VICTOR SAENZ
Houston Institute
Since the Fall 2018 I have served as Executive Director of Houston Institute, an independent academic non-profit aimed to support students and faculty at the Rice University and Texas Medical Center communities. Houston Institute provides a venue where students can think deeply about the best way to live through the study of the liberal arts, especially philosophy and literature. Our main goal is to foster in students a habit of seeking and loving truth concerning life's fundamental questions. Such truth-seeking thrives in an environment where students have the freedom to ask anything, where reasoned debate and respectful disagreement is encouraged. Such inquiries occur best in a spirit of friendship and in conversation with enduring philosophical and literary traditions of thought. Becoming such a truth-seeker will require living certain virtues such as courage, intellectual humility, and deep habits of study.
We accomplish our goal by sponsoring non-credit student-reading groups, public lectures, and providing one-on-one mentoring.
Though we are rooted in the natural law tradition–with Aristotle and Aquinas as central figures–and have a special interest in virtue and human flourishing, we look at the best thinkers with a range of views in a fair-minded way. All students committed to serious intellectual engagement are welcome, regardless of their views.
Why Houston Institute?
Many dedicated faculty provide an invaluable service to students by introducing them to some of the very best of the liberal arts, by helping them to explore how such learning might relate to their own lives, and by nurturing in them the habits required to become better truth-seekers. HI aims to complement such work in at least three ways.
First, there is something deeply valuable about having a dedicated venue in which to explore life’s deepest questions that is not tied to the pressures that come from competing for grades, prestige, the promise of future employment and wealth, and the like. These things are important and have their place. But they can easily obscure that seeking and delighting in truth is good for its own sake and a key part of the human good.
Second, HI is building an intellectual community that seeks answers together: our goal is to be a space where students can form deep friendships around the quest for truth, even if there might be disagreement about important issues.
Finally, our programming seeks to show the relevance of classical accounts of human flourishing–such as those found in the Aristotelian tradition–to the contemporary, pluralist, secular university.