WORLD WAR II
In only its 25th year of existence, the Thresher was covering its second war. In early 1941, before the chaos, the Rice Institute was finally developing into the vision of its founders. Edgar Odell Lovett had recently announced his retirement after more than 30 years as president. But, as a 1944 Thresher editorial would assess, “the carefree freshmen who matriculated at Rice in the fall of 1940 probably never dreamed that their college career would be disturbed by such as the present emergency”: the breakout of what was immediately known as the Second World War.
As the university adjusted to the war, Lovett decided to stay on as president so that Rice would not have to conduct a search. Throughout, the Thresher published overwhelmingly positive support for Lovett. They summarize their praise, consistently found in both the news and editorials sections of the paper, in a May 14, 1943 editorial, writing, “Dr. Lovett has exhibited courage throughout his years as president of the Institute, but never as much courage as he showed last year by remaining at his post over Sallyport after he had earned retirement."
Rice’s foremost focus on academics changed with the war. A 1944 editorial explained one of the major changes: “Our classmates found themselves in an almost militarized school because of … the Navy V-12 Unit here.” The editorial described the sudden stationing of 530 men at Rice from across the country to train in technical skills for the Navy.
The Thresher, in turn, showed abundant support for the new Navy students. The students were older, in uniform, and going to school six days a week, year-round. Even though they were not quite Rice students, the paper featured a warm welcome from Lovett and the Thresher editorial staff alike. “We hope that you will not feel like strangers for long,” the July 8, 1943 editorial read. “You will learn to love the Institute.”
The Thresher continued supporting the Navy trainees throughout the year in its coverage, including a front page news piece that lamented the constraints placed on the soldiers — they were not allowed to go outside the hedges aside from Wednesday nights. The article, written in a conversational tone by society editor Barbara Ewing, as the Thresher tended to do at the time, urged, “Make yourselves available girls, and raise the Navy morale — and yours, too.”
As the Institute and its students adapted to the war, the Thresher did the same. The war forced the paper to broaden its scope past Main Street and onto national issues. While the Thresher’s editorials maintained a patriotic tone in support of the war, they lamented the decreasing academic quality and lack of school spirit that had come to Rice with the war. Editorials often alternated in focus between Rice’s external impact on the war — one editorial urged students to buy war bonds--and the war’s impact on the Institute, with another arguing that students should cast aside their nostalgia and try to better Rice during the war.
Throughout it all, the Thresher continued writing about the usual Rice news while covering national stories. The stories primarily focused on Rice’s role within the war rather than the war at large. In the paper’s “Men in Service” section, the Thresher shared information about Rice students and alumni serving in the war.
The Thresher’s war coverage continued through the last days of the war, when the paper attempted to showcase Rice’s involvement in its conclusion. After the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Thresher featured Dr. H. A. Wilson, a Rice physicist involved in the making of the bomb, in an article on its science. The same issue contained an editorial not condemning the bombing, but warning of the future implications of the technology and joining Dr. Wilson’s call that the atom “may become a weapon for peace.”
The very next issue, the Thresher reported on Kermit Beahan, the former Rice student-athlete who was the bombardier tasked with dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The article, however, was overshadowed by the dominant article celebrating the Japanese surrender and the end of the war with a giant banner atop the front page reading, “This Is It!”
The Thresher now longed for the Institute to return to the pre-war period students had reminisced about for years. Both the Thresher and the rest of the Institute yearned for a more normal way of life, insofar as it was possible in the post-war period.
“Perhaps we may now resume our previous activities and rediscover the collegiate attitude,” the Thresher’s August 16, 1945, editorial said. “Let us keep tolerance, concentration and patience — but look forward with hopeful eyes.”
TO THE MOON
“Why, some say, the moon?” Kennedy asked. “Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
A week later, however, the Thresher neglected to include Kennedy’s most famous phrases in their coverage of his appearance at Rice — nor did any students or faculty choose to write opinion pieces regarding the president’s speech. Even the successful landing on the moon seven years later would later go unrecognized by the paper since it occurred during the summer.
The paper did mark Kennedy’s visit with a page of photos and a front-page article, entitled “‘Visiting Professor’ Kennedy Pushes Space-Age Spending.”
As the article explained, Rice President K.S. Pitzer had introduced Kennedy as an Orientation Week visiting professor. The piece’s author, Eugene Keilin, wrote that Kennedy seemed to be using the trip to support NASA’s expanding budget, which would rise to its historic high in the following four years.
“That budget now stands at $5,400,000,000 a year — a staggering sum, though somewhat less than what we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year,” the article said.
The stadium in the article’s accompanying pictures is easily recognizable to any Rice student, as is the piece’s opening description of the scene.
“[Kennedy spoke] to half-full stands in the heavy heat of a late Texas summer,” Keilin’s article began.
According to the article, about 40,000 people were present in the stadium, a crowd described as small but enthusiastic. The president himself joked about the heat in a lesser- known part of the speech.
“[Atmospheric re-entry causes] heat about half the temperature of the sun — almost as hot as it is here today,” Kennedy said to audience laughter. “I’m the one who’s doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute.”
The article said Kennedy also drew laughs from the Rice-Texas football quip, a joke that the president handwrote into the speech himself, according to the Kennedy Presidential Library. The audience may not have laughed had they known how prescient Kennedy was: While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would set foot on the moon in 1969, after the mid-1960s Rice football fans would have to wait until 1993 to see another victory over Texas.
COED COLLEGES
THE LEEBRON ERA
David Leebron first appeared on the pages of the Thresher on Jan. 16, 2004, when the paper reported on his selection as the new president of Rice University. The coverage of Leebron, who was then dean of Columbia Law School, included details of the search process, a description of his wife and two children and interviews with numerous faculty and students expressing their approval of his choice.
The issue included an “unconventional” interview with Leebron, with questions such as, “If you were forced to pick another career, what would you pick?” (Answer: “A popular musician of some kind or another.”) The Backpage, which would feature Leebron numerous times in the years to come, also welcomed “Bron-Bron” to the university.
In that first issue, the Student Association co-president encouraged student leaders to work with Leebron to ensure that his initiatives prioritized student interests. In an editorial, the Thresher called on Leebron to focus on the undergraduate experience, to keep Rice small and inexpensive and to improve student spaces and living conditions.
“Leebron should make a habit of doing nothing important at this university without consulting the students beforehand,” the editorial concluded.
Today, 12 years later, much has changed, and it is clear that Rice’s seventh president has left a permanent mark on the campus. His reign has not gone without controversy, however, though the pages of the Thresher did not always reflect the debate surrounding major initiatives.
Leebron’s impact could largely be summarized in one word: expansion. Leebron has ushered in massive construction projects that have not only changed the face of the university, but also extended its physical scope beyond the hedges. During Leebron’s tenure, tuition has doubled, which he has defended as a way of shifting costs away from low-income students, but which has resulted in periodic expressions of discontent in the Thresher.
Leebron has also expanded the undergraduate student body, which now totals more than 3,800, by 36 percent. However, somewhat surprisingly, these expansions did not gain much coverage from the Thresher: while the planning of McMurtry and Duncan Colleges and Leebron’s announcement of his ‘Vision for the Second Century,’ which included the goal of expanding the student body, were reported on in the Thresher, neither the editorial board of the time nor many students expressed opinions on the plans.
Duncan and McMurtry are only two of many construction projects completed during Leebron’s time at Rice, which total over $800 million. The other projects received little coverage, as well; the Thresher first mentioned the name of the Biosciences Research Collaborative after it had already been completed, and the construction of the new recreational center also saw few articles covering it.
On the other hand, the Thresher more closely followed Leebron’s effort to merge Baylor College of Medicine into the university as Rice’s medical school. The paper first reported on the proposed merger in Oct. 2008, after the Houston Chronicle broke news of the discussions. The paper’s editorial staff encouraged Leebron to pursue the idea, arguing that it would help the university without much impact on the everyday life of most undergraduates.
“BCM’s reputation would instantly enhance Rice’s prestige on both a national and international scale,” the staff wrote in an editorial.
By the fall, with talks between the Rice administration and Baylor leaders progressing, the Thresher received op-eds almost every week on the merger. The pieces, which represented both pro- and anti-merger viewpoints, were largely written by Rice professors.
In October, the Thresher ran a front page article about the on-campus debate that included a poll of the faculty on the merger in which a slight majority opposed the move. The Thresher also included another editorial in favor of the merger while asking Leebron to take faculty concerns into account.
In January of the following year, the paper marked the failure of the talks with a front-page article.
“[The merger] was slated to be the biggest development Rice has seen since the advent of the college system,” a third staff editorial stated. “Instead, [it] was the biggest anticlimax our university has seen in recent memory.”
However, the paper gave credit to Leebron for the effort to make the change.
“We applaud the university for thinking big in such an instance, and though a wrong turn resulted, it should take solace in the fact that it committed its due diligence in these efforts,” the editorial stated.
Leebron’s controversial decision to sell Rice’s KTRU radio station for $9.5 million to the University of Houston also spurred a heated debate in the pages of the Thresher. The deal, which was largely kept under wraps until it was completed and announced in 2011, prompted protestation from students and alumni, who condemned the failure to seek student input. In the issue in which the sale was announced, the KTRU station manager wrote an op-ed opposing the plan, while Rice’s vice president for public affairs wrote an op-ed supporting it.
“This transaction will leave a massive imprint in the pages of the Rice University history book,” the staff editorial read. “Coffeehouse workers, Thresher employees, athletes and any other club members have been reminded that the administration can and will act unilaterally to make an existential decision on students’ behalf without consultation or even forewarning. Which does the university value more: running a business or providing for students’ interests?”
Leebron sat down with Thresher editors the following week to defend his decision. Leebron said confidentiality was essential to making the deal, that KTRU was underutilized and had a plummeting value and that the funds were necessary to support projects like the completion of East Servery and the construction of the Oshman Design and Engineering Kitchen. Debate continued in the Thresher’s opinion sections over the next several weeks, and the Thresher published a two-page-long list of signatories to a petition to keep the station.
Despite the protests and the adoption of a resolution by the Student Association opposing the sale, the university finalized the sale. The Thresher followed up its initial coverage of the deal with reporting on KTRU’s efforts to respond, which included an open records request that unveiled Rice-UH emails planning an inspection of KTRU’s facilities under false pretenses and attempting to contain an early investigation of the possible deal by a Houston Chronicle reporter.
“While the administration can take away [KTRU’s] tower, they have shown that no one can quell their desire to be heard,” the Thresher staff wrote in an editorial the same issue.
KTRU is back on air as of this year, and the administration now says there are currently no plans for a 12th residential college. In addition to continuing long-term construction and renovation projects, like the new Robert A. Klein School of Social Sciences building and the Moody Center for the Arts, Leebron has also set goals for increasing the diversity of the international student body and increasing investment in overburdened departments.
As Leebron continues to work to balance student interests with the expansion of Rice’s national and international role, his name will certainly be printed in the Thresher many times to come.
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