Content and Context: The Humanities and Social Sciences of Rice

THE PRESIDENTS ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2002

The humanities and social sciences give us the intellectual and methodological tools to further our understanding of ourselves and enhance our lives.

At the Rice Institute’s opening ceremonies in 1912, founding president Edgar Odell Lovett articulated two tenets that were to shape the institution: Rice would “aspire to university standing of the highest grade,” and it would “assign no upper limit to its educational endeavor.” These would be accomplished, he continued, through course work and research in the “three grand divisions: science, humanity, and technology.” However, President Lovett and the first board of trustees already had privately acknowledged in 1909 that the new school did not have sufficient means to create in all disciplines programs of the quality he envisioned. He recommended to the board that Rice initially concentrate on the two areas that would make the most impact on the rapidly developing Houston area—science and technology.

President Lovett, however, had no intention of ignoring the humanities and social sciences, which at the time were included in humanities. He knew that, although science and technology give us physical and abstract tools to understand and manipulate the world around us, the humanities and social sciences give us the intellectual and methodological tools to further our understanding of ourselves and enhance our lives. While scientists and technicians formulate and manufacture paint, it is the artist who manipulates paint in a manner that moves us. Indeed, the humanities and social sciences often inform the use of science and technology. Marie and Pierre Curie undertook research into radioactivity as a purely scientific exercise, but the forces they unleashed are not controlled by devices or mathematical formulae. They are controlled, for better or worse, by the politician, the social scientist, the cultural critic, the philosopher, and even the artist.

Lovett and the board agreed that, as the Rice Institute grew, departments would be added in the humanities, and although that process has taken many decades, we have worked hard to make our programs in the humanities and social sciences as strong as those in science and technology. As Lovett envisioned, the Rice Institute is now Rice University, and humanities and social sciences have blossomed into schools, and in them too we have excelled. The pages that follow sketch our standing in these disciplines and outline some of the distinctive activities in humanities and social sciences.