This is a minute from a meeting of the Rice trustees held in December, 1918. What they’ve done here is authorize the creation of three administrative positions: a bursar, a dean, and a registrar. This describes their duties, which are considerable:

By February, as we can see in the second point of this next letter, the men who would fill the positions had been chosen. All three of them would serve well and two of them, Samuel McCann and John McCants, would serve for many decades:

My immediate reaction was real surprise at the late date–how did campus business get done between 1912 and 1918? I don’t know for sure but I expect it was already being done by these same people. My next reaction was bemusement as I pondered the fact that with a few tweaks this was essentially the shape of the Rice administration until the 1960s.

Bonus: I enjoyed reading of Governor Hobby’s generosity in the first paragraph above. He’s standing near the center in this photo of the British Educational Mission’s visit to Rice, left of Captain Baker.

British Educational Mission visit to Rice Institute