Rice Fact and Fiction: What’s Your Rice Historical IQ?

By Catherine Adcock

Falsehoods about Rice history are as much a university tradition as Beer Bike. Who knows where they originated, but they are fed to freshmen beginning on move-in day, reproduce exponentially during O-Week, and finally are held as fact by all.

Perhaps you do know the fact from the fiction. Or maybe you’ve just found some stories suspect but never have been able to find out for sure whether or not Rice really is an official cemetery or if live owls really did live on campus.

Test your knowledge about Rice history by taking this short true-or-false quiz. Then compare your knowledge with that of the wizard of Rice history, Professor John Boles, with the John Boles Rice History Meter.

The Stories

No building on campus, other than Brown College, may be taller than seven stories. Edgar Odell Lovett narrowly escaped tragedy when he decided at the last minute to postpone his return trip from Europe on the Titanic. Rice owns a tree farm in Louisiana. Students turned around Willy’s statue in 1988 to protest a rise in tuition. For several years, a pigsty was located next to Lovett Hall, then called the Administration Building. Rice owned the land on which NASA’s Johnson Space Center is located. The Rice campus originally featured a river. The Rice charter specifies that campus walkways cannot be concrete. This is why every walkway is covered in pebbles.

Rice pays for part of students’ class ring and can demand it be returned should they do something that brings shame on the university. Live owls, once Rice’s mascots, lived at Lovett College. The Rice charter requires there to be a tree for every student. The trustees almost built the campus downtown but decided to move it to its current spot in order to have more land. Rice relied on a system of wells throughout campus instead of a public water utility to pump drinking water into the campus until a graduate student contracted typhoid fever from the water. Former president George Bush was a professor at Rice in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management prior to becoming vice president under Ronald Reagan. The stairs and halls of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy were designed to confuse a terrorist. When Rice was founded, only white men were allowed to attend. Eventually, the charter was changed to allow women and minorities to attend Rice.

Rice University once owned the leasing rights to Yankee Stadium but was forced to sell them to the city of New York in the 1970s. Texas state law requires that Rice be registered as an official cemetery because William Marsh Rice is buried underneath his statue in the Academic Quadrangle. When then-president George Bush came to Rice for the 1990 Economic Summit, the toilet in the president’s office in Lovett Hall was modified to make it more suitable for a U.S. president. Originally, benches were not allowed on campus to discourage socializing between the sexes. The dirt removed from the ground when Rice Stadium was built was used to build the hill at Miller Outdoor Theater. Sammy received his name from a private investigator who made it up as part of a code phrase during a trip to return the mascot after it was stolen by Texas A&M students. Click here to see how well you can distinguish Rice facts from fiction ›››