EDITORIAL: HISTORY

Students need to play more active role in recording events for posterity.

Fifty years from now, what will the Rice University historians say about the early '90s? Will they include stories about the students who helped resurrect the Pub or the student who altered the face of student life (e.g., the seven Hugh Scott Cameron award recipients for their roles in developing the college system) to John Boles' University So Conceived ?

On the contrary, the official histories of Rice University will most likely center around the major incidents that the administration felt were important and for which documentation can be found. The histories will surely focus on the Southwest Conference breakup, the annual gifts campaign, the enrollment statistics and the Inaugural Baker Institute Conference. Rarely in university histories do you find any information about student life. Inaugural Will Rice College President Henry Gissel's disciplinary probation and subsequent removal from office for attending an exam-ending beer party in Hanszen 128 in 1957 will not appear in the official histories.

Why is that?

A recent meeting with Associate Dean of Student Affairs Pat Martin turned up the answer. There is a paucity of information available from the students and colleges about the students in the appropriate places (Woodson Researh Center). Do we really want The Rice Thresher and the Rice Campanile to be the only records of student life at Rice?

Hanszen College tried to remedy this lack of stored information by establishing the historian position at the college after Pat Martin and former Thresher editor Michael Raphael published a groundbreaking book at Rice entitled The History of Student Life at Rice University: A Series of Papers .

The publication contains histories on campus theater, women, Hanszen College, Will Rice College, Wiess College, traditions and the college system. Nowhere else in the university will you find a comprehensive list of all the Beer-Bike winners and college masters.

It is the responsibility of the students to make sure they are included in the university history, whether through the planned 1996-97 course to produce volume two of the above book or through colleges keeping copies of important documents in Woodson. This is one time when we have to be packrats, or we fade away into the annals of a dry institutional history.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the December 1, 1995 issue.

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