Rice University at 100

A century ago, there were no trees on these 300 acres of muddy prairie farmland. No paved roads. No electricity. No running water.

The five-sided spread sat three miles from the center of a city just coming into its own, a rough-and-tumble 16-square-mile patch with a population of about 80,000, where only one out of 100 residents had a high school diploma and the nearest “great” university was 1,000 miles away.

Yet, it was here, on Oct. 12, 1912, thatEdgar Odell Lovett, the first president ofRice Institute, foresaw a “community shaking itself from the slow step of a country village to the self-conscious stature of a metropolitan town.”

In the years ahead, Lovett told an audience of dignitaries and international scholars, the people of Houston would be “completing a channel to the deep blue sea, growing a thousand acres of skyscrapers, building schools and factories and churches and homes.” They would market in “lumber and cotton and railroads and oil,” and indulge in talk of  ”literature or science or art.”

And, Lovett predicted, at the heart of that vision, driving both enterprise and enlightenment, would be the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art, a hall of learning that would spur the “slow but sure evolution of a threefold influence on the material, the intellectual, and the spiritual aspects of the life of the city.”

With those words, in a speech that mentions Houston by name 33 times, Lovett marked the official opening of the Rice Institute – and laid the groundwork for an enduring bond between the city and the university.

“From the very beginning, Lovett sees a symbiotic relationship between the city and the university,” said Rice historian John Boles. “He understood that all great cities had great institutions and that it was important to nurture that relationship.”

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