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In practically any listing of the nation’s outstanding academic institutions, Rice University ranks generally in the top twenty, one of only two or three southern universities to do so. Moreover, it is both the newest and the smallest university in the nation to merit such ranking. And it is located in a state that for many Americans is stereotyped as the antithesis of thoughtful scholarship and where the biggest is always equated with the best. Yet those in the know about higher education are fully aware that Rice University is an academic gem. How did this apparent paradox come to be—a small, carefully planned, intensely academic institution deep in the heart of Texas? Perhaps more than with the case of any other university in the United States, Rice University is the outgrowth of the vision, direction, and leadership of one man, Edgar Odell Lovett. In some ways the history of the university whose development he oversaw seems to fit Texas stereotypes: the story begins with great wealth, a murder, then a sensational trial. But in Lovett’s hands the university—only vaguely conceived by its benefactor, William Marsh Rice—acquired a character, an ethos, that has guided it from its opening in 1912 to the present. Lovett had two earned doctorates to go along with teaching experience at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University when he was chosen the founding president of the Rice Institute—still only a proposition on paper—and he immediately set forth on a round-the-globe trip to learn about best educational practices at the world’s greatest universities. These were significant years in the evolution of the modern university, and Lovett was fully aware that in the past half century three important developments had occurred in American higher education. In the years just before the Civil War, natural science and engineering had begun to find a place in university curricula; in the next decade or two, university PREFACE leaders tentatively at first then more confidently articulated a utilitarian purpose to higher education; and by the last two decades of the nineteenth century the most innovative universities—borrowing from recent European institutions—had begun to promote active research agendas, pioneering the role of universities in the expansion of knowledge . Lovett’s conception of the university—which included these three significant developments—matured and expanded in the course of this trip, and he returned to Houston filled with ideals, ambition, and plans. The rest, as the cliché puts it, is history. And it is the history of that academic adventure, one so different from the story of all other southern academic institutions, that is the topic of this joint biography of Edgar Odell Lovett and the university he created. xiv Preface ...

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