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.
