With official administrative memos, policy statements, budget requests, and so on there is a sameness that runs straight through the course of all the decades. Sometimes this feels comforting, other times it’s deeply depressing, but because the content and tone of so much material never really changes it’s easy to think that Rice has always been the same place. It hasn’t been, though. The Cohen House papers that I started working with before Christmas continue to startle with their strangeness. Here is an example, a 1930 poll of the membership about whether to buy a radio and a record player for the Faculty Club. Absolutely nothing about this feels familiar:
Mr. Sharrar, by the way, taught economics. He was assistant to the Dean at this time and later became a Houston attorney.
Bonus: Our New Year’s eve party was perhaps a wee bit too successful.
Heh. Some things stay the same. No one wants to buy A/V equipment until some reason comes up that they need it.
Please, what was the result of this letter? I can’t stand the suspense…
I don’t see anything with the results of the poll but from other notices it does seem that they went ahead and got the radio with phonograph. I’ll keep my eyes open as I go through the boxes.
I have a pretty good idea who the nay-sayers were.
That letter may be the most polite expressions of “Put up or shut up” that I’ve ever seen.