Centennial video series: Female Owls join the nest

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

HOUSTON – (Aug. 15, 2012) – When the Rice Institute opened its doors to students in 1912, there were 59 students — 37 men and 22 women. Although women attended classes, they were unable to live on campus as the men did. In the first few decades of the Rice Institute, most female students were from Houston and lived at home with their parents. Over the years, off-campus boarding and other housing options became available; however, it wasn’t until 1957, when the college system was introduced and Mary Gibbs Jones College opened, that women began to live on campus.

Working with Centennial Historian Melissa Kean, video producer Brandon Martin takes a look at female Owls joining the nest. For more information on Rice’s history, visit Kean’s blog at www.ricehistorycorner.com.

To help celebrate the university’s centennial Oct. 12, Rice University is producing weekly videos exploring the school’s unique history.

The video, available on YouTube at http://youtu.be/g0dSD1avqjU, is also available to media in high quality and without music for editing purposes. For higher-quality video, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

 -30-

To see other stories in the centennial video series, go to www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60D6D71E71B66B3D&feature=plcp.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.