Rice University

• 1. Introduction

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  Rice University began with a murder. On the morning of the 23rd of September 1900, an 84-year-old Massachusetts businessman named William Marsh Rice was found dead in his New York apartment, apparently in his sleep. Within days, a suspicious check surfaced at a local bank, bearing Rice's signature but misspelling the recipient's name. That recipient was Rice's own lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, who then claimed that Rice had revised his will to leave his entire fortune to Patrick rather than to the educational institute Rice had spent years planning.

  What followed was one of the stranger legal dramas of the early twentieth century: a conspiracy, a forged will, a valet coerced into administering chloroform, and a conviction for murder. Out of all that chaos came one of the most distinctive universities in the United States. How did a fortune built on Texas real estate and cotton trading eventually produce Nobel laureates, a national baseball championship, and a speech by John F. Kennedy about sending humans to the moon? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Fortune and the Conspiracy

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  William Marsh Rice had made his money across several industries. Real estate, railroad development, and cotton trading in Texas had built an estate worth $4.6 million by 1904. In 1891, he had decided that this fortune should fund a free-tuition educational institute in Houston, created in his name upon his death.

  The plot to steal it unraveled quickly once investigators got involved. Charles F. Jones, Rice's butler and valet, had been persuaded to administer chloroform while Rice slept. A district attorney investigation in New York led to the arrests of both Patrick and Jones. Patrick claimed a revised will that directed the estate to him; Rice's Houston lawyer, Captain James A. Baker, helped expose the will as a forgery. Jones cooperated with prosecutors and was not charged. Patrick was convicted of murder in 1901, though he was eventually pardoned in 1912 due to conflicting medical testimony.

  Baker's role in dismantling the fraud would be commemorated in a lasting way. He helped steer the estate toward its intended purpose, the board of trustees took control of the assets on the 29th of April 1904, and decades later one of Rice's residential colleges would be named Baker College in his honor.

• 3. Lovett's Vision

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  In 1907, the board of trustees went looking for someone to lead the institute, which existed at that point mainly as a plan. They settled on Edgar Odell Lovett, then head of the Mathematics and Astronomy department at Princeton University, who came recommended by Princeton's president, Woodrow Wilson.

  Lovett accepted the challenge in 1908 and spent the next year conducting what amounted to a global survey of higher education. He visited 78 institutions across the world between 1908 and 1909, studying what made them work. Two things impressed him deeply: the architectural uniformity of the University of Pennsylvania, and the residential college system at Cambridge University. Both would shape Rice's character for generations.

  Lovett's public statements about the new institute were ambitious and specific. He called for a university "of the highest grade," "an institution of liberal and technical learning" devoted "quite as much to investigation as to instruction." He also declared, "Keep the standards up and the numbers down," and insisted that the most distinguished teachers must take their part in undergraduate teaching. He was formally inaugurated as Rice's first president on the 12th of October 1912, the same year the institute opened its doors.

• 4. Opening Days and Early Struggles

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  On the 23rd of September 1912, the anniversary of William Marsh Rice's death, the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art opened for instruction. Its first class numbered 59 enrolled students, later known as the "59 immortals," along with about a dozen faculty members. That number grew to 77 after 18 more students joined, 48 male and 29 female, making Rice coeducational from its very first day.

  Tuition was free, as Rice's will had stipulated, but the coursework was demanding. About half the students had failed after the first term of 1912. The Honor System, which still governs Rice academics today, was adopted by student vote in 1916, the same year Rice held its first commencement ceremony, awarding 35 bachelor's degrees and one master's degree. The first Ph.D. was awarded two years later, in 1918, in mathematics.

  The early decades carried darker chapters as well. A 1922 yearbook documented approximately twenty students in Ku Klux Klan robes in a posed photograph. A Klan event was held in 1923 on a Rice-owned property on Louisiana Street, near the home of a Black woman who had filed a lawsuit against the institute in 1909. Rice's original charter had explicitly restricted admission to white students, and that restriction would stand for another four decades.

• 5. Segregation, Space, and Change

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  Rice's original charter required the university to admit and educate, tuition-free, "the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas." In 1963, the governing board took the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against itself to change that charter, seeking the legal authority to admit students of all races and to charge tuition. Ph.D. student Raymond Johnson became the first Black student admitted to Rice that year.

  The charter was officially amended in 1964 to desegregate both graduate and undergraduate divisions, and the trustees won a lawsuit in 1966 to void the racial language in the original trust entirely. Rice began charging tuition for the first time in 1965, marking a clean break from the conditions its founder had set.

  Around the same time, Rice became entangled in one of the defining national projects of the decade. The university acted as a temporary intermediary in the transfer of land that became NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, now called Johnson Space Center, in 1962. President John F. Kennedy then spoke at Rice Stadium on the 12th of September 1962, reiterating that the United States intended to reach the moon before the end of the decade and "to become the world's leading space-faring nation." The Rice Space Institute has maintained a working relationship with Johnson Space Center for more than fifty years since.

• 6. Campus, Colleges, and Traditions

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  Rice Stadium opened in 1950 with a capacity of 70,000 seats and hosted Super Bowl VIII. After adjustments in 2006, it seats 47,000 for football but can be reconfigured to its original capacity. The campus itself covers 285 acres within Houston's museum district and holds more than 4,000 trees and shrubs in the Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum.

  Almost every building on campus follows the Byzantine architectural style that Lovett admired at the University of Pennsylvania: sand and pink-colored bricks, large archways and columns. Lovett Hall, the original administration building, remains the landmark at the center of the Academic Quad. New students walk through its Sallyport arch at matriculation and return through it at commencement.

  The residential college system that Lovett envisioned was finally adopted in 1958, converting the existing halls into Baker, Will Rice, Hanszen, and Wiess Colleges. Today the university has eleven residential colleges, with a twelfth, Chao College, scheduled to open in fall 2026. Roughly three-quarters of Rice's undergraduate population lives on campus, and students are randomly assigned to a college at matriculation. The loyalties that follow are fierce. The annual Beer Bike race, described on the official website as a "combination intramural bicycle race and drinking competition dating back to 1957," draws every residential college and begins each morning with what some estimate to be the largest annual water balloon fight in the world.

• 7. Athletics and Academic Reach

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  Rice competes in 14 NCAA Division I varsity sports and is the second-smallest school by undergraduate enrollment in Division I FBS football, ahead of only Tulsa. Its most celebrated athletic moment came in 2003, when the baseball team won the College World Series, defeating Stanford and making Rice the smallest school in 51 years to win a national championship at the highest collegiate level of that sport.

  The 2003 title capped a remarkable run in baseball. The team had finished ranked first in the nation for eight consecutive weeks in 1999 and went on to win 14 consecutive conference championships across three different conferences. In 2004, three Rice players were selected in the first eight picks of the MLB draft: Philip Humber third, Jeff Niemann fourth, and Wade Townsend eighth, which was a first in the history of the draft.

  Off the field, Rice's academic record is equally specific. The university's alumni include five Nobel laureates, a Turing Award winner, five Pulitzer Prize winners, and 14 NASA astronauts. The endowment stood at $8.1 billion as of June 2021, providing 40 percent of Rice's operating revenues. Admission is rated most selective by U.S. News and World Report, with an acceptance rate of 7.9 percent in 2023. Reginald DesRoches, appointed president in 2022, now leads an institution that the university's first president wanted to keep rigorous and deliberately small, a goal that its admissions numbers suggest it has managed to maintain.