As the grandson of T.H. Huxley, Julian Huxley had his fair share of fame in the biological community despite only being 23. Therefore, many universities began scouting him to help build their department’s prestige.

In this letter, Edwin Conklin, a professor of Zoology at Princeton University, hesitantly recommends Huxley to Edgar Odell Lovett, the president of the Rice Institute, even though he “covet[s]” Huxley for his department. Conklin thinks Huxley would be better suited to life at Princeton rather than Rice, as he “has no experience in organizing a department,” “little experience in teaching,” and is accustomed to “conditions in an ancient academic center” like Oxford. He explains that he intends to offer Huxley an Assistant Professorship at Princeton but does not want to recruit him if Lovett is interested, as Conklin understands that his former colleague is attempting to build a biology program from scratch.

It is worth noting that Edwin Conklin informally offered Huxley a position in 1911, which Huxley respectfully declined in favor of the Rice Institute.

So why did Huxley turn down Princeton to favor a newly founded Institute without an established reputation? 

While Huxley admitted he saw the appeal in accepting Conklin’s offer, he felt drawn to Rice. He agreed that Princeton would “be far pleasanter” than Houston, though he confessed that he is interested in the “newness & remoteness” of the Rice Institute. It seems that the very factors that might have deterred Huxley from accepting the position were precisely the ones he found most exciting.

In addition to the newness of the Institute, several other factors appealed to him. In this letter to his father, Huxley wrote about how he had been invited to become faculty at the Rice Institute. Notably, he was excited about the following:

“It [the Rice Institute] is chiefly for science, reading, research, applied & technical, but there will be a respectable faculty of History, Philosophy, Classics, & Literature…enough ‘Arts’ to keep it humanized.”

Furthermore, Huxley was rather keen on the fact that he was the first person President Lovett personally approached for a position at the Institute. This boost in self-esteem, along with Huxley’s impression that President Lovett would give him whatever he desired while at the Institute, were decisive factors in his consideration of Rice.

Convinced that Rice Institute would be the place for him given its aim to integrate the humanities with the sciences, proximity to wildlife, and special treatment by the President himself, Huxley accepted the offer in the winter of 1912.

In his letter of acceptance of the position at the Rice Institute, Huxley informed Lovett that before coming to Rice, he planned to tour the best universities and labs in Germany, which was the hub of scientific advancement at the turn of the century. Additionally, Lovett wanted to keep a tight lid on the word of Huxley's acceptance of a position at Rice, perhaps out of fear that another university would recruit him.

In this letter, Huxley also attempted to negotiate the contract terms, asking that staff be provided with on-campus housing given that Rice was relatively isolated from the rest of Houston. Lovett granted Huxley this request, and he stayed in the North Tower of what is now Baker College. However, it was not long before he moved off campus with a few other colleagues after complaining about dorm life.

Huxley expressed his concern over malaria and yellow fever to President Lovett due to the climate of Houston. Despite the his concern and precautions, Huxley would later end up contracting malaria while at Rice, in which he developed a high fever (Sourced from letter dated Nov. 5, 1915 (MS 474, Box 9, Folder 17)).

As mentioned in the previous letter, Huxley wanted to learn more about the emerging field of genetics and examine other leading universities before coming to the Rice Institute. In this letter to President Lovett, Huxley writes about his time working under William Bateson, a biologist who had coined the word “genetics” in 1906. While at Bateson’s Experimental Breeding laboratory, he writes he worked as a “mere novice & manual laborer…mostly picking and checking-off peas.” Still, he mentions he learned a lot about the “methods & general atmosphere” of genetics through observation and intended to bring this knowledge to the Rice Institute. After studying with Bateson, Huxley went to Germany to study in the labs of Otto Warburg and Oscar Hertwig.

Despite not assuming his position at Rice until the fall of 1913, Huxley attended the Rice Institute’s Opening Ceremony in 1912. En route to the Institute, Huxley visited T.H. Morgan’s famous Fly Room in New York, known for its contribution to the field of genetics, where he first met Hermann J. Muller, whom he would later recruit to teach at Rice.

At the opening ceremony, Huxley was excited to encounter many renowned scientists, such as chemist Sir William Ramsay, the discoverer of the noble gases of the periodic table, and botanist Hugo de Vries, the pioneer of mutation theory. Both scientists delivered inaugural lectures at the Insitute as a testament to Rice’s commitment to being the center of scientific innovation.

Huxley recounts the Opening Ceremony in his essay “Texas and the Academe,” published in the Cornhill Magazine July-December 1918 issue:

It was a sufficiently striking phenomenon but no more striking than the phenomenon which had brought it about. Here in Houston was being celebrated the birth of a new University, and celebrated in the same spirit as might have been the dedication of a new Cathedral in the Middle Ages (Huxley 54).

Just as impressed as Huxley was with Lovett’s ability to recruit numerous notable academics to attend the Institute’s inauguration, he was also impressed with its architecture. As Huxley wrote in “Texas and the Academe”:

The Administration Building was before us, looking exactly as if it had risen miraculously out of the earth… Below was a cloister, the capitals of whose pillars were curiously carved with heads of scientists, modern and ancient, with grotesque of American footballers and women students, with strange beasts in foliage…Here it stood, brilliant, astounding, enduring : rising out of the barren brown prairie which extended, unbroken save for a belt of trees, to the horizon and far beyond the horizon (Huxley 59).

While Huxley does not explicitly mention it, one of the “modern” scientists carved into pillars is Francis Galton, the coiner and proponent of “eugenics,” a reminder of the values the early Institute once held.

After visiting the Rice Institute for the Opening Ceremony, Huxley and Hugo de Vries, the botanist who had delivered an inaugural lecture, took advantage of their trip across the Atlantic, traveling throughout Texas and observing the North American flora and fauna they encountered. Here is de Vries in a photograph likely taken by Huxley while they were in San Antonio. 

As a botanist, de Vries appears to be fascinated with a plant in this photo, which seems to be a cactus of sorts that Huxley labeled “cylindrical arborescent opuntia (Opuntia arborescero?)”, perhaps indicating some unfamiliarity with American flora. Nevertheless, these two European scholars appeared to have been quite fascinated by the plants Texas has to offer, as Huxley took several more photographs of his plant discoveries during his trip.

Despite coming to Rice for the opening ceremony in 1912, it would be some time before Huxley returned to Houston. After experiencing major heartbreak when his long-time fiance, Kathleen Fordham, broke off their engagement, Julian Huxley delayed his arrival at Rice after leaving Germany. In his autobiography Memories, he describes how he relapsed into "a real 'nervous breakdown'—in modern terminology, a depression neurosis. Whatever it is called," Huxley wrote, "it was a horrible experience, a hell of self-reproach, repressed guilt, a sense of my own uselessness and the futility of life in general" (97). At times, his condition was so bad that he was prescribed bed rest and was forbidden to write letters. 

Fortunately, Lovett appeared to have sympathized with Huxley, whose struggles were openly communicated through both Huxley and his father. Even after Huxley arrived at the Rice Institute, Lovett remained in close contact with Huxley's doctors, receiving doctors' notes and ensuring that he was not overworking him. In spring 1914, Huxley's condition took a turn for the worse yet again, and he returned to England to recover until the following fall semester.

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