Early Life and Education
Rice was born in Washington, D.C., to Emmett J. Rice (1919–2011), Cornell University economics professor and the second black governor of the Federal Reserve System; and education policy scholar Lois (née Dickson) Fitt, currently at the Brookings Institution. Her maternal grandparents were Jamaican. Her parents divorced during her youth.
Rice was a three-sport athlete, student council president, and valedictorian at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., a private girls' day school. She played point guard in basketball and directed the offense, acquiring the nickname Spo, short for "Sportin’."
Rice said that her parents taught her to "never use race as an excuse or advantage," and as a young girl she "dreamed of becoming the first U.S. senator from the District of Columbia." She also held "lingering fears" that her accomplishments would be diminished by people who attributed them to affirmative action. After her father's death in 2011, she said, “He believed segregation had constrained him from being all he could be. The psychological hangover of that took him decades to overcome. His most fervent wish was that we not have that psychological baggage.”
Rice attended Stanford University, where she received a Truman Scholarship, and graduated with a B.A. in history in 1986. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, Rice attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a M.Phil. in 1988 and D.Phil. in 1990. The Chatham House-British International Studies Association honored her dissertation entitled, "Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979-1980: Implication for International Peacekeeping" as the UK's most distinguished in international relations.
Read more about this topic: Susan Rice
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Mormon colonization south of this point in early times was characterized as “going over the Rim,” and in colloquial usage the same phrase came to connote violent death.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)