us something to fight, give us something much more.

Try energy, healthcare or freedoms abroad; try happiness, weed or political fraud; try telecom, Darfur or sex ed that’s flawed; try warfare, religion, a claim we should laud. It’s issues and causes that spawn unity, not sitting in circles with Three Cups of Tea. Let Rice summon change; let students be free. Together we’re something, now don’t you agree?

Want vision? Want thunder? Want influence? Speed? Want the public’s attention to a critical need? Want the weight of a hippo, the strength of a steed? Then do us a favor; don’t have us just read. Oh Common Reading, I rhyme to you here in hopes that you’ll open a listening ear. Ahead is our future, a frightening frontier. Let’s go make a difference; let’s go pioneer.

Dear Common Reading, this is your cue. And Dean Robert Forman, for you I write too. Have the strength of an owl smothered in blue. To let us take flight, you know what to do.

Visit ricethresher.org for the original published article.

This, matriculants, is your new beginning. Doubtless before today you have been told of the formidable ride ahead. Independence, midnight food runs, walks of shame, all-nighters, lectures, dorm rooms, freedom, flip-flops, keg stands, new friends, books, class. As if swallowed into the depths of another dimension for four years—give or take—to slosh in the presence of anarchy before being spat out into some vanilla society, this is your college experience. The Real World awaits with its system, its responsibilities, for the day you stumble defenselessly from behind the protection of the Sallyport. And when you do, let there be no mistake: Playtime is over; you are an adult.

Don’t buy it.

You may have been told your mission as a student is to soak up the rays of knowledge bound to pummel you from every direction, emanating from textbooks, from friends, from late-night drunken epiphanies. This much, at least, is true. But you may also have been told that education is a stage, a prerequisite, a duty even. As a graduate, as a person in The Real World, you will no longer have the luxury of freedom, for you will be weighted by bills, by family, by careers. The end of college is another beginning, but this time as an adult. But believe with the force of the fiery sun that brings the new dawn that there are no more beginnings, for this is the last. This is the time when you will embark on your adventure of a lifetime.

Prepare for graduation as not another beginning but as a gunshot, an instant at which you are finally unleashed from the Hedges as a warrior for your cause. So learn to push the limits of your clever mind, to challenge your most deeply held beliefs, to steal moments with the people who matter, to find happiness in everything you do. Resolve to make your college experience your personal training ground so you may emerge from these years as not a pawn in the system, but as a leader, an innovator, an individual of distinction and, most importantly, as a better person.

In your college, find comfort. In a chance happening, find your passion. In your future, find possibility. You, as a matriculant of one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, have been plopped into a bubbling bath of opportunity. But for the world’s brightest, education and action are lifelong pursuits.

So if that leap up ahead ever seems like the beginning of the end of your life, light your plans afire. The Real World, in fact, does not exist.

Visit ricethresher.org for the original published article.