00:00:41.770 - 00:00:52.040

How's your Friday going Dr. Byrd? It's going well. How about yours? Is there a bad Friday?

00:00:55.300 - 00:01:04.970

(laughing) Okay. I'm glad it's Friday, but it definitely seems like every day these days is a new set

00:01:04.970 - 00:01:17.050

of challenges and opportunities. Let's put it that way. Yeah. I know everybody's... There's so many things competing for attention these days

00:01:17.050 - 00:01:28.390

and yeah, I definitely feel like I'm scrambling today. How about you? I'm scrambling every Friday. (laughing) and Thursday and Wednesdays

00:01:28.390 - 00:01:35.050

and Mondays, but- Oh, Tuesdays, you're good. We should do this- Tuesday, man. If you catch me on a Tuesday,

00:01:35.050 - 00:01:46.580

I'm usually fairly well put together. Well, I am glad it's Friday and glad to be here with you for our Doc Talk. This is our fourth.

00:01:46.580 - 00:01:55.960

Can you believe that we've had... This is the fourth one of these that we've done. I can, I'm beginning to believe it. And now I'm gonna start numbering my slideshows

00:01:55.960 - 00:02:17.020

just so that I can have a good handle on that. Well, I wanted to show you and our attendees as well that we've made it because on our task force webpage, we now have a specific page for the Friday Doc Talks.

00:02:17.070 - 00:02:23.790

Okay. So you know that we have arrived. But that's not the real reason I wanted to show you the website.

00:02:23.790 - 00:02:41.870

I was excited as well that we have an events page now too. And I wanted to call our audience's attention to an event that's coming up next Wednesday, October 7th at 6:00 p.m, hosted by the task force called Black at Rice:

00:02:41.870 - 00:02:54.540

Remembering the Black Student Experience. And if you go to our website at taskforce.rice.edu, you can find all the Zoom information about this webinar. But I'm really excited about this event.

00:02:54.540 - 00:03:07.820

There's a fantastic lineup of speakers from a variety of classes and it's gonna be a great conversation. I'm looking forward to this.

00:03:07.820 - 00:03:23.330

We have two Black at Rice webinars coming up, one with alumni remembering, right? And then we have a few weeks later one with current students.

00:03:23.330 - 00:03:38.320

So it's gonna be a nice series, nice informative series. Well, make sure that you check out that website that I've put in the chat if you weren't aware of this event and share it widely so that we can encourage our community

00:03:38.320 - 00:03:51.570

to come and listen to black students from years past talk about their lives at Rice in sense and share some of their insights with us. So we hope that you'll be able to join us on Wednesday

00:03:51.570 - 00:04:01.580

and spread the word about this event and check out our new Doc Talk page on the website as well. Now that we're a month in, we hope to soon be adding more information

00:04:01.580 - 00:04:17.530

about how to access recordings of past Doc Talks as well. So share that information with your circles too. The Doc Talks, if you're just joining us for the first time, this Friday, are opportunities for Dr. Byrd and I

00:04:17.530 - 00:04:29.590

as co-chairs of the task force on slavery segregation and racial injustice to share some of the documents that are coming up in the research of the task force and think about what questions they raise,

00:04:29.590 - 00:04:44.470

what questions they help us answer, and work through them live in an improvisational way, thinking about them as historians would and piecing together what we can about these sources and how they connect

00:04:44.470 - 00:04:57.870

to the present and the future of Rice. So without further ado, I think today, Dr. Byrd, you are going to share with us a newspaper article or set of newspaper articles from the Rice Thresher.

00:04:57.870 - 00:05:14.560

I am. I'm gonna go to the Thresher today to the late 1980s and want to... I don't know if this is a historical concept, but I'm gonna introduce it as one and you and I can decide

00:05:14.560 - 00:05:28.970

whether it is or not or our colleagues can weigh in. But I want to introduce the concept of the Documentary Windfall. And so, my initial work was in the late 18th century Jamaica

00:05:32.430 - 00:05:43.710

and Sierra Leone. And I was interested in the lives of enslaved African Americans. And it wasn't always, especially on plantations.

00:05:43.710 - 00:05:54.860

And so, I typically spent all my time looking for these Documentary Windfalls, right? You're trying to get a sense of how black people on these plantations are living.

00:05:54.860 - 00:06:08.300

And they're 90% of the population, but they show up relatively... Their representation in official documents, in those official documents, they don't abound.

00:06:08.300 - 00:06:20.750

But then when something happens, right? And on a plantation, typically, for me on the plantations I studied would be at the change of a manager. So when one manager left a plantation,

00:06:20.750 - 00:06:36.740

one white manager left a plantation and a new manager or attorney or overseer arrived, all of a sudden, that new oversee or attorney would work really hard to tell his boss how everything the former attorney did

00:06:36.740 - 00:06:47.750

was completely, utterly wrong and backwards. And what a good thing you hired me. And so then they would open... And in doing, the open up this huge world on black life

00:06:47.750 - 00:07:02.910

on that plantation until things settled down. And things like this earlier in the life of the university also show up as what happens when debates hit the press that then open up these insights,

00:07:02.910 - 00:07:22.200

not only into these moments that speak to the different ways the university has attended to black life on campus. But then we can also get a sense from students when they're having debates about other matters,

00:07:22.200 - 00:07:36.000

can we use what they write and say to get further insight into their lives? And in one of these moments of a Documentary Windfall in the sense is, when the Office of Minority Affairs opens

00:07:37.730 - 00:07:49.670

in the late 1980s. And this week we can play along. And so if you have your camera, you can pull the document up by following that QR code.

00:07:49.670 - 00:08:02.970

If you're not into that, you can enter that short URL that's next to it and you can see the document that I'll be working through right away. Speaking of Windfalls,

00:08:02.970 - 00:08:15.070

it's great that we have so many issues that the Rice Thresher digitized and available to us. I mean, it's really been helpful to our own research that we have so many documents at our fingertips.

00:08:15.070 - 00:08:28.510

Especially in this season, right? When you can't necessarily get into the archives as easily as you could before. So I agree, It's been really helpful

00:08:28.510 - 00:08:44.660

and we should never pass by an opportunity to thank our friends in the Woodson Center, and the Fondren Library for their continual work of scanning and making additional documents available to us.

00:08:46.980 - 00:08:55.370

So sometimes, Dr. McDaniel, I'm sitting here getting ready for what I'm gonna do and then you go, "What do you see there, Dr. Byrd?" (laughing)

00:08:55.370 - 00:09:01.240

And then I say... So I'm gonna do that to you today. Turn the tables a little bit. That's right.

00:09:01.240 - 00:09:12.210

So tell us what's going on on the front page. Just give us a description, if you will. So this is something that would be familiar in some ways to anybody who's seen copies of the Rice Thresher,

00:09:12.210 - 00:09:26.600

but it looks different than the Rice Thresher today. The headline is a little bit different. This is from Friday, October 30th, 1987. So it has a very '80s feel to the font.

00:09:26.600 - 00:09:37.520

So Rice is all in lowercase letters and then Thresher is in capital letters. I noticed the tagline underneath the headline, too. "We print everything."

00:09:37.520 - 00:09:48.340

And this is volume 75 of the Thresher. But what I immediately notice is in the upper left-hand corner, so this would have been above the fold

00:09:48.340 - 00:09:59.150

which is what we would say if we were looking at the paper, edition of this paper. There's a story... The headline says, "Office to seek staffers."

00:09:59.150 - 00:10:09.020

And right next to it, there's a photograph of the BSU President, Steve McVea. Did you say BSU? The BSU, yeah.

00:10:09.020 - 00:10:17.610

It does say BSU. Yeah. I feel like you wanna tell us a little bit more about that. Well, I mean, it just raises another thing

00:10:17.610 - 00:10:29.290

worth looking at that we don't have a BSU anymore. We have a BSA. So this was the Black Student Union, right? Which is a play on a student union movement,

00:10:30.500 - 00:10:48.360

but focused on black students in particular. But obviously, there comes a time when the BSU becomes the Black Student Association, which is another topic that some intrepid student

00:10:50.510 - 00:11:04.110

if they're interested in exploring, I'm sure it would bear some interesting bits. All right, so right. Steve McVea is pictured here and the Vice-President

00:11:04.170 - 00:11:21.550

of Student Affairs, Ronald Stebbings who recently passed is highlighted discussing the opening of this Office of Minority Affairs. And Steve McVea is speaking supportively

00:11:23.120 - 00:11:38.020

in response to that. But it's the next pages, it's the letters to the editor pages that I want to focus on most, because what has happened

00:11:39.480 - 00:11:55.370

is there's in the previous number of the Rice Thresher when word was already coming down the pike about the opening of this office, that information spurred one undergraduate student

00:11:55.760 - 00:12:13.410

to write a really long article length actually, an article length letter to the editor alerting people to what this student thought were all the reasons why Rice should not have an Office of Minority Affairs.

00:12:13.410 - 00:12:25.560

And then the next week, you get this cavalcade of letters where the Thresher actually says that, we've gotten so many letters. We can't even print them.

00:12:25.560 - 00:12:31.030

We can't even print them off. I feel like I've gone too far. Is that the Windfall? The Documentary Windfall?

00:12:31.030 - 00:12:46.010

That's the Documentary Windfall. If we could get into the Threshers files, we'd see even more than what they've put here. And so what happens on the second page of the Thresher

00:12:46.010 - 00:13:03.260

and throughout, you have this series of about six letters that the Thresher has decided to print in response to that. Not only that on the third page, a faculty member in the History Department, Richard Wolin

00:13:03.260 - 00:13:17.650

has written an article in response to that. Professor Wolin used to also, I think was often wrote in the pages of the New Republic. So I think if you could get him into the Thresher,

00:13:17.650 - 00:13:31.740

you are probably gonna get a pretty good essay. And maybe we'll returned to Wolin's work later. But it's the students that I'm most interested in. And I think what I'd like to do now

00:13:31.740 - 00:13:44.620

is just to go through their letters, some of them. I'm interested in their responses and the arguments they make about why an Office of Minority Affairs is important.

00:13:46.840 - 00:14:00.440

But I also, I wanna pay even more attention to what their letters might tell us about their lived experience at Rice. In their arguments about the Minority Affairs Office,

00:14:00.440 - 00:14:15.930

are they also giving insight into their experiences on campus and their day-to-day lives? And in this first letter that's written by Anthony Willis, who is Vice President of the Black Student Union

00:14:15.930 - 00:14:35.170

at the time, I wanna call our attention to three things that I think may speak to his describing black life on campus. The first piece I've underlined, I think may really speak

00:14:36.490 - 00:14:50.700

to a kind of difference between the interaction of students now on campus and the interaction of students then. So Mr. Willis writes, "I believe that most Rice students

00:14:51.130 - 00:15:05.210

don't know much about black students other than what they've seen on television. Television? (laughing) That used to be a thing.

00:15:06.230 - 00:15:19.560

Yeah. That used to be a thing. So I imagine, some of this may have to do with numbers on campus in terms of their small number of black students.

00:15:22.020 - 00:15:40.440

And so it is possible for interaction between students on campus to be limited in that way. But then Willis also goes on to talk about what other Rice students might find,

00:15:40.860 - 00:15:55.520

non-black students at Rice might find if they spoke to him more, right? And so the second underlying bit I have here is, "They might tell you about how their parents were restricted

00:15:55.520 - 00:16:06.450

to certain areas in movie theaters, railroad stations and restaurants, or how bitter and frustrated their father felt because the system prevented him

00:16:06.450 - 00:16:18.690

from moving out of his lower socioeconomic group. They might tell you..." I'm not gonna use the word that Willis uses here. You can read it.

00:16:18.690 - 00:16:26.170

If I was in class, I might use it, but I would have warned you beforehand. I haven't warn you beforehand. So I'm just gonna skip over it.

00:16:26.170 - 00:16:36.810

"They might tell you how it feels when someone called them..." It's a ethnic slur, racial slur. "On campus or how infuriating it was

00:16:36.810 - 00:16:52.570

to have someone question their intelligence or disdainfully call R&B music, 'jungle music'." So I think it's worth settling here for just a moment 'cause I think at least two or three things are happening.

00:16:53.890 - 00:17:06.140

One of my questions is how much of this is autobiographical for Willis? That's a question I would have. Another question would be how much of it

00:17:06.140 - 00:17:19.550

is broadly communitarian? How much is he accessing a community story in his community, at Rice, and beyond? But then I also...

00:17:22.440 - 00:17:39.570

I also have questions about how much of it is accessing the kind of knowledge about black studies. Because when I read this line or how bitter and frustrated their father felt

00:17:39.570 - 00:17:52.790

because the system prevented him from moving out of his lower socioeconomic group, there's also... Specifically, what comes to mind for me is Nikki Giovanni's poem, "Nikki-Rosa",

00:17:52.790 - 00:18:07.660

which has some language just really close to this about her father. And of course, it is an experience that is widespread in Afro-America.

00:18:08.710 - 00:18:21.170

But I also have questions about the degree to which Willis is accessing his education around African American history and his education of African American literature.

00:18:21.170 - 00:18:30.450

He does go on to say, we have a rich history which you no doubt know nothing about and that there's a lot there in that letter to support that reading.

00:18:32.100 - 00:18:44.280

As we continue to go through India Porter, right? As she continues to dig up and unveil for us what the developing curriculum at Rice looks like at this time,

00:18:46.350 - 00:19:00.950

this was a year... I may be getting stuck, Dr. McDaniel. Now I'm depending on my memory, which can be dangerous. But I think this is a year where the History Department

00:19:00.950 - 00:19:17.960

and the Dean of Humanities, this is a time in which they'd actually worked together to bring to historians of Afro-America, who go on to make prominent and important contributions

00:19:18.610 - 00:19:31.900

to the field. And so he is here at this moment when there are two young, dynamic historians of Afro-America on campus, I think for the first time.

00:19:31.900 - 00:19:42.260

And he references landmark legislations such as the Civil Rights Act and programs such as affirmative action, so there is a historical consciousness, I think,

00:19:42.260 - 00:19:53.590

evident in the letter. Yeah. And where it's coming from probably maybe some combination of home, education here, maybe high school as well.

00:19:55.650 - 00:20:10.410

Uh-oh. Moving too fast. I wanna underline just the first line of this second response that comes from Kevin Gunthorpe,

00:20:12.500 - 00:20:25.900

who's coming from Sid. You see I'm doing some correction, on the fly correction of the Thresher as I go. And that comes from being old, Dr. McDaniel.

00:20:25.900 - 00:20:37.530

(laughing) We're getting into current events for your co-hosts. We can remember these years. Yeah, so I remember him

00:20:37.530 - 00:20:48.860

and his name is not Genthorpe. It is Gunthorpe. But what I find interesting here is how in Kevin Gunthorpe's response how the community,

00:20:51.000 - 00:21:06.830

or knowledge of the world beyond the hedges it becomes important in responding to the previous week's letter. And his first line, his very first line of the response

00:21:06.830 - 00:21:19.080

is meant to send the reader outside of the university. "Simply put, the black student from Yates High School doesn't have the same opportunity to succeed as does the white from St. John's."

00:21:24.000 - 00:21:37.210

I got some questions about that, right? So where does his knowledge of the geography surrounding the university come from? Right?

00:21:38.840 - 00:21:56.150

Is this reference to students from St John's a reference to his experience on campus and running into students on campus and seeing where they're from? I think we'll...

00:21:56.150 - 00:22:08.660

Sorry. St. John's is a private high school here in Houston and Yates High School is in the third word a public school, predominantly, African American, yeah.

00:22:08.660 - 00:22:16.110

Both relatively close. Yates, maybe closer. Yeah. And physically in physical distance may be closer.

00:22:18.860 - 00:22:36.360

There's an interesting piece in Gunthorpe's letter that speaks to why black students choose to come to Rice. So in the letter from last week, the writer who's criticizing the opening

00:22:36.360 - 00:22:47.280

of the Office of Minority Affairs says that, "You know what, black students? If you don't like it at Rice, why come here? Right?

00:22:47.280 - 00:22:59.210

And if you don't like it at Rice, why stay, right? There are lots of universities you could go to. Why don't you pick one and head out?" And here, in the second line that I focus,

00:22:59.210 - 00:23:11.890

the second passage from Gunthorpe's letter, I think we have access to a kind of decision-making that's happening in black homes at the time. And so Gunthorpe writes,

00:23:11.890 - 00:23:25.020

"In the case of most minorities at Rice, attending such a school is simply not an option. For those that demand an education of Rice's caliber. The only schools available are predominantly

00:23:25.020 - 00:23:37.950

white private universities. And I think that's interesting for the reasons that I just laid out, but I also think it's interesting because it's a matter that we can and should debate

00:23:37.950 - 00:23:54.940

because it's a matter that definitely students at the time were debating. I'll stop here. This is my last one,

00:23:54.940 - 00:24:11.600

which comes from Russell Ross's response. And two things come to mind here. One is the way that he just supports, right? Verifies in a way, Anthony Willis's argument

00:24:12.700 - 00:24:22.930

that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of racial interaction on campus. "I'm appalled," writes Ross, "By the number of students who have never met a successful black person

00:24:22.930 - 00:24:36.580

or had misconstrued beliefs." Not more importantly, but in greater detail as you go down, we might be getting a sense of, in some areas we know we're getting a sense of

00:24:36.580 - 00:24:50.160

what his actual interactions with other students on campuses have been and in other places, maybe we're hearing from other students. But I think it's important to just kind of go through

00:24:51.140 - 00:25:01.610

what he's encountering. "Unfortunately, I'm expected to have superior athletic ability, a great sense of humor, an oversized sex life, and organ, and be able to rap,

00:25:01.610 - 00:25:13.130

sing, dance and do something musical. For example, my freshman year, while participating in various icebreakers and study sessions, I was commonly asked, 'What sport do you play?'

00:25:13.130 - 00:25:24.950

Before I was asked my name." And his reply was, "I don't." (laughing) Yeah, "I don't. I'm a double e."

00:25:26.250 - 00:25:36.610

I don't know if we... Do we still call double e's double e's? But he's saying he was an electrical engineer, yeah. Well, I can see why you described this as a windfall

00:25:36.610 - 00:25:51.250

because it really does give us some insight into experiences of black students on campus at this particular moment. One question all of this raises for me is, and some viewers might be wondering,

00:25:52.090 - 00:26:03.340

there's this office being created at this particular moment, is there a reason why the office was being created at this particular moment? Do you know anything about that?

00:26:03.340 - 00:26:17.100

So if we read through this number of the Thresher and the previous number of the Thresher, it's coming from a few directions. But I think one of the directions that is really important

00:26:17.100 - 00:26:32.450

is students are advocating for it. So Steve McVea, who's the president of the BSU at the time and other students see it as something that they want and desire.

00:26:33.320 - 00:26:51.670

At the same time, there is obviously a discussion going on in other echelons of the university, the Vice President of Student Life, and some faculty on campus, Chandler Davidson

00:26:51.670 - 00:27:04.830

is mentioned by name in some of the articles, Professor Davidson is emeritus professor of sociology, was a professor of sociology at this time, and was an advisor of the Black Student Union.

00:27:04.830 - 00:27:23.280

It's clear that he and some faculty are also at work moving this conversation. From some of Dr. Stebbings responses, it's also clear that there is an interest outside the university

00:27:25.120 - 00:27:35.470

in certain philanthropic circles in supporting black students at Rice. So one of the things Stebbings brings up is that we're gonna open this office

00:27:35.470 - 00:27:47.940

and one of the reasons we're opening it is because we have substantial support from a number of outside entities, energy companies, I believe, in the larger Houston area

00:27:48.800 - 00:28:02.120

who are gonna underwrite the opening of this office. But Stebbings also says, "Even if we didn't have that outside support, we'd still do it." As most of the questions we ask

00:28:02.120 - 00:28:11.670

when we're just trying to get down to what are the origins or what's the answer, right? It's coming from several different directions. But if we were to ask,

00:28:11.670 - 00:28:22.890

and this is a good seminar question, right? Is there an actor who's most necessary? Right? I would wager that the students

00:28:24.260 - 00:28:37.650

are the most important moving force here. That's fascinating. Well, and I think it does raise questions about the history of the Black Student Union, as you pointed out

00:28:37.650 - 00:28:48.390

and how it laid the groundwork for this administrative change. So thank you so much for sharing that doc. The document that I brought today

00:28:48.390 - 00:28:57.170

is also a newspaper article. I know last week we were looking at two letters to presidents and this week we've got a couple of newspaper articles.

00:28:58.720 - 00:29:18.770

But my article takes us to those other echelons of the university that you were talking about. And so let me see if I can pull up this one. So this is coming from not the Rice Thresher,

00:29:18.770 - 00:29:32.580

but from the Houston Chronicle. And you can see here some evidence that we're not looking at a newspaper from 1987. We're not in 1987 anymore because on the left-hand column

00:29:32.580 - 00:29:49.100

of this page from the Chronicle is a photograph of President Lyndon Johnson, kissing his wife, Lady Bird on the cheek before she leaves for a trip to Greece. We also have in the lower right-hand corner,

00:29:49.100 - 00:30:01.510

that singer Mel Torme is seeking $22,500 in pay from Judy Garland. So we've taken a step back in time. We got Beetle Bailey comic strip at the top of the page.

00:30:02.530 - 00:30:14.010

But what drew my attention to this particular page is the story that's in the middle. And in the middle, there's also a photograph of Dr. Kenneth Pitzer, who was the president

00:30:14.010 - 00:30:30.410

of Rice University at the time this issue came out. This is the issue of the Chronicle from Wednesday, March 11th, 1964. So I feel like if we were watching television in the 1980s,

00:30:30.410 - 00:30:37.480

that thing back then, this would be that moment where there'd be the kind... (mimicking) And we would go back in time

00:30:39.170 - 00:30:58.190

because last week we were talking about Dr. Pitzer as well. And we were examining a correspondence between now Dr. Raymond Johnson, who was a graduate student at Rice in 1965, writing in the spring of 1965 to Dr. Pitzer,

00:30:59.290 - 00:31:18.670

who was the president then too, about his concerns over the university's plans to recruit and to support black students in the wake of the decision in Rice's favor in the charter trial in 1964.

00:31:18.670 - 00:31:32.620

So this article though is a little bit of a background to that correspondence we looked at last week because we're moving a year before that correspondence. And this is, again, in March, 1964.

00:31:32.620 - 00:31:49.380

So it would have been published really only days after the judge in the charter trial had had ruled in favor of Rice University at the recommendation of the jury, of course, in that trial.

00:31:49.380 - 00:31:59.200

And so, what you have here is the Chronicle interviewing President Pitzer, who as it says in the caption under his photograph, is looking to the future.

00:31:59.200 - 00:32:15.200

So what does the future have in store? And do you notice anything else you wanted to point out before I... Well, I've got a question because it says here,

00:32:16.150 - 00:32:26.820

"Always open to qualified students." And so... Right. (laughing) So this is the headline you're pointing out.

00:32:26.820 - 00:32:36.580

Yes, that's the headline and I'm a little baffled by the "always", but... Right. And I think if you read the rest of the headline,

00:32:36.580 - 00:32:47.620

it kind of shed some light on that. There's this first headline in all caps, "Always open to qualified students." And then the sub-headline says, "Relatively high tuition,

00:32:48.570 - 00:33:06.210

very large fund for scholarships in works at Rice U." And so, if you recall from last week, one of the concerns that Dr. Johnson had was that the decision to admit black students to Rice was made at the same time

00:33:06.210 - 00:33:20.380

as the decision to charge tuition for undergraduate students. And so the concern that he expressed to President Pitzer in the spring of 1965 was that if you charge tuition

00:33:22.000 - 00:33:32.350

that black students that might be interested in coming to Rice and other students who don't have the means to pay that tuition will continue to be excluded

00:33:33.320 - 00:33:46.610

and will feel that as a barrier. And President Pitzer in his response to Raymond Johnson sort of reacted, I think it's fair to say, a little bit defensively to that

00:33:46.610 - 00:34:06.630

and said that that was a rumor that was going around, but that in fact the board had every intention to make sure that tuition would be covered for students. But I think it's interesting when you read in this article,

00:34:06.630 - 00:34:23.260

the way he was talking about those plans in the spring of 1964, shed some light on why Dr. Johnson maybe still felt the need to write a year later about this subject because on the one hand,

00:34:23.260 - 00:34:32.320

in the article, President Pitzer says that there's a large scholarship fund that's being planned that's gonna be called the William Marsh Rice Scholarship Fund,

00:34:33.200 - 00:34:46.300

that Rice is going to use a national organization that was run out of Princeton called the College Scholarship Service that would allow parents basically to submit documentation

00:34:46.640 - 00:34:59.470

about their financial need upon application to the university. And that that would be a guide to the university in determining who needed some help

00:34:59.470 - 00:35:12.990

meeting the new tuition requirements at the university. And so he says here in the third column, "Make no mistake about it. This system will not prevent qualified students

00:35:15.000 - 00:35:25.410

from gaining admission to Rice. And the scholarship fund will not be restricted to the upper 10% who need help. It will be for all qualified students."

00:35:25.410 - 00:35:35.470

And so there's that word, I think, that you were noticing- Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if we got this in a student paper, we might wonder about all of this qualified,

00:35:35.470 - 00:35:46.180

whether our writer, whether we could give them a dictionary or thesaurus and help them find some other words. Right. What does that word mean?

00:35:46.180 - 00:35:56.400

Yeah, what work is it doing? There's a question there. It's interesting that most of this article starts off talking about the tuition changes.

00:35:56.400 - 00:36:10.180

And in fact, it doesn't even turn to the question of race until the third column halfway down. And there's another little subheading here that says, "Not a crusade."

00:36:10.180 - 00:36:20.560

And that's because Pitzer goes on to say that he envisions little change in Rice philosophy in the years to come. And the quote has him saying,

00:36:20.560 - 00:36:33.610

"It will be Rice University without barriers. We will make no effort to recruit members of any race into the student body. We are not conducting a crusade.

00:36:33.610 - 00:36:48.850

We are simply removing restrictions." And that struck me when I saw this article because it reminded me of our conversation last week about Dr. Johnson writing to President Pitzer,

00:36:48.870 - 00:37:01.240

in which, and again, here I'm relying on my memory. He said something to the effect of, while he understands why universities would not recruit students to apply,

00:37:01.240 - 00:37:19.220

that special circumstances here seemed to call for special measures because without recruiting, maybe we could say without going on a crusade of the kind that Pitzer avoids here, Dr. Johnson was worried

00:37:19.690 - 00:37:35.090

that black undergraduate applicants would not feel welcome or encouraged to apply at Rice. And so here you have President Pitzer saying pretty explicitly that, at least for this interview

00:37:35.090 - 00:37:54.910

with the Chronicle, he envisions integration, primarily as a move to remove restrictions and lift barriers, but to do little else. I mean, one question it raises for me is,

00:37:56.140 - 00:38:06.310

does the fact that this is in the Chronicle have any bearing on why President Pitzer would talk that way about this decision? Right.

00:38:06.310 - 00:38:15.510

How would this be read? Right? So there's looking at it now in 2020, there are ways in which it is obviously...

00:38:16.930 - 00:38:31.040

It's obviously conservative in the sense that he's stressing that very little is gonna change, except when we remove racial barriers, which I imagine for some readers of the Chronicle

00:38:31.040 - 00:38:39.740

at the time, and particularly for the people who made the suit, right? That was the point. And so-

00:38:42.640 - 00:38:56.830

So maybe Speaking to that audience, to white Houstonians who were reading the Chronicle, maybe for some of them, that would have been a reassuring language, but you can see why the same language would concern someone

00:38:56.830 - 00:39:07.560

like Raymond Johnson when he's writing a year later. Well, and I would also say, though, this is less important, would still be inflammatory to some, right?

00:39:07.560 - 00:39:24.030

That this language for some in Houston would not have been conservative. It would've been kind of professor speak to cover up what radical change was actually coming

00:39:24.030 - 00:39:33.520

that there will be black folks at Rice. Yeah. Well, later in the article, too, I mean, that brings up the next part of the article

00:39:33.520 - 00:39:49.170

because he does seem at pains to tamp down any expectations that there's gonna be some radical transformation at Rice. And in fact, he says that he doesn't expect to hire many black faculty members,

00:39:50.720 - 00:40:04.610

but he says that there's never been a restriction on that, that the restriction was only about students. So he's quoted here saying that, "If a candidate were to apply of sufficient quality,"

00:40:04.610 - 00:40:18.340

which makes me think of that word qualified again, "If someone of sufficient quality offers himself for faculty service, we will not hesitate to hire him. This has always been our policy."

00:40:20.970 - 00:40:33.120

It raises questions about what the policy had been about hiring faculty and black faculty in particular. There's kind of an interesting line there that's less familiar to me in the way

00:40:33.120 - 00:40:50.990

that the academic job market works today, of course, the idea that if a candidate offered himself for service, then if he was of sufficient quality, he would be hired. And this is a language that really prevails

00:40:51.380 - 00:41:04.570

in the period of desegregation. When schools began to de-segregate, some of the white public, or I should say segregationist discourse

00:41:04.570 - 00:41:20.310

becomes a discourse that's about quality. But it's about quality in the service of maintaining segregation under some other means. Right. Right.

00:41:20.310 - 00:41:35.610

And he sort of says that later, just to double down, and he says, "There will be no change in the academic requirements for Rice students." And that recalls part of the Thresher article from '87

00:41:36.060 - 00:41:50.950

that I didn't read, but this is one of the arguments that the student from the week before, right? Who starts this discussion, this is an argument that is really key to his letter.

00:41:50.950 - 00:42:02.800

He is really concerned in 1987 that an Office of Minority Affairs is going to end up moving toward a reduction of standards at the university.

00:42:04.950 - 00:42:15.900

I wonder, now that you talk about that context if it shed some light on another document that I was thinking about talking about today. And I think we established last week,

00:42:15.900 - 00:42:28.260

that there's not a firm rule about the number of documents is there that we can present. No, there's not. I went through just four letters, I think, just now.

00:42:28.260 - 00:42:38.090

Though it was one newspaper. (laughing) Well, this takes me beyond the pages of the Chronicle, but in President Pitzer's papers,

00:42:38.090 - 00:42:53.100

there was an interesting document that shows some of the language that President Pitzer in the spring of 1964 was developing for public consumption about this change.

00:42:53.100 - 00:43:04.250

So the suit has been concluded, although there's counter suits that are being filed. And so then the task becomes for the president and the board of trustees to start thinking

00:43:04.250 - 00:43:15.700

about how to announce the university's intentions for the fall of 1965. And so what you can see here from a folder in the Pitzer papers

00:43:15.700 - 00:43:34.190

is a sort of yellowing piece of paper, a type script paper and then paper clipped to the top of that yellowed piece of paper is something that's clearly been printed, a little slip that says, "Special Notice".

00:43:34.190 - 00:43:46.860

And it says that Rice University has recently received judicial authorization to admit students without regard to race and to charge tuition of its students.

00:43:46.860 - 00:43:55.680

And then it goes on to say that, "Assuming there's not further court proceedings to halt that, that it's the intention of the board of trustees to establish a broad system

00:43:55.680 - 00:44:10.010

of scholarships so that no applicant if admitted, shall be denied the opportunity to attend Rice because of inability to pay the tuition charge." Which is in some ways similar to what he said

00:44:10.010 - 00:44:17.490

to the Chronicle around the same time. But I don't know about you. I mean, one question I would have is if we compare this language,

00:44:17.490 - 00:44:30.090

what's missing in the special notice that we in the Chronicle. And there was a surplus of it in the Chronicle. There was a surplus of language around this idea

00:44:30.090 - 00:44:44.010

of qualifications and being qualified. Qualified and sufficient quality. Well, that's what's interesting about this file though, is because if you look underneath that top slip

00:44:44.010 - 00:44:55.920

that's paper-clipped, what you get is a series of pages that show the revisions that were made to that special notice over time. And at the very bottom of the stack

00:44:55.920 - 00:45:14.070

is a double-spaced type-scripted page in courier font, as you pointed out last week, but double-spaced because clearly it was intended to be a draft that could be annotated and edited.

00:45:14.310 - 00:45:25.030

And what you can see is a version of what became that special notice. But in the middle paragraph, it says that, "Is the intention of the board of trustees

00:45:25.030 - 00:45:36.950

to establish a broad system of scholarships so that no otherwise qualified applicant shall be denied the opportunity to attend Rice." And then in the next sentence, it says,

00:45:36.950 - 00:45:52.200

"For those students who are fully qualified academically and it would be a hardship for them to pay tuition, scholarships will be granted that would amount up to full tuition or more."

00:45:53.070 - 00:46:08.010

Can I say something here (mumbles)? It's a good thing this is a draft because this paragraph is a mess, right? It is a full-on car crash.

00:46:08.010 - 00:46:19.440

It needs to be fixed. Needs some work. But it also sounds a lot like Pitzer's language in the Chronicle. Yeah, yeah. And I think the reason for that

00:46:19.440 - 00:46:35.630

is because if we look at the other papers in this file, it's clear that that was Pitzer's original draft, his personal draft that he handed to Malcolm Lovett, who was a member of the board of trustees,

00:46:35.630 - 00:46:50.640

the son of Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of the Rice Institute, and also one of the lawyers who was assisting the university in providing advice in this charter trial.

00:46:50.640 - 00:47:03.190

And so he writes to President Pitzer, with some suggested revisions to the statement that President Pitzer proposed to publish. And so I think we can reason from that,

00:47:03.190 - 00:47:12.700

that this draft we were looking at, it has all these pencil marks on it. And it has words that are crossed out and it has words that are inserted.

00:47:12.700 - 00:47:27.470

And so that's probably Malcolm Lovett's edits to the draft that President Pitzer provided. And it's significant that he took his pencil to these phrases that we've been calling attention to.

00:47:27.470 - 00:47:42.260

He crossed out "otherwise qualified" and he also crossed out "fully qualified academically", so that Lovett's revised version would read simply, "It's the intention of the board of trustees

00:47:42.260 - 00:47:54.310

to establish a broad system of scholarships so that no applicant shall be denied the opportunity to attend Rice if admitted because of inability to pay the tuition charge.

00:47:54.310 - 00:48:08.110

For those applicants who are admitted and for whom it would be a hardship to pay tuition, scholarship will be made." It raises questions for me about why Lovett saw it

00:48:08.110 - 00:48:17.290

as important to make those corrections. And if we go through this file, you'll see that the other corrections were made. President Pitzer responds and says,

00:48:17.290 - 00:48:25.340

"Thank you for those revisions." He says they were definite improvements, but he says on further reading, he thinks there's some other things that needed

00:48:25.340 - 00:48:40.520

to be added to the statement. And so there's a series of other revisions that are made including another sort of handwritten pencil draft that would be added to the start of the second paragraph

00:48:41.770 - 00:48:53.510

that says, "If no unfavorable developments arise in the court proceedings, this is what the university intends to do." And so you kind of get in this file, a version history

00:48:54.560 - 00:49:11.190

of what would have been received by applicants as just this printed special notice on the top. But it does raise questions for me about the thinking there that was going into revising that language about qualified

00:49:11.190 - 00:49:23.350

and sufficiently qualified and otherwise qualified. That was clearly part of President Pitzer's thinking about the subject. So maybe the subject for further research.

00:49:23.350 - 00:49:32.400

What do you think? Well, I think there's what I think could be some interesting... I guess this is intellectual history,

00:49:32.400 - 00:49:53.680

but some interesting questions about intellectual history the way the discourse on qualification after desegregation is so thick in the language that it begins to lead people

00:49:53.680 - 00:50:05.950

to kind of confuse the process of admission and to suggest things that they're actually trying to not suggest. So in the Houston Chronicle article,

00:50:05.950 - 00:50:25.120

Pitzer takes great pains to say all of our students will be qualified. But then in this initial draft, it can be read in a way that intimates that it would be possible

00:50:25.120 - 00:50:41.530

for a student to be admitted to Rice and not be academically qualified. And that's the part that that's Lovett's pen, right? He goes to that really quickly to fix.

00:50:41.530 - 00:50:55.060

Right. And sort of to clarify how will need be factored into decisions about admissions 'cause the university was very clear that it's admissions would be need-blind.

00:50:56.000 - 00:51:11.780

But at the same time, these words about qualification kind of creep back into the draft. And so maybe that's why Lovett decided to take that out. It suggests to me too some of the long history of the debate

00:51:11.780 - 00:51:24.550

that you presented to us in 1987, that by the time you get to 1987, there are these debates about affirmative action. You start to see in the original student letter

00:51:24.550 - 00:51:36.170

to the editor that prompted all those responses, the kind of beginnings of a discourse about reverse racism, or reverse discrimination. And there's this question being raised

00:51:36.170 - 00:51:50.330

about whether affirmative action means that qualified white applicants are being overlooked in order to admit less qualified minority applicants. And what looking at this letter

00:51:50.330 - 00:52:05.230

in this Chronicle article shows us is that that discourse doesn't just occur out of nowhere in 1987, but it reaches back to debates that were happening in the '60s at the moment of integration.

00:52:05.230 - 00:52:20.560

I kind of wonder about when we look at the responses of the black students who wrote to the editor, they were saying, they were thinking about their father and his bitterness about not being able

00:52:20.560 - 00:52:33.700

to advance socioeconomically. And it raises the question of, the father of the student who wrote the initial letter would have been of the same generation, but possibly on the other side

00:52:33.700 - 00:52:47.440

of these questions, and maybe that was influencing some of the thinking of the student. I wanna appreciate something here that may be a little off topic,

00:52:47.440 - 00:53:01.920

but since this is... We're Rice folks, I think it's worth appreciating is the ways in which this language about need, there remains this commitment, right?

00:53:01.920 - 00:53:15.420

There remains this commitment to meeting need beyond tuition, right? That we have this university that doesn't charge tuition heading into this new phase.

00:53:15.420 - 00:53:30.360

And in the language that's developed about meeting need, it's up to and beyond, right? And understanding that the cost of attending a university is something that is more than tuition.

00:53:30.360 - 00:53:55.210

And this commitment to making an education possible to still to folks for whom it would be a hardship to pay. Well, we have a couple of questions in our Q&A and wanna remind everyone, we do have a few more minutes,

00:53:55.210 - 00:54:09.580

if you had some questions about either of these documents, you can click on the Q&A bubbles at the bottom of your screen and drop some questions into there. One question is about, attending Rice Institute was free

00:54:09.580 - 00:54:25.140

of charge to young white males. I had heard that once they started admitting "other students", tuition was established. Well, I guess there's...

00:54:25.140 - 00:54:40.820

And we'll see in some weeks to come, right, that the charging of tuition does and the admission, the dropping of the race barrier happen at at the same time, but this word, young white males

00:54:41.700 - 00:54:58.270

also deserves some interrogation, right? In terms of that women attend the university, white women attend the university from its opening. But also there's some play around white, right?

00:54:58.300 - 00:55:13.430

And so hopefully, in other Doc Talks, we'll see that we can show you pictures of students at the university, and you'll see that though there aren't any visible black students, right?

00:55:14.670 - 00:55:29.720

That they're smallish numbers of non-black students who do attend the university in it's tuition fee free time. Well, this is an interesting question too because it clearly show...

00:55:30.810 - 00:55:43.790

The questioner says they had heard this, that when students who were non-white began to be admitted that that's when tuition was introduced. I think that that's a a long-standing story

00:55:46.230 - 00:56:00.480

that has some truth to it, has kernel of truth to it, the timing of the two things happen together. But it's interesting that that remains a way that we remember that particular moment

00:56:00.480 - 00:56:13.170

and the way that many people understand the pairing of these two things together. I mean, certainly Raymond Johnson even a year after Pitzer revise that draft

00:56:13.170 - 00:56:24.520

and gave his interview to the Chronicle, he clearly had the understanding that maybe tuition would raise a new barrier, and that maybe it was intended to do that.

00:56:24.520 - 00:56:37.430

So even at the time, only a year after this decision was made, there was that kind of understanding in the air and it survives a long time, that perhaps...

00:56:37.430 - 00:56:50.010

And certainly, I think it did operate in many university contexts as a new kind of barrier that would slow integration. So it does raise the questions

00:56:51.120 - 00:57:03.790

that I think the question is getting at, why that understanding of the pairing of these two things does continue to have a long life in conversations about this moment.

00:57:03.790 - 00:57:16.640

And maybe it has something to do with all of that other language about qualified and we're not gonna be on a crusade, and very little is gonna change.

00:57:16.640 - 00:57:29.390

And so, even as Pitzer is trying to dispel this idea that tuition is gonna be a new barrier, maybe there's other aspects of the university's communications that are undercutting

00:57:30.490 - 00:57:47.000

that laudable intention and that message. Well, in last week's letter, Pitzer suggest that, well, Dr. Johnson is suggesting precisely that, right? That there are aspects of the university's behavior

00:57:47.000 - 00:58:00.720

and communication that are leading to these conclusions. And Dr. Pitzer is suggesting that there are bad actors, right? Beyond the university with those very intentions

00:58:00.810 - 00:58:13.930

to misconstrue the university's positions, precisely to drive down interest by African Americans. And now I'm counting on my memory of last week- No, you're right. You're right.

00:58:13.930 - 00:58:21.420

Sort of said that this is being said to embarrass the university with the intention of embarrassing... And he calls on Johnson

00:58:21.420 - 00:58:34.980

to help him combat this misunderstanding which was an interesting part of the letter too. He kind of enlists Johnson to give him suggestions about how to counter this narrative.

00:58:36.910 - 00:58:49.460

It's clearly it's not a part of the story of Rice that's ever completely gone away. And maybe we need to reckon with that, why that seems a plausible memory of that moment

00:58:53.530 - 00:59:04.770

and to fully investigate what truth is there. Yeah. And I can tell from some of the other questions in the Q&A, right after we finish a Doc Talk,

00:59:05.710 - 00:59:14.480

we start thinking of the next episode, right? And so- That's right. So (mumbles) and come back. We hope that you'll go to our website again,

00:59:14.480 - 00:59:27.180

taskforce.rice.edu and the first rule of Doc Talk is talk about Doc Talk. Right. To everybody you know and encourage them to come and learn a little bit more about the research

00:59:27.180 - 00:59:35.300

the task force is doing. We wanna put in one more plug for our webinar that's coming up this Wednesday, which is called Black at Rice:

00:59:35.300 - 00:59:47.090

Remembering the Black Student Experience in which we'll hear from black alumni from across the decades who are gonna be sharing insights about their lives at Rice in sense,

00:59:47.090 - 01:00:01.070

so I think that'll be another windfall moment going back to where we started, where we'll have a chance to hear about the black student experience from a really distinguished panel of people.

01:00:01.070 - 01:00:11.330

And so if you would like to learn more about that webinar, please go to taskforce.rice.edu, check out our new events page, and you'll find the information

01:00:11.330 - 01:00:20.170

to share with everyone you know. And I hope to see you there. And see you next week. See you next week.