Rice Thresher to mark 100 years

EDITOR’S NOTE: THE APRIL 8 CELEBRATION HAS BEEN POSTPONED. THIS STORY WILL BE UPDATED WHEN THE NEW DATE AND TIME HAS BEEN SET.

For 100 years, the Rice Thresher has been the student-run source of campus news from the relatively quotidian — faculty accomplishments, campus lectures and athletics scores — to the outlandish — from a construction crane crowned homecoming queen to college jacks.

The first issue of the Rice Thresher, the university’s student-run newspaper, hit campus Jan. 15, 1916.

To mark its milestone anniversary, the Thresher will host a celebration in the Academic Quad April 8 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., complete with treats, music and a party favor: a special 44-page centennial magazine. The commemorative magazine will look back at how the newspaper covered big news stories as well as its evolution over the century.

And what an evolution it has been. The first issue of the Rice Thresher hit campus Jan. 15, 1916. Among the front-page stories in the four-page publication were the announcement of a new dormitory to be built at a cost of $98,000 and a function held by the Leap Year Dancing Club at which “punch, sandwiches and candy refreshed the dancers.”

For 100 years, the Rice Thresher has campus covered news of all sorts, including historic visits like President John F. Kennedy’s in 1962.

In the ensuing years, the Thresher documented the growth of campus and the student body, recorded the ebb and flow of campus traditions, reflected social and cultural changes and reported historic events at the university, such as John F. Kennedy’s famous “Moon Speech” at Rice Stadium in September 1962 and the Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations in July 1990.

The Thresher itself has changed over the decades. The paper instituted different design layouts and typefaces, added color photos and graphics and began publishing online while still producing a weekly print edition. With an ever-changing staff, the Thresher has adopted varied editorial voices, but the Backpage has become the traditional outlet for humor and satire. In fact, in characteristic unconventional style, the last page of the paper is often the first page that students read.

The transformation of the paper — and the world it reports on — is apparent when that debut issue is compared with one published 100 years later. The Jan. 13, 2016, issue included stories about Rice’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders, which was endowed by a $50 million donation; binge-watching movies during a flight from Houston to Taipei; and the election of Sylvester Turner as Houston’s second black mayor (and who had the endorsement of the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama).

Even though Rice does not have a journalism school, the Thresher has won a number of awards, including being named best newspaper at schools with fewer than 5,000 students by the College Media Association. Some former Thresher editors and writers have made a career of journalism, including Paul Burka ’63, who retired last year as senior executive editor of Texas Monthly; Lisa Gray ’88, the “Gray Matters” columnist for the Houston Chronicle; and Evan Mintz ’08, a member of the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board.

Peruse archival issues of the Rice Thresher online in the Portal to Texas History, http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/THRSH/, or in Rice’s Digital Scholarship Archive, https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/64890.