00:00:15.090 - 00:00:37.860

That was very effective product placement there. You're taking a... I didn't negotiate a very a very good deal, but, indeed. It's good to see you. It was a little chilly this morning and it didn't seem that cold to

00:00:37.860 - 00:00:55.860

me outside. You look like you're preparing for a North Pole expedition or something there. I am. There is a sign outside my office door that says North Pole. And so whenever I walk in here, I need to be really prepared.

00:00:56.430 - 00:01:11.460

And this actually has, it works. When I was younger, I didn't think this worked. I thought you had to have a coat on. But actually a scarf can be quite warming.

00:01:13.840 - 00:01:22.020

That's good to have. We're back. Yes! It's, it's good to see you again, and I hope you had a good spring break. I did. I did.

00:01:22.070 - 00:01:39.150

Only thing better than spring break would be two spring breaks back to back. Yes, we could, we could use more of that for sure, but summer is coming, and then, then you won't need that scarf anymore, unless maybe indoors, I will say. In this office I will need this scarf.

00:01:39.260 - 00:01:56.580

That is one thing about Houston is, it's humid and hot outside, but we, we know how to blast the air conditioning inside. Wanna welcome all of our audience who's joining us today. It's Friday. And that means it's, it's doc talk day again.

00:01:56.600 - 00:02:16.810

We were off last week, hope that you were off as well, relaxing a little bit. But we are excited to be back with you today and continue our series. We do this, I've lost count of how many times we've, we've convened our doc talks, Dr . Byrd, but it's getting up there, and it's always a pleasure to be with you on, on

00:02:16.820 - 00:02:38.900

Fridays to talk about the work of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice here at Rice, and especially to share with our audience some of the documents from the archives that we're examining as part of our charge to investigate the history of Rice with respect to slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.

00:02:39.260 - 00:03:01.370

And just to give you some insight into how historians think about those documents and work through them, what kinds of questions they raise, and maybe what kinds of questions they could help us to answer, today is a little bit of a departure for me, Dr. Byrd, because instead of bringing a single document to the doc talk, I have brought with

00:03:01.370 - 00:03:19.340

me a box, an entire box. So I guess for today and today only we are box talk. I have a feeling about what, what this is, is this the... Well, yeah, can you read, I don't know if you can see, kind of have to turn the box to...

00:03:19.880 - 00:03:45.920

Yes, this is the world famous Campanile that was not bound in a traditional way. That's right. The Rice Campanile, of course, is the university yearbook, and it's an award-winning yearbook, has got a lot of creative issues over the years, but none, I think, more creative than the 1970 edition of the Campanile, which you can see on the

00:03:45.920 - 00:04:11.440

outside of this square box, the title, as I turn it, "Campanile." And then on the back, 1970. So that year, the students who were in charge of editing the yearbook decided to break the mold a little bit, and to think inside the box, I guess, but outside the bound volume that the Campanile is usually represented with.

00:04:11.450 - 00:04:31.840

And inside this box, I'm gonna open it up here, you can actually find a series of publications, several different pamphlets. And I've seen pictures, by the way, in the Thresher, of students picking up their yearbooks that year, and this is literally what students who ordered the yearbook would

00:04:31.840 - 00:04:49.600

have gotten. There were tables with stacks of these boxes. And now, of course, they're in high demand, so if you have one, if you're in the audience and you've got one, hold on to it. I'm feeling very fortunate to have one today on loan from the Woodson Research Center over

00:04:49.600 - 00:05:04.960

in Fondren Library. But when you open up the box, you can, can reach in and find a series of different publications. So let me just do a little show and tell here. I feel kind of like Mr. Rogers today, going through the, the box, but we've got some

00:05:04.960 - 00:05:28.670

photographs, so there's one pamphlet that just has a series of photographs. Of course, this would have been at the time, many of them are documenting protests at Rice and other universities across the country of the Vietnam War. There's also this very interesting sort of graphic comic cover to a publication that has

00:05:29.690 - 00:05:45.770

pictures of various student groups on campus that year. And this is probably my favorite part. There's, there's actually, inside the box, a vinyl record that has on it recordings of sort of the soundtrack of the year.

00:05:45.770 - 00:06:08.150

And you can go to the website for the Woodson Research Center and you can find a link to this edition of the Campanile, and there's actually an audio file that you can click on and listen to some of the music and some of the newsreels and quotations. I haven't tried to drop this on, on a turntable, but that would, that would be

00:06:08.150 - 00:06:24.590

interesting in and of itself. And then there's also, let's see if I can keep pulling out. I'm not gonna show you everything, but there's also a little pamphlet that shows the athletics teams for, for the year.

00:06:24.830 - 00:06:52.070

And there's also this book that is full of photo strips of students who were invited to come by the Grand Hall of the RMC starting on Monday, October 20th, 1969. And there was a, I'm just reading here, I'm quoting directly from the cover, there is a

00:06:52.070 - 00:07:17.150

"groovy photo booth" there in the Grand Hall, and students were invited to make free use of this photo booth, and they were encouraged to not be afraid to experiment. They could, they could draw the curtain and just be themselves, and then they would take this photo strip and drop it in a box or under the door of the Campanile editorial

00:07:17.150 - 00:07:41.210

office, and the editors would select them and put them in this book. Now, remember, this is 1970, of course, the '60s, it's the tail end of the '60s, you can imagine some of the students were, in fact, quite creative behind that curtain of the photo booth, and so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna turn every page, but I wanna come back

00:07:41.210 - 00:07:58.460

to this a little bit later. They were also creative in this small blue book. This is a book that replicated something that was a feature of many issues of the Campanile over time, which was at the back of most volumes, there would be spaces for

00:07:58.460 - 00:08:11.280

seniors to put a small square representing their time at Rice. Was that something you were able to do, Dr. Byrd, or is that more, earlier than your time? I, I think so.

00:08:11.290 - 00:08:35.860

I have a memory of my mother sending some stuff in as well and a picture of me as a kid. That's a faint memory. Yeah, well, I'm going to have to go back to the sources now, but in this particular year, students had a little bit more room to work with rather than just the small little square

00:08:35.860 - 00:08:50.740

at the end of the yearbook. They were given a whole page. Every senior had a whole page in, in this small blue book, that was included in the box, where, again, within that box, they could be as creative as they wanted to be.

00:08:50.740 - 00:09:09.220

And so some students, you can see just submitted a blank page and made a statement. Some had a quotation, a favorite quotation. Some of those who had photography skills would, would put photos or maybe make a collage of different things.

00:09:10.270 - 00:09:31.270

It looks like here we have a, someone submitted a speeding ticket that they had received and published it in the, in the book. So there's, there's a lot of creative examples here of, of seniors. Now, one, I think, frustrating thing for a researcher is that if you were to want to get

00:09:31.270 - 00:09:53.140

a picture, let's say, of a senior who graduated this year in 1970, or just a picture of a student who was at the university in that year, you won't find that in this box. That's kind of an archetypical feature of yearbooks, is just photos of, of all of the students, and instead what we have are these, these photo booth booth

00:09:53.140 - 00:10:14.980

strips and the senior pages for this year that are not organized in alphabetical order. But maybe that's a good thing, because it encourages any historian who's working with the book not to just go directly to the page they're interested in, but you really have to spend some time with the box as a whole and turn a lot of pages to find what you're

00:10:14.980 - 00:10:39.410

looking for. And what I was looking for in the Woodson Research Center when I pulled this Campanile off the shelf was some more information about the first two black undergraduates to receive a degree from Rice University in 1970. And we've met one of those two students before on one of our earliest doc talks,

00:10:39.560 - 00:11:00.170

because you might remember, Dr. Byrd, that we had a student researcher on the webinar talking to us about the college application that Linda Faye Williams submitted to Rice University in 1965. And of course, Linda Faye Williams then entered the university in 1966 and received

00:11:00.170 - 00:11:21.080

her degree in 1970. So she was a graduating senior this year, and so was Ted Henderson, who was the first black male undergraduate to receive a degree from the university in 1970. And so I was kind of curious to see if, in this box that's clearly a little bit

00:11:21.080 - 00:11:39.440

different from other yearbooks, if they were, their experience was represented at all in, in, in the yearbook. And I found some, some evidence that they were. For example, I found here the senior page that was submitted by Ted Henderson.

00:11:39.950 - 00:12:03.360

His full name, Theodore Marshall Henderson, at the bottom of the page. And I'm just gonna read you a little bit, he, he chose to put some text on his page. He said, "Rice has been an almost undescribable experience. It has brought suffering, boredom, and sadness, but it has also brought happiness,

00:12:03.630 - 00:12:24.260

interest, and peace." And then he talked a little bit about some of his varied experiences. He talked about, at, I think he was at Will Rice College, and there was a staff member at the college who frequently was waking up students who were oversleeping their alarm and making sure they got to class.

00:12:25.820 - 00:12:38.570

And he also talked about some of the friendships that he had, had formed, that he treasured and hoped to maintain. He had participated in the Will Rice College Chorus, which he noted won first place three out of four times, so he was proud of that accomplishment.

00:12:40.280 - 00:12:56.690

And in the end, he says, "Rice has been all of the aforementioned, but, in the final analysis, I have enjoyed it. I have met some people that will remain close, and I have developed lifetime interests. Thanks, Rice." That's Ted Henderson's senior page.

00:12:57.530 - 00:13:14.800

Now, that's kind of close to the front of the book. When I kept turning through this book, it took me a while, but you can see from my little Post-it note sticky bookmark here, I found the senior page for Linda Faye Williams. Okay.

00:13:14.800 - 00:13:43.370

And what I found there was a little bit more, raised more questions for me than, than Mr. Henderson's. I'm gonna show you the page here, so you can open up the book, and on one side, on the left side of this opening, you can see there's some text. And this is actually a page submitted not by one of the graduating seniors, but by a

00:13:43.370 - 00:14:00.200

faculty member at Rice, who we've also talked about on on the doc talks before, Chandler Davidson, the professor of sociology. I forgot to mention that, that the, some faculty, I don't know whether certain faculty were approached, or if all faculty had the opportunity, to submit a page to this book as

00:14:00.200 - 00:14:24.380

well, but there are, scattered in this book, some reflections from faculty from this year. Maybe one of the faculty members from that time, I see possibly even in the audience today, might remember how that worked, but I don't know for sure. That's a question I have. But there is this reflection from Chandler Davidson, who talked

00:14:24.380 - 00:14:43.580

about being moved that year by the death of Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher who had had been very influential on Chandler Davidson. That's what his reflection is about. And then on the, the other side of this opening, facing Davidson's reflection, is

00:14:43.970 - 00:15:03.580

Linda Faye Williams's page, and it's not blank, but if you can see, it's almost blank, except for an image, a circular image, directly in the middle of this blank, white field. I'm gonna kind of hold it up to my camera and see if you can make that out.

00:15:03.590 - 00:15:09.960

Can you see that at all? It's kinda hard to see, and actually, when I ... I can... Yeah, go ahead.

00:15:10.010 - 00:15:27.060

Oh, I was gonna say, I can make it out, but I think I'm kind of cheating, because I also believe I may have seen a digital image in the past. Yes. Yes, they're, they're, off course, all of these books that I'm showing you physically today have been scanned, and they're available, and actually, that's where

00:15:27.060 - 00:15:42.480

I first encountered this page, was not with the physical copy, but was with the scanned image of the page. But the resolution of the, the image was not great, and I couldn't really make out what this was from, from looking at the page.

00:15:43.050 - 00:15:57.810

It was difficult to read the text on it. But when I went and looked at the physical copy, it was a lot easier to read what was on the, this little object. And let me share my screen here and show you what I found.

00:15:57.810 - 00:16:29.140

I was able to do a little searching, because it was possible to make out on this circular image the words "rapid transit lines," and you can see that my Google searching turned up this page from a coin collecting site called Numista, and it identified this coin as, or this little circle on the page, as a coin that was produced in Houston

00:16:30.420 - 00:16:49.620

by Rapid Transit Houston Lines, Incorporated . And on the reverse, so, on one side of this, what we have here is, is a coin, or I guess we, we would call it a, like a bus token. It's got a coin here, and it's got two little circles on it so that it won't be

00:16:49.620 - 00:17:09.450

confused for legal tender. But on one side of, of this coin, it says, "Rapid Transit Lines, Inc.," and on the reverse side, it says, "good for adult one zone," or "good for one zone," it's an adult token. So I did a little bit of, of searching for rapid transit lines in the

00:17:09.450 - 00:17:28.350

newspaper, and, and found out a little bit more about what it was. It was part of the public transit, or I guess private public partnership transit, that was existing in Houston at the time. And when I, when I first made those connections, that raises a question for me

00:17:28.350 - 00:17:53.630

of, of why Linda Faye Williams might have selected that for her page. And once I saw this coin, it also just really added some materiality to that page because it's, of course, wouldn't have been as easy in 1970 to simply photocopy or scan or take a picture with your smartphone of a coin.

00:17:53.630 - 00:18:18.070

To get, to get this effect of putting that coin on this white blank page would have required going into a darkroom, I'm assuming. And either Williams herself or a photographer who might have been helping her would have had to develop this photo of a physical bus token.

00:18:18.070 - 00:18:42.350

So it would've, it would've taken some additional steps to turn this coin in as, as her senior page, that we can say might not have been necessary in the case of Ted Henderson's text, where you could just write out what you wanted to say on the page. And so maybe it seems obvious to our, to our audience what's going on there on that page,

00:18:42.350 - 00:19:02.840

but I'll just confess that it wasn't immediately obvious to me. I was sort of starting to wonder if perhaps Williams had lived off campus and regularly rode the rapid transit lines in Houston to get to class, or to get to campus, that was kind of where my brain went first.

00:19:03.380 - 00:19:26.120

But after doing a little bit more research, I found another document that sheds some light on this, this page in the Campanile, and it's from a publication called the Sallyport, which was the magazine of Rice University for many years. And what I'm showing you on the screen now is a digitized copy of the Fall 1988 issue of

00:19:26.120 - 00:19:46.550

the Sallyport magazine. And you can see the, on the cover of this magazine, there's, there's a woman who's, who's dressed to sort of look like the stereotypical image of a flower child from the 1960s, has an earring with the peace symbol and is holding a flower, has a scarf

00:19:46.580 - 00:20:11.810

tied around her head, and there's the American flag draped in the background. And the headline for this issue is, "1968 to 1971: What a Long, Strange Trip It Was, A Special Issue. So this whole issue of the Sallyport was dedicated to Rice at the tail end of the 1960s, and it talks about some of the protests that happened on campus, some of

00:20:11.820 - 00:20:34.190

the, the Masterson crisis, the, the occupation of some administration buildings, opposition to Nixon, the Vietnam War. And there are, there are several interviews in the magazine with professors who talked about that time, including, you can see here, Chandler Davidson, who is pictured

00:20:34.190 - 00:20:57.530

sitting with a copy of the book, The Power Elite. And there's also a picture a few pages later of Dean Allen Matusow holding a picture of Janis Joplin. And there's a picture of Alan Grob here on the next page, standing behind a chair.

00:20:58.580 - 00:21:24.900

But what I really wanted to, to zero in on is, on page 16, there was an interview, or a profile, I guess I should say, based on an interview, with Linda Faye Williams. And the headline is called Breaking the Barriers. You can see on the right here, we have a picture of Williams as a Rice student.

00:21:25.560 - 00:21:45.300

It's very, very similar to the picture we saw on her application at the beginning of, of our dock talks. But she's also pictured here in 1988, a current photograph, standing, leaning up against a railing, it looks like it's outdoors, and she's smiling.

00:21:45.510 - 00:22:13.020

And in this profile, we learn a little bit more about Williams's experiences as one of the first black undergraduate students at Rice. For example, she talks about her O-Week experience, showing up in, in 1966 at Jones College, and having to deal with the mother of her white roommate being concerned

00:22:13.020 - 00:22:39.630

about her daughter's placement with Linda Faye Williams in a room together in Jones College. And reflecting on that, Williams said, "It was the loneliest I had been in my entire life." She talks some about the pressure she felt as one of the first black students to succeed, particularly since one of the students who had entered Rice the year

00:22:39.630 - 00:22:59.580

before her had left the university and not, not completed her degree. And so, so, I should say, Dr. Williams, because as the profile notes, after Rice, she went on to a distinguished Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a distinguished career in political science, a

00:22:59.580 - 00:23:21.630

professor at Howard University, and later, after this profile, at the University of Maryland. And so Dr. Williams reflected on her feeling that she and Ted Henderson felt this pressure to, to represent black students at the university and beyond by performing well in their

00:23:21.630 - 00:23:49.480

classes. And it's in that context that I found an answer to my question about that picture of the rapid transit lines coin on Williams's senior page. At the bottom of page 17, the author of the profile says, "While today she can look back on her Rice experience and laugh, at the time, Williams was not so forgiving.

00:23:49.990 - 00:24:12.950

The year she graduated, each senior was given a whole page in the senior book on which to place something that symbolized their four years at Rice." Quote, "'I chose a picture of a bus token,' she says. 'That seemed to bother a lot of the progressive faculty, but that was how I

00:24:12.950 - 00:24:35.450

felt.'" So she was selecting a token to symbolize her feeling at the time. Now, the article goes on to give us a little bit more example of that experience. It says, "'To be fair,' Williams says, 'the idea of integration was very new to Texas in 1966.'" Quote, "'When you walked into a restaurant with white students, everybody in

00:24:35.450 - 00:24:51.980

the restaurant would turn around and stare,' she recalls. 'There was just very little integration in Houston at that time. I had friends, and they really were my friends, who couldn't understand why I hated them having a Confederate flag hanging in their room.

00:24:52.370 - 00:25:09.340

They would say, You are a Southerner, too.'" Because Williams was, was, was born and raised in Texas. Later on, the article talks a little bit about how Rice is taking steps to make sure its current students do not suffer from this kind of cultural isolation.

00:25:09.340 - 00:25:27.400

"It's an important goal," the Sallyport says, "of the newly established Office of Minority Affairs to offer black students a forum to share their cultures with each other and with the community as a whole." But you get a picture from this profile of some of what Lnda Faye Williams experienced in those early years.

00:25:27.400 - 00:25:49.030

And I'm curious about your reactions, Dr. Byrd, but I'll just say two things quickly that, that struck me. One was the reference to Confederate flags hanging in dorm rooms, even of, of students that Dr. Williams considered her friends at the time, because that's something that, that

00:25:49.060 - 00:26:12.460

I think you can see evidence of even in this other book from the, the Campanile. And it's also, well, I'll show you that in a minute, but it's, it's, it's something that I was thinking about this week in particular because, in the coverage of the historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U .S.

00:26:12.590 - 00:26:40.180

Supreme Court, there was an article in the New York Times that talked about Judge Jackson's experience as an undergraduate at Harvard University sometime after Linda Faye Williams was a student at Rice, but Jackson recalled that she and her friends had, had organized to protest the appearance of a Confederate flag hanging from a dormitory at

00:26:40.180 - 00:26:56.530

Harvard University more than 30 years ago. So this was, was something that, that black students at Harvard were confronting even in the late 1980s, early, early 1990s. But it's also something that you could see at Rice in 1970.

00:26:56.530 - 00:27:19.770

In fact, on the, remember we talked about the photo booth in the Grand Hall, that any student could go and pull that curtain and take a picture of themselves. There is a picture, you can see it here, of Ted Henderson there, you see him, this is his strip that he turned in, holding up a peace sign here at the bottom of the strip.

00:27:20.250 - 00:27:44.270

But then on either side of that strip, there are students who decided to use their opportunity in the photo booth to drape a Confederate flag around themselves. And that too was published in, in, in the Campanile box from that year. The other thing that, that I noted was the fact that Williams said that the progressive

00:27:44.270 - 00:28:03.820

faculty members at the time weren't very happy about the choice that she had made to publish a token on her senior page, and that raised a lot of questions for me, you know, who the, who those faculty might have been and why they might, why they might have been upset to see that, that token.

00:28:03.830 - 00:28:20.450

So I don't know if you have thoughts about either of those two issues, Dr. Byrd, or others. So thanks, thanks for that, Dr. McDaniel, it was, well, I'll just run straight into three, three quick reactions.

00:28:20.450 - 00:28:47.820

One about early black experience on campus and the idea that, right, they need to be explored in their pluralities, right. But in listening and hearing you describe Dr. Williams, parts of her experience, I think one of the things that struck me as a older

00:28:47.820 - 00:29:15.880

person and former student and all of that is just the, the ways in which this extraordinarily bright young person is in a context where clearly they are struggling with even being able to own their loneliness and their, and their feelings. So, so to see in that one article Dr.

00:29:15.880 - 00:29:43.930

Williams express being as lonely as she had ever been, right, but at the same time, feeling it necessary to couch that discussion of, of racism, to, to lighten that discussion. I wasn't, I wasn't, "I didn't feel myself the target of much intended racism." I find that, I find that language striking.

00:29:44.830 - 00:30:00.670

You're referring to a block quote, I don't think I read it, but there was a block quote in the, in the Sallyport article, where she said, "I wasn't the subject of intended racism, I didn't see much intended racism, but I saw a lot of unawareness," was the word, word she chose.

00:30:02.900 - 00:30:13.910

You see out here on doc talk, Dr. McDaniel, you throw it up, man, we listen to you and we read. You gotta be careful. We're reading the article while you're talking about it.

00:30:14.240 - 00:30:38.770

And I think the, the second, I think I've lost my third, but it, it probably wasn't very good. But the second one has to do with some editorial questions, right, that, what would the odds be that Chandler Davidson's page just ends up next to Dr. Williams's page?

00:30:38.770 - 00:31:03.190

And what would the odds be that Ted Henderson's strip just happens to be flanked by two strips featuring the Confederate flag? So I have some editorial questions about what, what's being said, what the editors are doing and saying there.

00:31:04.030 - 00:31:18.220

That is a great question. And to the Davidson point, I didn't talk about, but maybe you read as I was talking, in the Sallyport article, that Dr. Williams went on to, to highlight her relationship with Dr.

00:31:18.220 - 00:31:42.070

Davidson as a mentor who really helped to guide her into her career in political science. And she talked about some early research she had done in one of Professor Davidson's class that really laid the foundation for the career that she went on to, to have in

00:31:42.070 - 00:31:59.830

academia. And so perhaps that was, that was known, but that is, that is a question, to, to ask why they were, why they were put side by side. And, you know, I also come back to the question of, clearly she had these, this relationship with Dr.

00:31:59.830 - 00:32:25.300

Davidson, and clearly, she's signaling that there were, as she said, "progressive" faculty on campus who were people she could turn to, or allies, but at the same time, they were, they were sort of disturbed by this token, she recalled. And that kind of raises some questions for me, too, I mean, I think maybe it has

00:32:25.300 - 00:32:48.400

something to do with, I mean, I don't know if the sense in which she's using the word "progressive" there, but I do think that, that progress is something that we all want to see in our communities, in our country, in our university for sure. But I think one of the things that I see when I'm reading that, that interview in the

00:32:48.400 - 00:33:08.240

Sallyport, and even to some extent in, in Ted Henderson's senior page, where he described this kind of mixture of experiences at Rice, there was "suffering and sadness," he said, but there was also happiness and peace. There were both things together, you know, that, and he says in the final analysis, I

00:33:08.360 - 00:33:26.210

balanced out where I enjoyed my time. But I think there's that emphasis on the combination of things. And sometimes maybe when we tell the history of, especially when we tell the history of the desegregation of institutions, or the arrival of people who had been excluded from

00:33:26.210 - 00:33:52.710

the university into the university, we want to see the progress, and it is real progress, it's absolutely progress that Linda Faye Williams and Ted Henderson received their degrees in 1970, but when we read her experience, we're seeing that that progress also came with some real challenges and that, and that substantive costs for the

00:33:52.710 - 00:34:13.950

students who were, who were on the leading edge of that, of that progressive change. To me, that's kind of what that, that token on the senior page reminds us of, and what may have been hard for some progressive faculty at the time to wrestle with. And it's still hard today, I think, for us, as we think about our university history to

00:34:13.950 - 00:34:34.460

wrestle with, to see even this moment of, of forward thinking change also come with these difficult experiences. Absolutely agree. And I think we've bounced around, right, this, this theme that is, I think, now

00:34:34.460 - 00:34:56.700

ascendant in civil rights history, of, of tending, making sure that we attend to exactly that, the costs of progress. Well, that's what, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna put my box away, we can go back to doc talk now.

00:34:58.050 - 00:35:21.720

Alright. Well, thanks for that. I am going to get started. We have some really interesting comments in the chat and in the, in the Q&A, that I know we will have, have, have time to, to speak to toward the end of things.

00:35:23.180 - 00:35:35.910

Okay. I am sharing, I believe. Alright, you should see an Instagram page. I'm really excited. Maybe that was a mistake.

00:35:35.910 - 00:36:08.280

I should get off Instagram, wasn't, not gotta spend a lot of time on it. But here is the, the document that I want to talk about today, comes from 1984. It's from a 1984 issue of the Thresher, detailing a report that Catherine Clack, a report and a survey that Catherine Clack, who's then Assistant Director of

00:36:08.280 - 00:36:34.500

Admissions, follows through with in the, in the early 1980s, in 1981. And so I want to talk about admissions. I'm gonna raise some questions about admissions. You, you shouldn't be surprised that Catherine will be featured in some of this,

00:36:34.500 - 00:36:56.820

'cause we're working on a webinar celebrating her 40 years at Rice that will happen on April 14th. And it's, it's fortuitous that we're gonna talk about admissions the day after Rice regular admissions has been announced.

00:36:56.820 - 00:37:18.150

Admissions season is now over, Dr. McDaniel. And one of the ways that you can know this is that if you go to the Rice University Rice Admission Instagram page, you'll see "Congrats Rice 2026," and you'll also get

00:37:18.150 - 00:37:27.900

this, is this called a hashtag, Dr. McDaniel? What do the kids call it? You know, your guess is as good as mine.

00:37:28.320 - 00:37:50.440

Alright, well, we get these hashtags, and you can, we get stuff like this? I did it! I got in! I hope you can get the sound. I got in, bro!

00:37:52.860 - 00:38:08.350

Let's go! Mom, I got in! I got in! Oh my God.

00:38:13.210 - 00:38:41.980

So once you've seen four of these, you kind of get what the other ones are going to be. But what's phenomenal, or less phenomenal for people who have been at Rice for a while, is just, even if you're just kind of following the Instagram algorithm on hashtag, right, to see who's reacting to a positive answer from Rice University, just how

00:38:41.980 - 00:39:09.790

extraordinarily diverse our class is, right. And so I want to go from that present, right, to that 1981 article and survey on special admissions. And I wanna ask some questions about what is special admissions in 1981, and what is its

00:39:09.790 - 00:39:41.140

relationship to admissions today? In, in doc talk fashion, for a bit, though, I wanna, I wanna pause momentarily just to take us through quickly some debates around admissions that are in and around the desegregation of American society in the, in the early 1980s.

00:39:41.140 - 00:40:07.210

And I just wanna start quickly with a column called "Spanning the Hedges" from that year, which, which I think really encapsulates important aspects of student debate around what's called then affirmative action. And what we have here in the, in the two pieces from the Thresher that I wanna stress

00:40:07.210 - 00:40:29.230

from two different students, are a critical look at affirmative action and also a defense of affirmative action. What, what they both have in common is they're really thoughtfully written pieces, and in conversation with one another in ways that I think are really impressive.

00:40:29.650 - 00:41:01.570

But in this, in this first piece, we have the writer who, who first gives what I, what I think is a really cogent and sensitive summary of what affirmative action is. And basically, the writer admits that they inhabit a society in which certain classes of people have been discriminated against, and one of the solutions to that historic

00:41:01.570 - 00:41:27.550

discrimination is to privilege these people in school admissions, in jobs, applications for jobs, etc., in ways that mirror the ways they had been previously disadvantaged. So the writer summarizes affirmative action in this way, also adding that it is a

00:41:27.550 - 00:41:45.350

temporary fix, right. But, but then the writer goes on to, to take issue with affirmative action theory and practice. Does practice correspond to theory?

00:41:45.370 - 00:42:10.150

Does affirmative action actually repay victims of discrimination in the best and fairest way possible? And if you, if you read this entire piece, basically the argument that the writer comes to is that we are a society in which the individual is really important.

00:42:10.480 - 00:42:31.840

And the trouble with affirmative action, the writer argues, is you cannot really tell if the person who is benefiting from affirmative action actually was disadvantaged by the harm. Right, the writer has an idea of that the individual is the, is, is kind of the

00:42:31.840 - 00:42:55.390

principal unit in society. And so recompense for harms should, should focus on, should focus on, on the individual. There are some other things in the middle there that I won't spend much time on. Whenever, well, I'll just say whenever I was in college, whenever I went into

00:42:55.390 - 00:43:18.410

analogies, I got in trouble, and this sort of happens here. I still get in trouble in the classroom when I, when I start using analogies. But the, the end argument of this is that a colorblind society is admirable, says the writer, but, "but by rewarding classes instead of individuals, affirmative action

00:43:18.410 - 00:43:44.750

succeeds only in underscoring the irrelevant class distinctions it aims at erasing." So it's a pretty, I think it's an important piece. It's, it gives us, I think, an interesting sense of opinion on campus in the early '80s about affirmative action.

00:43:45.110 - 00:43:59.670

And a few weeks after this piece, another student writes, let me see, did I miss that? Looks like I did. Hold on, let me get my life together. I think you had it.

00:43:59.670 - 00:44:09.380

It was a letter to the editor? Yeah, it was a letter to the editor. You had it, you had it, go back to the one before. Okay. Yeah, what I, you know, I'm getting fancy, Dr.

00:44:09.380 - 00:44:39.590

McDaniel, what I'm looking for is my marked up PDF that I also must have failed to insert right after it. But then we, we get this, this, this piece from another student who's responding to that, that earlier January opinion on affirmative action, which, which basically takes issue with the, the idea, or the writer stresses the idea that the

00:44:39.590 - 00:45:05.960

disadvantages of discrimination are systematic and state-enforced in such a way that it would be very difficult to be black in America, right, for example, and to not be disadvantaged by that historic discrimination. They also, emergent in this argument, though not explicit, right, emergent in a way that

00:45:05.960 - 00:45:32.240

our listeners will be familiar with, because this argument is now much more explicit now in public discourse, but emergent in this argument also is the, is the converse of that: it would be difficult to be white in America and not to be advantaged by the discrimination. So this is a way to speak to the, the, the, the earlier focus on, on

00:45:32.240 - 00:45:53.210

individuals. And both of these, I think, are extraordinarily thoughtful arguments. I just raise them here because I think for us, we might be surprised about what's missing in them. So these are articles ostensibly about the efficacy of affirmative action at a place

00:45:53.210 - 00:46:16.400

like Rice, but they, they, both of them don't take, neither of them really takes Rice as a ground for debate and discussion. The closest that they get to it is an argument about whether affirmative action, one of the consequences of affirmative action, is that students admitted under such

00:46:16.400 - 00:46:40.100

a policy, whether, whether they can compete, right on, on, at Rice, but have very little to say about Rice itself and the impact of, of affirmative action on Rice as a, as a society. So it's an interesting debate, I think, in what, in the early '80s is at least left out there.

00:46:40.640 - 00:47:04.310

So now let's get to, let's get to the document that I wanna, I wanna speak to. And here we have Catherine Clack, who at this moment in January, wait a minute, I'm now in 1984. But at this moment, in 1984, in the August of 1984, is assistant director of admissions

00:47:04.730 - 00:47:24.320

at Rice University, and she's, she's reporting on a survey she did about special admissions or the "five percent," the five percenters. So the initial question that I have is, what is special admissions at Rice in the, in the mid 1980s, and what is the five percent?

00:47:24.320 - 00:47:50.900

And basically, what, what the article makes clear, is that as early as the mid 1970s, there emerged a practice at the university that focused on admitting what's, what's known as the five percenters. And what that meant is taking a small section of the class and admitting them under

00:47:50.900 - 00:48:15.760

slightly different criteria than the rest of the class. And so basically, if Rice had eight different domains in which they were judging people, if folks fell down in two or three of those domains but were extraordinarily high in others, that would be someone that they would consider admitting under these,

00:48:15.790 - 00:48:38.950

under the five-percent approach. The writer of the article on special admissions says that "The university has set aside five percent of the slots in each freshman class for individuals whose academic records are below average in some respect, but who possess unique ethnic and economic

00:48:38.950 - 00:48:56.320

backgrounds or special talents." I had to read that sentence a few, a few times, right. It's the mid '80s, so we're still struggling I think some with language to even talk about race and ethnicity. So, but I found that interesting.

00:48:56.320 - 00:49:24.340

I don't, I don't always consider myself as possessing my ethnic characteristics. Unique, unique, ethnic. Yes. So, right, this is, the, the discourse changes. And now, what's also obvious from the article is that this, this

00:49:24.340 - 00:49:39.520

five-percent approach to the class is not uncontroversial. And so one of the controversies around it is these, these people are admitted under different circumstances. A, are they really qualified?

00:49:39.730 - 00:50:00.650

B, what can their experience be like? And so one of the things that Clack has done here is that she's followed folks who were admitted under this five-percent practice, but then who go elsewhere. And so she aims to find out where these folks went.

00:50:05.170 - 00:50:25.870

Just pausing. And the exciting part for her is some of the places that they go. Oh, they go to Cornell, they go to Yale, they go to Harvard, they go to UT Austin, SMU, Naval Academy, Brown, Trinity, MIT, you know.

00:50:25.870 - 00:50:37.630

A few podunk little, podunk little places. Just some schools. Some schools you may have heard of. I think that those are what, in the business, we, of higher education, we would wanna call

00:50:37.630 - 00:50:57.160

our "peer institutions." The peer institutions. I love that. I have heard, I have heard one college president refer to them as "the nation states." This is the way that she distinguishes between what it means to run

00:50:57.160 - 00:51:10.180

her college and what it must mean to run Yale, right. Yeah. Very different types of jobs. Right, so definitely the nation-state, the nation-state colleges.

00:51:14.560 - 00:51:34.540

And so what's interesting, I'll go on to say two more things and then back out for, for some questions. Is, so Clack has focused on where the five percenters go who don't come to Rice. I'm Susan Clark, who at the moment is chair of the admissions committee at the

00:51:34.540 - 00:51:59.200

university, spends some time following what five percenters on campus do, right, and she says, you know, they don't do much, you know, they end up editor at the Campanile--I keep saying the "Campanile," that's just gonna be the difference between us I think. They end up editor of the--no, no, no, we're colleagues, they end up editor of the

00:51:59.200 - 00:52:16.360

"Campanile." I'm gonna try it out. I don't know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna defer to you as a Rice alum on questions of pronunciation with regard to... I was, don't, don't defer to me, I was, I was a freshman at Rice, where I was still

00:52:16.360 - 00:52:36.220

pronouncing a really important word in my life as "macabre." So I am not, I am not a person to rely on for pronunciation. You know, they end up president of the SA, they go on in the Rice Players, edit the Thresher, etc.

00:52:37.060 - 00:53:02.110

And then toward the end of the article, we get this introduction, at least in this piece, of a very different kind of argument than the ones that prevail in the early 1980s. And it takes this argument that Clark and Clack had made, and it said, you know what, these, this small part of the class actually makes the university better.

00:53:02.230 - 00:53:28.310

Its part, it may end up being part of our excellence. And so the Director of Admission at the time, Ron Moss, is looking forward to the future, and he says, you know, this, this group is designed to ensure heterogeneity in the class, which improves the class, but we're kind of at a disadvantage, because we

00:53:28.310 - 00:53:51.810

don't have a way to systematically, right, really recruit and attract these folks to make this place an attractive place for them. And, you know, it may turn out in the future that these folks might become really important, this type of diversity might become really important in, in the class.

00:53:54.200 - 00:54:21.670

And so what we have Moss outlining here, and Dick Stabell and Catherine Clack, in the mid '80s are outlining, right, what is special admissions in the early 1980s, if we go back and read these pieces, right, is best practice admissions in 2022.

00:54:21.670 - 00:54:43.730

Right, it is exactly what, I shouldn't say "exactly," I should be--but, but it's largely, the things that are at the margins in the mid 1980s are very much at the center of admissions presently. And so this, this raises a couple of questions for me, and one, I'm just

00:54:43.730 - 00:55:16.340

interested in this intellectual, the intellectual history of this transformation in ways to think about equality or excellence at, at the university. The second thing that interests me is the power and the importance of speech and experience and the ways the debate unfolds on, on, on campus.

00:55:16.850 - 00:55:40.830

And by part of that, is, is, I mean, Clack and others, right, turning to the, some of the fundamental ways of being at the university, right. Let's go get some evidence, right, let's go, let's go survey some folks. Let's see, let's research this and see what it, what it tells us.

00:55:42.030 - 00:56:06.690

And then the related part of that is just what, what a long view is on, on how, how folks at the university think about things. And I mean, we didn't, we didn't talk much about the, the authors of some of the pieces at the, at the, at the start, but, right, because I know some of the work of some of

00:56:06.690 - 00:56:33.960

the folks or one of the folks who, who, who is making arguments in the early 1980s, it's just interesting to me that this person's career has unfolded in such a way that is really focused on addressing systematic discrimination. And so the other thing I take away from this is the importance of, of the university as a,

00:56:34.170 - 00:57:01.670

as a space for really hard discussion and debate and what that discussion and debate, how it actually impacts what people think, right, that, do minds change? So this is, this is what I've been working on in the run up to this conversation with Catherine. Any questions or reflections you wanna share, Dr.

00:57:01.670 - 00:57:18.690

McDaniel? Well, just, on your last point about the importance of these, of these conversations happening among students, I'm also thinking about the crucial work that black students at Rice, both during their time at Rice and then in their careers after, contributed to

00:57:18.690 - 00:57:45.690

those, those discussions, and the, the kinds of research and analysis and advocacy that you've been describing in our, even in our chat, we've been hearing from a black alumna who was working in the admissions office when the five percenter policy was in place, and like Catherine Clack, did some surveys, looked at how black students were doing at

00:57:45.690 - 00:58:04.500

Rice from the beginning of 1965 to the early '70s, went through transcripts, and established that they were holding their own, as she says. And I'm also, just because I've been thinking about Dr. Linda Faye Williams, I didn't get to this in my, my time, but Dr.

00:58:04.500 - 00:58:29.290

Williams's book, published in 2007, I wanna say? Two thousand, check my memory here, 2003. 2003. I think she, I think she, this may have been her last work published by Pennsylvania State University Press won three National Book Awards, including one

00:58:29.290 - 00:58:49.330

from the American Political Science Association, and the title of the book is, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege. And one of the key arguments she makes in this book is the ways that social policy in mid 20th-century America have been shaped by race, that you can't think about social

00:58:49.330 - 00:59:09.430

policy without thinking about race, but one of the reasons that scholars, she argues, have not, is because of the strength of liberal individualism, and this idea that you were, that we identified in one of those first columns that you showed us, of the individual being responsible for what happens to him or her.

00:59:10.270 - 00:59:30.940

And so I just find that connection interesting as well, that it raises the question for me of, of how Dr. Williams's experiences at Rice, her research after Rice, what she learned in classes at Rice, and then what she did in her own career, contributed to this debate that

00:59:30.940 - 00:59:51.940

you're highlighting for us, not just in the pages of the Rice Thresher, but, but writ large, which is another way of thinking about, if we think about sort of our history and what progress represents, that might be, as much as anything, an indication of how important these early debates were.

00:59:52.810 - 01:00:12.520

Yeah, a fruitful path to follow, right, because we've got a similar situation that you describe with Dr. Williams with Dr. Johnson, right, and his, the work that, right, they both end up at the University of

01:00:12.520 - 01:00:30.910

Maryland, coincidentally, but their work, both of their work goes on to expand access in critical and very critical ways. Did I get the date right about the webinar? It's April 14th?

01:00:30.910 - 01:00:39.580

April 14th. April 14th. And we'll get that up on the, on the website next week. Well, thanks for sharing those documents. Thanks to all of you for being here.

01:00:39.580 - 01:01:01.270

We hope that you'll join us again next week, every Friday, on the doc talks, and check out our website if you haven't, taskforce.rice.edu, where you can find recordings of some of our earlier webinars, the seminar, including a lecture by Dr. Bernadette Pruitt, on the Great Migration and early African American history in

01:01:01.270 - 01:01:15.400

Houston, and also another one on the legacies of segregated medicine. So if you haven't checked those out or weren't able to attend them live, we encourage you to visit taskforce.rice.edu. Have a great weekend, everyone.