"Rice University: Edgar Odell Lovett's Vision"

John Boles:

William Marsh Rice's charter for the Rice Institute was extremely vague, and none of the original six trustees was especially knowledgeable about higher education. But the trustees chose very wisely when in 1907 they selected a young Princeton mathematician, Edgar Odell Lovett, to be Rice's first president-and they gave him great freedom to plan and act. Although Lovett already had uncommonly broad academic experience, at the trustees' request he made a round-the-world trip interviewing educators and visiting academic institutions. This was a very creative era for the development and reconceptualization of universities in Europe and America, and Lovett thoughtfully borrowed from a wide range of sources the ideas that he hoped would imbue the new institution. Both Lovett and the trustees recognized the unusual opportunity they had, and from they beginning they planned for Rice ultimately to be a university of the highest rank. It would emphasize both teaching and research, though at first mainly on the science end, but its academic ambition-even though it was located on the outskirts of a then-insignificant Texas town-was remarkably bold. Even today, at its best, Rice is largely fulfilling the vision outlined by Lovett in his 1912 address at the formal opening of the university.

"The Research University under the Auspices of NeoHumanism: Wilhelm von Humboldt and the 19th-Century German University On the Model of Berlin"

John Zammito:

Perhaps the most important initiative in the creation of the modern Western university - and most certainly one quite crucial in the background of the emergence of Rice University - was Wilhelm von Humboldt's foundation of the University of Berlin. Humboldt's vision of a modern research university aimed to maximize the cross-fertilization of teaching and research under the cultural principles of his Idealist NeoHumanism. The question of how to integrate the burgeoning fields of science and technology within this agenda, and thus to bridge the emergent "two cultures," became the theoretical issue most central to 19th-century thought on the university and culture generally, with a host of still timely implications.