BOTH PARENTS BECAME TEACHERS
His interest in academia had been sparked long before Princeton. As a junior in college, he attended a pre-PhD summer program at the University of Michigan—a self-described “nerd camp for aspiring academics.” It probably helped that both his parents became teachers as well. His father, initially a chemist for DuPont and later a professor at Hobart Junior College, was a strong influence, fostering a respect for higher education and research. His mother was an elementary school teacher.
During his time at JP Morgan, he worked in global energy banking out of Houston, where Enron was the firm’s largest client. “I remember vividly how a lot of my colleagues left for Enron,” he says. “They were making more money than they’d ever dreamed, and some told me I should’ve stayed—that we would’ve ruled the world. I wondered if my timing was all wrong. A year and a half later, I saw one of them testifying on C-SPAN.” The experience reaffirmed his instincts. “It just didn’t feed me the way academia did,” he reflects. “It wasn’t endlessly fascinating. I knew I had made the right choice.”
Armed with his Princeton PhD, Rodriguez returned to Texas A&M as an assistant professor in 1997. Six years later, he moved to the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business in Charlottesville, where he would spend more than 13 years of his life. By the time Rice recruited him as dean, Rodriguez had served for five years as senior associate dean for degree programs.
‘RICE WAS THE FIRST PLACE I THOUGHT I MIGHT MOVE FOR’
“I loved being there,” says Rodriguez. “There is no school quite like Darden. It has an amazing culture that runs deep. Teaching was paramount, which meant that students and their learning were always at the center of everything you did. We bought our second house in Charlottesville, and three of our kids grew up there.”
Still, Rodriguez began to think about what might come next. “It dawned on me that my next step would probably be a deanship,” he recalls. “Rice was the first place I thought I might move for. I’d always seen it as a very good private university—known for academic quality and rigor—situated in a large, dynamic city in a state full of Fortune 100 companies. I thought, they have room to grow. They have the resources and the opportunity. That’s not something you find everywhere. They didn’t really make the map until around 2010, and though there had been a lot of progress since, they were still under the radar.”
Family ties also tugged him toward Houston. “My mother and my wife’s mother both live in Texas,” he says. “But it was still a hard choice. I wanted to get my hands on the reins.” Before deciding, he sought advice from Bob Bruner, then dean of Darden. “Bob told me, ‘No one can answer that for you. Ask yourself where you can do your best work—where you can be the best version of yourself five or ten years from now.’”
‘TELL US WHAT YOU WANT TO DO NOW — JUST DON’T MAKE US SIT IN COMMITTEES’
Rodriguez took that to heart. “I realized I would grow more as a dean and leader at Rice than anywhere else,” he says. “The question was what I should do next—and I decided I wanted to be a better dean than I had been a professor. I believed this was my space.”
When Rodriguez arrived at Rice in 2016, he approached his new role with the humility and curiosity of a scholar. “I remember coming in and thinking, I’m new — let me take 60 to 90 days,” he recalls. “I wanted to listen aggressively before acting.” But the message he heard across the school was surprisingly direct: Just start doing things. Faculty and staff were eager for momentum. “They felt they had waited too long,” says Rodriguez. “They told me, ‘Tell us what you want to do now — just don’t make us sit in committees to discuss it.’”
His first major move came quickly: launching Rice’s first-ever online degree, the MBA@Rice. It was a bold idea for a university that had never offered an online program of any kind. “Everyone I proposed it to said no at first,” he admits with a laugh. “Then they’d think about it and say okay.”
ONLY FULL PROFESSORS WOULD DESIGN ONLINE COURSES
By the spring of his first year, the university approved the plan. “There was no existing infrastructure, no history of supporting online education,” says Rodriguez. “But our external partner agreed to pay the upfront costs and guaranteed not to run any competing programs in Texas. That allowed us to move fast and focus on hiring faculty.” The first cohort began classes in 2018, just two years after Rodriguez’s arrival.
“It didn’t seem like Rice to do something like this,” he concedes. “But we made strict agreements around student quality and faculty control. Only full professors would design the courses, and we used the program’s proceeds to fund new tenure-track hires.” The results were transformative.
Today, the online MBA enrolls between 330 and 350 students annually—about one-third of the school’s MBA population. “It’s been stable and successful,” says Rodriguez. “When COVID hit, it was a massive windfall. We didn’t have to invent anything new; we already had the platform, the faculty, and the technology.” The experience changed Rice’s culture of teaching. “So many of our professors learned how to teach differently because of that program,” he says. “They used Canvas more, we built in-house studios, and we’ve launched countless innovations since—like online executive education.”
Highlights Of Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez
| Dates | Details |
|---|---|
| 2016, July | Becomes first Hispanic Dean at Rice |
| 2017, June | Rice Business Joins The Consortium |
| 2018, July | Launches first online degree program at Rice |
| 2021, Fall | Launch of undergraduate business program |
| 2023, July | Launch of 22-month Hybrid MBA program |
| 2024, May | Breaks ground on new $54.5 million 112,000 square foot building |
| 2024, October | Lands historic naming gift for the Virani Undergraduate School of Business |
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