Education: Call to the Semifrontier

One fall day in 1900, in a swank Manhattan apartment, a trusted butler clamped a chloroformed towel across the face of his master. So died William Marsh Rice, 84, leaving some $10 million—most of it to his lawyer. To his old friends in Texas, where Yankee Merchant Rice had made his pile, the will seemed strange. They thought that Rice, a widower with no children, had planned to leave nearly all his money to the founding of a college in Houston.

Rice was murdered to make sure that no such thing happened. Lawyer Albert T. Patrick had forged Rice’s will, hired Butler Charles F. Jones to hasten his inheritance. Patrick’s crime was almost perfect ; he erred only in passing a bad check soon after his client’s death.* By that slim margin, the Southwest nearly lost its finest college: rigorous, little-known Rice University (enrollment: 1,963), a 300-acre oasis of lush lawns and cool buildings that seem downright alien in raucous Houston.

Lush & Cool. Opened in 1912 after complex litigation, Rice is so rich (net worth: $101 million) that it charges no tuition, and so picks only top students. Long mistaken for a pure engineering school, Rice in fact is a fount of the humanities. Though Rice students endure Math 100, a required trial in orderly thinking, the majority wind up in liberal arts.

Full of other surprises, Rice is so selfeffacing that it has yet to hire a fulltime campus pressagent. Scorning fraternities, it has five residential colleges (one for women) that mix students and faculty on a pattern drawn from Oxford and Yale. All of Rice’s classes are small; nearly all are taught by professors rather than graduate students. Among the school’s half a dozen really top scholars, fields range from economics to history.

Sun Dawn. What long masked all this was Rice’s former name, Rice Institute, which was finally changed last year. Rice has been a model university ever since it opened 49 years ago under aloof, derby-hatted President Edgar O. Lovett.

A Princeton astronomer-mathematician, Lovett scoured the world’s great universities to get ideas for infant Rice. He brought in such scholars as Julian Huxley, made sure that his first 77 freshmen (“these torchbearers of the sun dawn”) meant business. When only 39 students stayed the route to graduation, Rice was permanently stamped as the toughest school in Texas.

Autocrat Lovett shaped Rice for 34 years, gave way in 1946 to an impressive successor, Caltech Physicist William V. Houston (pronounced How-ston v. the city of Hew-ston). No backslapping money raiser, Researcher Houston had a dream financial setup going for him. Though it may some day require students to pay tuition, Rice grows fatter on oil income by the year. It never even badgers alumni for cash. When emergencies arise, Rice simply turns to its rich friends and trustees.

One Out of Ten. Rice’s vast 70,000-seat football stadium, for example, was built in 1950 “at cost” (for $3,295,000) by Houston’s Brown & Root, the world’s biggest construction company. Not surprisingly, the chairman of Rice’s board of governors is George R. Brown, one of the company’s millionaire partners. All that he and other donors ever asked was seats on the 50-yard line for the annual game with the University of Texas.

Last year President Houston retired for health reasons, and last week Rice’s third president got his first real look at the premises. Also a topflight Caltech scientist, Chemist Kenneth S. Pitzer, 47, arrives at a propitious moment. Because it shuns mass education, Rice long irked Houstonians whose duller youngsters could attend only the high-tuition University of Houston. This year Houston became a low-tuition state campus, which will ease the pressure on Rice. The pressure is still intense; Rice accepts about one out of ten applicants.

The quality shows; on college board exams this year, Rice’s 425 entering freshmen averaged 651 in English, 622 in physics, 680 in advanced math (out of a possible 800). In percentage of National Merit Scholarship winners, only Caltech leads Rice in the U.S. With 65 winners this year, Rice alone has more Merit Scholars than all other Southwest campuses combined.

Scholars & Space. Texas still supplies 75% of Rice undergraduates, a statistic that President Pitzer intends to change. He aims to more than double Rice’s largely non-Texas graduate enrollment to 800, he wants to expand the humanities even more. Rice, which claims that its salaries in most fields are second only to Harvard’s, is out to raid faculties from coast to coast.

In luring fine scholars, President Pitzer has a new attraction in “semifrontier” Texas. Largely owing to Rice’s facilities, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently chose Houston as the site of its $60 million manned space flight laboratory. For Rice, the faculty fallout should be considerable. “This is a natural place for some really distinguished university development,” says Pitzer. “Our goal is to make Rice one of the very top universities of the world.”

*Lawyer Patrick was sentenced to life, and disbarred. Eventually pardoned, he died in obscurity in Tulsa in 1940. Butler Jones turned state’s evidence, became a rich Texas oil speculator before killing himself in 1954.