The student body consists of over 3,000 undergraduate, 897 post-graduate, and 1,247 doctoral students, and awarded 1,448 degrees in 2007. The university employs 611 full-time faculty and 396 part-time or adjunct faculty members in 2007. Rice has a very high level of research activity and had $77.2 million in sponsored research funding in 2007. Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of nanotechnology, artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, and space science. Rice was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1985. The university is organized into eight schools offering 40 undergraduate degree programs, 51 masters programs, and 29 doctoral programs.
Rice opened in 1912 as a coeducational institution with free tuition. The university was founded several years after the murder of its namesake, the prominent Houston businessman William Marsh Rice, who left a $4.6 million ($110 million in current dollars) funding endowment in his will. It is listed as one of thirty Hidden Ivies and as one of Newsweek's "New Ivies"
History
William Marsh Rice moved from his native Massachusetts to Houston in 1839 and established a store in the new city. Soon he was trading cotton, investing in land and railroads, and on his way to making a fortune. After the Civil War, he retired to the East Coast, but he still had investments in Houston and often returned to the city. During an 1891 visit, he called together a group of friends and his lawyer, Capt. James A. Baker, and chartered the William Marsh Rice Institute for the advancement of literature, science and art. This charter was a vague document that listed a variety of functions but did not specifically call for the establishment of a university. It did say that nothing was to be done before his death.
Rice died on Sept. 23, 1900, but not of natural causes. Albert T. Patrick, an unscrupulous lawyer, was in cahoots with Rice’s valet, Charles Jones. They had concocted a plot to steal his fortune by means of a forged will. Impatient for Rice to die, the crooked lawyer and greedy valet suffocated him. They might have gotten away with their scheme; however, the next day, they tried to cash a check written out to the lawyer by the valet. In their rush, the valet misspelled the lawyer’s name. An alert bank clerk noticed the discrepancy, and the bank president called Rice’s apartment for verification. With Capt. Baker pressing the investigation, the plot soon unraveled. The valet confessed, the lawyer was sent to Sing Sing, and Rice’s fortune was saved. A counterclaim to much of the estate, based on Rice’s second wife’s will, was settled in 1904, and the funds became available to fulfill the intentions of the 1891 charter.
But exactly what kind of institution did the imprecise charter mandate? To guide them, the trustees chose an imaginative first president, a young mathematician and astronomer at Princeton University named Edgar Odell Lovett. Lovett had earned doctorates from the University of Virginia and the University of Leipzig, and he had taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago and Princeton, the most innovative American universities of the time. The trustees sent him on a worldwide tour of the “competition,” where he interviewed faculty, inspected facilities and developed an inspired vision of what might be accomplished on the plains of Texas with a blank-check charter, a generous endowment and high ambitions. The goal was a university “of the highest grade” that kept “the standards up and numbers down.” Lovett shaped the university that Rice would become.
The Rice Institute opened on Sept. 23, 1912, the anniversary of Rice’s murder, with 77 students and a dozen faculty. An international academic festival celebrated the opening three weeks later - a spectacular event that brought Rice to the attention of the entire scholarly world. Four years later, at the initial commencement, 35 bachelor’s degrees and one master’s degree were awarded, with the first doctorate conferred in 1918.
Campus
Rice's campus is a heavily-wooded 285-acre (1.15 km2) tract of land located close to the city of West University Place, in the museum district of Houston.
Five streets demarcate the campus: Greenbriar Street, Rice Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Main Street, and University Boulevard. For most of its history, all of Rice's buildings have been contained within this "outer loop". In recent years, new facilities have been built close to campus, but the bulk of administrative, academic, and residential buildings are still located within the original pentagonal plot of land. The new Collaborative Research Center, all graduate student housing, and the Wiess President's House are located off-campus.
Fondren Library
Fondren Library was founded in 1913 with a beginning collection of fewer than 200 volumes. Today Rice's modern research library has almost 2.7 million volumes, more than 3 million microforms and 17,000 current serials and periodicals. The scope of Fondren Library's collection is broad, with excellent coverage in art, architecture, history, literature, music, philosophy, languages, economics, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. The library is also a selective depository for U.S. and Texas government publications and for U.S. patents and trademarks. A recent renovation added study rooms, a sixth-floor reading room, and improved signage and service points.
Reputation
Rice's undergraduate program was ranked 17th among "National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) in its 2009 edition and 41st nationally by Forbes Magazine in 2008. USNWR also ranked the Jones Graduate School of Management 40th and the Brown School of Engineering 35th. The Princeton Review ranked Rice 2nd for "Best Quality of Life", 2nd for "Lots of Race/Class Interaction", 15th for "Happiest Students", and 4th for "Best Value" in its 2009 edition. Rice was ranked 26th among national universities by The Washington Monthly in 2006, 78th internationally by The Times Higher Education Supplement in 2008, 97th internationally (54th nationally) by the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2008, 41st among research universities by the Center for Measuring University Performance in 2007.
Research
Rice is noted for its pioneer applied science programs in the fields of nanotechnology, artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, and space science.
- Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology (SINST) - the nation's first nanotechnology center
- Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) - promotes the discovery and development of nanomaterials that enable new medical and environmental technologies
- Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) - provides a resource for education and research breakthroughs and advances in the broad, multidisciplinary field of nanophotonics
- Rice Quantum Institute - organization dedicated to research and higher education in areas relating to quantum phenomena
- Rice Space Institute - fosters programs in all areas of space research
Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering (IBB) - facilitates the translation of interdisciplinary research and education in biosciences and bioengineering - Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology - dedicated to the advancement of applied interdisciplinary research in the areas of computation and information technology
- Baker Institute for Public Policy - one of the leading nonpartisan public policy think tanks in the country
- Connexions - an open-content library of course materials developed by Rice University
- Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship - supports entrepreneurs and early-stage technology ventures in Houston and Texas through education, collaboration, and research
- Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE)
Rice Gallery
Rice's academics are organized into six schools which offer courses of study at the graduate and undergraduate level, with two more being primarily focused on graduate education, while offering select opportunities for undergraduate students. Rice offers 360 degrees in over 60 departments. There are 40 undergraduate degree programs, 51 masters programs, and 29 doctoral programs. Undergraduate tuition for the 2008-2009 school year was $29,960
Undergraduate and Graduate Schools
The Rice University School of Architecture
The George R. Brown School of Engineering
The Rice University School of Humanities
The Shepherd School of Music
The Wiess School of Natural Sciences
The Rice University School of Social Sciences
Graduate Schools
The Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management
The Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies
Rice University was ranked 78th in the 2008 THES-QS World University Ranking
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