Meet Dale Rice

In a 35-year career in journalism, Dale Rice covered just about every angle of the news.

He has been a general assignments reporter, education writer, city hall reporter, capital bureau chief, business editor, deputy features editor and restaurant critic.

Along the way, Rice had his phone tapped by authorities attempting to find an official who was leaking information, was threatened with contempt of court by a federal judge for refusing to reveal a confidential source, helped prompt a secretly impaneled grand jury to reopen a dramatic murder case after the full story was revealed in the newspaper, ignited a national debate in Japan over geography education and received death threats after panning Elvis in concert.

Also, in the course of his work, he became an expert on:

• School desegregation (While on a Ford Foundation journalism fellowship, he conducted the first nationwide study of the impact of magnet schools on desegregation.)
• Mentally retarded offenders (The American Psychiatric Association invited him to give a speech on groundbreaking reporting on the incarceration of people with mental retardation at the organization’s annual convention.)
• Testing (He was praised by the U.S. commissioner of education for proving that the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the nation’s most widely used yardstick of student achievement, had been made easier in subsequent versions between the 1950s and 1980s.)
• Dining (He reviewed more than 1,000 meals, including one with a $900 tab in Paris, while serving as the Austin American-Statesman’s restaurant critic.)

Now he brings that varied reporting, writing and editing background to Texas A&M University, where he teaches in Journalism Studies and the Department of Communication and mentors students in the Liberal Arts Student Reporter Project.

Read Dale's Q&A with AggieJournalists.com