The Rice University

William Marsh Rice University (commonly known as Rice University and opened in 1912 as The William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science and Art) is a private coeducational research university located in Houston, Texas, United States. Its campus is located near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center.

The student body consists of over 3,000 undergraduate, 897 post-graduate, and 1,247 doctoral students, and awarded 1,448 degrees in 2007. [4] The university employs 611 full-time faculty and 396 part-time or adjunct faculty members in 2007.[2] Rice has a very high level of research activity and had $77.2 million in sponsored research funding in 2007.[6] Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of nanotechnology,[7] artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, and space science. Rice was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1985.[8] The university is organized into eight schools offering 40 undergraduate degree programs,[9] 51 masters programs, and 29 doctoral programs.[10][11]

Rice opened in 1912 as a coeducational institution with free tuition. The university was founded several years after the murder of its namesake, the prominent Houston businessman William Marsh Rice, who left a $4.6 million ($109 million in current dollars) funding endowment in his will. It is listed as one of thirty Hidden Ivies and as one of Newsweek's "New Ivies".[12]

The history of Rice University began with the untimely demise of Massachusetts businessman William Marsh Rice. Rice made his fortune in real estate, railroad development, and cotton trading in the state of Texas. In 1891, Rice decided to charter a free-tuition educational institute in Houston, bearing his name, to be created upon his death, earmarking most of his estate towards funding the project. On the morning of September 23, 1900, Rice was found dead by his valet, and presumed to have died in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, a suspiciously large check made out to Rice's New York City lawyer, signed by the late Rice, was noticed by a bank teller due to a misspelling in the recipient's name. The lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, then announced that Rice had changed his will to leave the bulk of his fortune to Patrick, rather than to the creation of Rice's educational institute. A subsequent investigation led by the District Attorney of New York resulted in the arrests of Patrick and of Rice's butler and valet Charles F. Jones, who had been persuaded to administer chloroform to Rice while he slept. Rice's friend and personal lawyer in Houston, James A. Baker, Sr., aided in the discovery of what turned out to be a fake will with a forged signature. It took nearly ten years for Jones and Patrick to be found guilty of conspiring to steal Rice's fortune. Patrick was convicted of murder in 1901. Baker helped Rice's estate direct the fortune, worth $4.6 million in 1904 ($109 million today), towards the founding of what was to be called the Rice Institute. The Board took control of the assets on April 29 of that year. In 1907, the Board of Trustees selected the head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy at Princeton University, Edgar Odell Lovett, to head the Institute, which was still in the planning stages. He came recommended by Princeton's president, Woodrow Wilson. In 1908, Lovett accepted the challenge, and was formally inaugurated as the Institute's first president on October 12, 1912. Lovett undertook extensive research before formalizing plans for the new Institute, including visits to 78 institutions of higher learning across the world on a long tour between 1908 and 1909. Lovett was impressed by such things as the aesthetic beauty of the uniformity of the architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a theme which was adopted by the Institute, as well as the residential college system at Cambridge University in England, which was added to the Institute several decades later. Lovett called for the establishment of a university "of the highest grade," "an institution of liberal and technical learning" devoted "quite as much investigation as to instruction." [We must] "keep the standards up and the numbers down," declared Lovett. "The most distinguished teachers must take their part in undergraduate teaching, and their spirit should dominate it all."

[edit] Establishment and growth

Lovett Hall, formerly known as the Administration Building, was the first construction on campusIn 1911, the cornerstone was laid for the Institute's first building, the Administration Building, now known as Lovett Hall in honor of the founding president. On September 23, 1912, the anniversary of William Marsh Rice's murder, the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art began course work. 48 male and 29 female students were enrolled, paying no tuition, with classes taught by a dozen faculty. Rice was unusual for the time in that it had coeducational admissions. Three weeks after opening, a spectacular international academic festival was held in celebration, bringing Rice to the attention of the entire academic world. Four years later, at the first commencement ceremony, 35 bachelor's degrees and one master's degree were awarded. That year, the student body voted to adopt the Honor System, which still exists today. The first doctorate was conferred in 1918.

The Founder's Memorial Statue, a bronze statue of a seated William Marsh Rice, holding the original plans for the campus, was dedicated in 1930, and installed in the central academic quad, facing Lovett Hall. The residential college system proposed by President Lovett was adopted in 1958, with the East Hall residence becoming Baker College, South Hall residence becoming Will Rice College, West Hall becoming Hanszen College, and the temporary Wiess Hall becoming Wiess College.


John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice Stadium in 1962In 1959, the Rice Institute Computer went online. 1960 saw Rice Institute formally renamed William Marsh Rice University. Rice acted as a temporary intermediary in the transfer of land between Humble Oil and Refining Company and NASA,[13] for the creation of NASA's Manned Space Flight Center (now called Johnson Space Center) in 1962. President John F. Kennedy then made a speech[14] at Rice Stadium announcing that the United States intended to reach the moon before the end of the decade of the 1960s, and "to become the world's leading space-faring nation." The relationship of NASA with Rice University and the city of Houston has remained strong to the present day.

The original charter of Rice Institute dictated that the university admit and educate, tuition-free, "the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas." In 1963, the governing board of Rice University filed a lawsuit to allow the university to modify its charter to admit students of all races and to charge tuition. They had explicitly not admitted minorities in the past. Rice won its case, and charged tuition for the first time in 1965. In the same year, Rice launched a $33 million ($223 million) development campaign. $43 million ($236 million) was raised by its conclusion in 1970. In 1974, two new schools were founded at Rice, the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and the Shepherd School of Music. The Brown Foundation Challenge, a fund-raising program designed to encourage annual gifts, launched in 1976, ending in 1996 having raised $185 million ($251 million). The Rice School of Social Sciences was founded in 1979.

On-campus housing was exclusively for men for the first forty years. Jones College was the first women's residence on the Rice campus, followed by Brown College. According to legend, the women's colleges were purposefully situated at the opposite end of campus from the existing men's colleges as a way of preserving campus propriety, which was greatly valued by Edgar Odell Lovett, who did not even allow benches to be installed on campus, fearing that they "might lead to co-fraternization of the sexes".[15] The path linking the north colleges to the center of campus was given the tongue-in-cheek name of "Virgin's Walk." Individual colleges became coeducation between 1973 and 1987, with the single-sex floors of colleges that had them becoming co-ed in 2006. By then, several new residential colleges had been built on campus to handle the university's growth, including Lovett College, Sid Richardson College, and Martel College.