Letter from the RICE Trustees

Date: Sun, 12 Nov 95 00:23:00 -0500
From: jeff.zeitlin@execnet.com (JEFF ZEITLIN)
Subject: Letter from the RICE Trustees

  1202-314

  To All who have benefited from the RICE Papers:

  Over the past year, the composition of the Board of Trustees has
  changed, and with those changes have come new ideas.  After long
  and difficult debate, and consultations with various individuals
  and groups throughout the Regency, a decision has been made that
  will have a significant (and, in our opinion, positive) impact on
  the scope of published RICE Papers.

  We have long viewed the Regency as the sum of its component parts
  - its member planetary systems - and no more.  However, we now
  realize what we overlooked before - that interstellar
  communication, migration, travel, and government affect culture,
  and are indeed a culture themselves.  More, there are ethnic
  groupings that have carried significant portions of their
  cultures from their homeworlds, and retained them, even after up
  to 1500 years of settlement on worlds far from their original
  homes.  These can no longer truly be considered planetary
  cultures, and they cannot truly be addressed within the context
  of a single RICE Paper focussed on a single planetary system.

  It is for this reason that we have decided to expand the scope of
  the RICE Papers, to allow our researchers and reporter to write
  on any aspect of Imperial culture (to which we of the Regency are
  the heirs) that they feel worthy of note - from topics as simple
  as the traditional Vilani game of \saalir\, ranging up through
  the traditions of the various Imperial Yachting Cup competitions,
  or of shipboard etiquette, all the way up to the complexities
  of the Terran faith of Binay Abrim, or of the interaction between
  Vilani, Sylean, and Vargr social traditions in the coreward areas
  of the Regency.

  To do less would be to break faith with our Charter, which
  charges us with furthering "Cultural Education".  It is our hope
  that you, as we, will find this change to be for the better.

                                        Jeff Zeitlin
                                        Chief Archivist, for

                                        The Board of Trustees
                                        Regency Institute for
                                           Cultural Education