No building on campus, other than Brown College, may be taller than seven stories.

Fiction: Any building on campus can be taller than seven stories. The story that floats inside the hedges is that the Rice Charter required every building be shorter than seven stories—a myth propagated by south campus residents, as Brown is eight stories tall. Those on the north side tend to believe that the Brown family, when donating the money to pay for the college, specified that it must always be the tallest building on campus. (5 points)

Edgar Odell Lovett narrowly escaped tragedy when he decided at the last minute to postpone his return trip from Europe on the Titanic.

Fiction: Although the timing is right, the name of the ship is wrong. During 1911 and 1912, Lovett traveled the world hunting down the best faculty to herald in the inaugural year of the Rice Institute for Literature, Science, and Art. Originally, Lovett made plans to return several times, making it likely that one of these plans might have included a return trip back via the Titanic. Not so. “I’ve seen all his letters to his wife,” says Boles. “While he kept delaying his return trip, he never mentioned the Titanic.” Lovett did return on another ill-fated ship, however—the Lusitania. (3 points)

Rice owns a tree farm in Louisiana.

Fact: In Beauregard Parish, Louisiana, 47,000 acres of land are devoted to financing Rice’s educational mission. It was purchased by William Marsh Rice in 1878, and in 1911, all the trees were cut down in one fell swoop to pay for the first buildings on campus. The Rice Land Lumber Company has operated a modern tree farm on the land since shortly after World War II. Only 2,000 acres of the land are logged every year. The tracts are then reseeded and given 25 years to grow before the trees are cut again. (3 points)

Students turned around Willy’s statue in 1988 to protest a rise in tuition.

Fiction: Angry protests aren’t as much a Rice tradition as the myth that turned this prank into one. In 1988, a group of students built an A-frame with a series of ropes and pullies that lifted the one-ton statue of founder William Marsh Rice off its base located in the Academic Quadrangle only to return him, unharmed, facing the opposite direction. According to the masterminds behind the operation, the activity was no more than a stunt, done to prove that the 180-degree turn could be accomplished. (7 points)

For several years, a pigsty was located next to Lovett Hall, then called the Administration Building.

Fact: When the Rice Board of Trustees purchased the land on which Rice University now is located, there was trouble with one particular corner of the new campus. Charles F. Weber owned an eight-acre farm that cut into the Main Street side of campus. He originally refused to sell his land, but relented in 1910 on the condition that he was allowed to remain on the land for three and a half years. Many early alumni remembered a pigsty, belonging to Weber, on the south end of what is now Lovett Hall. (3 points)

Rice owned the land on which NASA’s Johnson Space Center is located.

Fiction: It’s a fantastic myth, perfect for feeding the dreams of any future space scientist. Rice didn’t actually own the 1,000-acre plot 22 miles southeast of downtown but simply acted as a temporary intermediary in its transfer. Humble Oil and Refining Company gave the property to Rice in 1961 on the condition that the university offer it to the government to draw NASA to Houston. The free land sweetened a package put together by NASA board member and Rice alumnus Representative Albert Thomas ’20 and sealed the deal in bringing a manned space flight center to Texas. (5 points)

The Rice campus originally featured a river.

Fact: It's true if you can call the Harris Gully, known to early students as the Blue Danube, a river. The stream originally ran from the northern end of what is now the Greenbriar Lot, around Autry Court, and past the Track and Soccer Stadium. There even was a bridge where Main Street crossed the stream. Rice obtained permission from the city of Houston in 1946 to channel the stream through a drainage pipe. (5 points)

The Rice charter specifies that campus walkways cannot be concrete. This is why every walkway is covered in pebbles.

Fiction: The walkways on campus used to feature crushed granite, similar to what is found on the outer loop trail. Eventually, Rice decided to pave the walkways. “One of the reasons they changed the sidewalks from crushed granite to pebble is that the crushed granite on the soles of people’s shoes was ruining the carpet and floors of the buildings,” says Boles. “That’s also the reason the stairs in Lovett Hall look like they’re 700 years old.” Pebble-encrusted sidewalks were chosen over less pleasing plain concrete ones for aesthetic reasons only. (5 points)

Rice pays for part of students’ class ring and can demand it be returned should they do something that brings shame on the university.

Fiction: According to the Rice Ring Agreement, Rice can ask for your ring back only on one condition: if you don’t graduate. Students are allowed to purchase rings after completing 90 hours and are given a “reasonable amount of time” to graduate. Today, few rings are returned. However, when Rice only required 75 completed hours to receive a ring, more students failed the graduation requirement. (7 points)

Live owls, once Rice’s mascots, lived at Lovett College.

Fact: Rice owned two owls as mascots as late as 1991, and they lived in a tree in the Lovett quad. Of the last pair, one flew off and the other died. More stringent government regulations regarding the care of wild and endangered animals made it too difficult and expensive to replace the owls, so Rice found another solution. Instead of returning to the large stuffed version of Sammy, such as the one that had been stolen by A&M students, Rice simply stuffed a student into a costume, thus retaining a live mascot while successfully circumventing government regulations. (3 points)

The Rice charter requires there to be a tree for every student.

Fiction: This persistent myth likely originated with a public relations push that sold Rice as a forest-like campus with more trees than students. Today, there is even a tree committee that meets once every 10 years to count all of the trees on campus and compare the number of trees to the number of students. While its nice to know that some students think our campus is wooded enough to support such a myth, there are not as many trees at Rice—4,000—as there are students—4,600. According to groundskeeper Ron Smith, the number of trees on campus is fairly stable, but there is potential for growth. “We do plantings through the year,” he says, “and we try to protect the trees we have.” (3 points)

The trustees almost built the campus downtown but decided to move it to its current spot in order to have more land.

Fact: Rice almost did have an urban campus where the current downtown YMCA is located. Concerned over the lack of land, Edgar Odell Lovett and the first Rice trustees decided to move the projected campus three miles from this spot to the current location. About one-third of the original land was bought from George W. Hermann, who bestowed to the city of Houston much of the rest of the land he owned, which later became Hermann Park. The total cost for the original land was $290,000. (7 points)

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.

Fiction: This myth does raise one interesting question, though. What tastes better: water straight from the ground or the water out of Baker College’s decades old pipes? Starting in 1911, Rice provided its own drinking water through water pumps. A graduate student did contract typhoid while studying at Rice in 1933; however, it was not from the wells, as documented in a 1933 test done by Houston’s health office. The use of the pumps was discontinued due to concerns regarding the stability of the underground water table. (3 points)

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.

Fact: Former president George Bush was an adjunct professor of administrative science at the Jones School in 1978, the year it opened. The course, Organization Theory, involved lectures from Bush regarding the organizations he headed—the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Republican Party, a U.S. congressional office, the United Emirates Mission to China, and an oil exploration company. Just months before Bush hit the presidential campaign trail, the former president was candid about his internal debate to enter the primaries. (7 points)

The stairs and halls of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy were designed to confuse a terrorist.

Fiction: Really, does this need to be explained? Terrorists know to get the floor plan of a building before they infiltrate it. Come on—we all know Baker Hall was designed to confuse visitors. (3 points)

When Rice was founded, only white men were allowed to attend. Eventually, the charter was changed to allow women and minorities to attend Rice.

Fiction: The Rice charter specified that both white women and men would be allowed to attend Rice. Blacks could not attend Rice until 1965, when the charter was changed to allow minorities to attend Rice and tuition to be charged. The original tuition: $1,500. (3 points)

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.

Fact: Rice alumnus John Cox ’27 gave his alma mater his ownership of Yankee Stadium, including all leasing rights, in 1962. Rice made several million dollars off the gift, leasing the House that Ruth Built to the Yankees for almost a decade. In winter 1966, the stadium was painted blue and white. Coincidence? We think not. The city of New York eventually forced Rice to sell Yankee Stadium in 1971 for the meager price of $2.5 million. (9 points)

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.

Fiction: While several people are buried on the Rice campus, no Texas law requires Rice to be registered as a cemetery. Who are the lucky ones with their permanent resting place as Rice? “As far as I know,” says Boles, “there are three people buried here. William Marsh Rice’s ashes are underneath his very own statue, and the Cohens are both buried within the walls of Cohen House.” But three burials does not a cemetery make. “Having your founder buried on your campus doesn’t make your campus into an official cemetery,” adds Boles. No one has yet located the final resting place of the dignity of Club 13 runners. Perhaps they simply dropped it somewhere along the way. (3 points)

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.

Fact: The advance team for then-president Bush decided the original Lovett Hall toilet, almost 80 years old, in then-Rice president George Rupp’s office, wasn’t of acceptable quality for President Bush during the 1990 Economic Summit. At first, the team asked the president’s office to replace the toilet, but when the request was refused on the understandable grounds that the toilet was in fine working condition, the White House broke down and paid for a new toilet seat to be installed. That wasn’t the only inconsequential detail changed during the economic summit. According to Boles, the old Wiess College was substantially altered to make it more appealing to the eye since the window of Bush’s Herring Hall office overlooked the loading dock. A wall complete with a line of shrubbery was constructed to make sure the president wouldn’t have to see such a ghastly sight should he happen to glance out his window. (7 points)

Originally, benches were not allowed on campus to discourage socializing between the sexes.

Fact: William Marsh Rice was not very forward thinking when it came to relations between the sexes. Coeducational facilities weren’t too common when he wrote the original charter for Rice. While women were allowed to matriculate into Rice, they weren’t allowed to stay on campus past 5 pm. And no, there were no benches, except the ones around William Marsh Rice’s statue, to discourage coed fraternizing. (5 points)

The dirt removed from the ground when Rice Stadium was built was used to build the hill at Miller Outdoor Theater.

Fiction: The dirt removed to make way for Rice’s enormous stadium was banked up around the walls of the stadium, not used to make the hill in front of Miller Outdoor Theater. The dirt in the hill originated with the expansion of the lake in Hermann Park from 18 acres to 20. The resulting mound can seat 10,000 people. (3 points)

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.

Fact: In winter 1917, several Rice students constructed a giant stuffed owl to parade at a basketball game against Texas A&M. Rice lost the game to the Aggies, who pilfered the large stuffed mascot during the game. A group of students formed the Owl Protective Association to reclaim the owl but couldn’t locate him. They turned to private investigator Sam Snow, who posed as a reporter to fool the Aggies into telling him about the stolen mascot. On January 30, Snow wired the Rice students with a code phrase indicating he’d located the owl. “Sammy is fairly well,” he wrote, “and would like to see family at eleven o’clock.” The Rice students raided the A&M campus and rescued the owl but were intercepted by Aggies on the return trip to Houston. Rather than let Sammy again fall into the hands of the enemy, they cut his body into several pieces, burned the stuffing, and smuggled the pieces of canvas “skin” back to Rice. (9 points)