University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute

by John B. Boles

Overview

Rice University, one of America's preeminent institutions of higher education, grew out of the vision, direction, and leadership of one man: Edgar Odell Lovett (1871--1957). University Builder is the fascinating story of this extraordinary educator and the unique school he created. Widely acknowledged, almost from its founding in 1912, as one of America's best universities, Rice is distinguished as both the smallest and the youngest institution in the top tier of American universities. In telling the tale of Lovett and his innovative, enduring vision for Rice, John Boles provides both a compelling biographical narrative and a refreshing new view of American higher education in the first half of the twentieth century.
Lovett was not a Texan; he was not even a southerner. Rather, with two Ph.D.'s in hand, he was a rising star at Princeton University when the trustees of the newly founded Rice Institute--chartered in 1891 by wealthy Houston merchant William Marsh Rice--called him in 1907 to be the school's first president. Working with a significant endowment, a vague charter, a supportive board, and a visionary's gift for planning, Lovett set out on a fact-finding tour of educational institutions around the globe. He transformed the idea of the Institute into a complete university, one that emphasized research as much as teaching and aspired to world-class status. He sought the best architect available to design the campus, lured distinguished faculty from leading universities across the globe to Texas, and constructed a far-reaching vision of a small, carefully planned, elite university that incorporated the most advanced educational practices and shaped Rice's development for the next century.
Lovett served as president of Rice for nearly forty years, proving himself to be an exemplary and charismatic leader who inspired two generations of students. He was the creator of Rice University in practically every way. Indeed, perhaps no other American university has been so shaped by its founder's vision. Boles's exceptional account of Lovett's remarkable academic achievement is a vital contribution to the legacy of Rice University and an important addition to the historiography of education in the early twentieth-century South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807147542
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	07/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

John B. Boles is William P. Hobby Professor of History at Rice University and managing editor of the Journal of Southern History. He is the author of The South through Time: A History of an American Region; Black Southerners, 1619--1869; and numerous other books. In 2004, he was honored with the Rice University Distinguished Alumni Award, and he has received multiple teaching awards.

Table of Contents

Foreword George Rupp xi

Preface xiii

Chapter 1 Dual Beginnings 1

Chapter 2 Farewell to Princeton 35

Chapter 3 The Grand Tour 63

Chapter 4 The Launching of the New University 89

Chapter 5 Academic Administration in Peacetime and War 120

Chapter 6 Steadying the Course in the Roaring Twenties 156

Chapter 7 Confronting the Great Depression 194

Chapter 8 War, Stress, Change, and Promise 227

Chapter 9 Full Circle: Retirement, Transition, Renewed Momentum 257

Acknowledgments 281

Note on Sources 285

Bibliography 291

Index 299

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Thanks to John Boles's superb biography, Lovett, founding president of the Rice Institute, can now take his rightful place in the procession of great 'university builders' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." -- John R. Thelin, History of Education Quarterly