Rice University

William Marsh Rice came to Texas in 1838, became one of the state’s wealthiest men through business and envisioned a polytechnic school as his philanthropic legacy. On May 19, 1891, the State of Texas chartered the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art. Rice stipulated that the school open only after his death.⁠[1]

The charter barred religious affiliation and tuition and limited the institute to educating the white inhabitants of the City of Houston and the State of Texas.⁠[2]

On September 23, 1900, Rice was murdered by his valet, Charlie Jones, in a plot that Rice Magazine attributes to his lawyer, Albert Patrick. The investigations and legal disputes that followed threatened the planned school, and development began only after his estate was settled.⁠[2][1]

The trustees had a large endowment but little experience in education, and they hired Edgar Odell Lovett of Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry as the first president. Lovett spent months consulting experts around the world and broadened the vision into a university combining teaching and research. In 1909 the Boston firm Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson designed the campus, blending classical architecture with Mediterranean influences.⁠[1]

Classes began on September 23, 1912, with 59 students and four buildings. Rice Magazine gives October 12, 1912, as the date the Rice Institute opened.⁠[1][2]

In 1914 the institute became a charter athletic member of the Southwest Conference and soon gained academic accreditation; the first class graduated in 1916. An Army ROTC unit was established on campus in 1917, and enrollment passed 1,000 in the 1920s.⁠[1][2]

The two world wars and the Great Depression slowed growth. In 1945 the trustees broadened the curriculum and launched a major building program.⁠[1]

In 1960 the institution was renamed Rice University.⁠[1]

On September 12, 1962, after touring NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry sites in Houston, President John F. KennedyJohn F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was an American politician who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 to 1963. The youngest person elected president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office, he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.Open the full entry spoke at Rice Stadium and urged the nation to reach the Moon by the end of the decade. He opened with “We meet at a college noted for knowledge,” and the speech included the line “We choose to go to the moon”; he predicted that Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center would become a center of scientific and engineering activity. The year was also the 50th anniversary of the university’s opening.⁠[3][1][4]

The speech was written by Ted Sorensen with input from NASA, the Department of State and the Bureau of the Budget; the famous line about going to the Moon in this decade originated in NASA’s draft and survived Sorensen’s revisions largely intact.⁠[4]

Rice remained segregated for its first 50 years. In 1948 Rice Thresher editor Brady Tyson expressed support for integration, and President William V. Houston called the discussion “entirely academic.”⁠[2]

In 1963, under President Kenneth Pitzer, the Board of Governors began legal proceedings to change the charter to allow tuition and integration, and some alumni intervened to try to prevent it. In 1964 doctoral student Raymond Johnson enrolled as the first African American student; two more African American students joined in 1965 and two in 1966.⁠[2]

Selected by the Board of Trustees to succeed David Leebron, who had served for 18 years, Reginald DesRoches took office as Rice’s eighth president on July 1, 2022, and was formally inaugurated on the Academic Quadrangle on October 22, 2022. He is the university’s first Black president, its first immigrant president and the first engineer to lead it.⁠[5][6][7]

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Queens, New York, DesRoches earned master’s and doctoral degrees in structural engineering at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry. He chaired the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, joined Rice in 2017 as the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and later served as provost.⁠[5][7]

Momentous, Rice’s 10-year strategic plan, launched in fall 2024 with 33 goals across two focus areas, premier teaching and premier research. In fall 2025 the university launched a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence, and sponsored research awards reached a record $257.9 million in fiscal year 2026, up 37.5% from the previous year.⁠[8]

As of November 2026 DesRoches was president of the university. Preliminary figures for fall 2026 put total enrollment, including graduate students, at almost 9,200, with about 5,000 undergraduates; the first-year class numbered 1,352, from more than 38,000 first-year applications, 5% more than the previous year.⁠[9]

Rice University: Official website: https://www.rice.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/riceuniversity (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/edu/school?id=19472 (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/riceuniversity (opens in a new window).⁠[8]