Houston to Houston

Young, prosperous ($27 million endowment) Rice Institute at Houston has perhaps the top engineering school in the Southwest, and a reputation for choosiness. Rice has never hired a campus pressagent. For years it cheerfully flunked out its most promising football material in the Christmas exams. When alumni howled, Rice reluctantly established a slightly less exacting department of physical education with a B.S. for thick-skulled athletes, but it never liked the idea. Rice has had only one president in its 34 years, derby-hatted, aloof Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett. Four years ago, at 70, Dr. Lovett said he wanted to quit.

It has taken Rice four years to get his successor. The trustees went out to find a scientist with the right amount of "character, reputation, experience, ability, personality and background." At last they found him: benign, highbrowed Physicist William Vermillion Houston, 46, who last year succeeded famed Robert Andrews Millikan as chairman of the California Institute of Technology's division of physics, mathematics and electrical engineering.

The studious son of a Presbyterian minister, Dr. Houston was a college physics teacher at 20, a full professor at Cal Tech at 31, at 34 the author of a definitive text in mathematical physics. For several years during the 'war he worked on anti-submarine devices at Columbia University. No backslapping endowment hustler, Physicist Houston intends to continue his own researches (spectroscopy, the structure of solvents), to stiffen Rice's entrance requirements, and to keep sports a college sideline. Says he: "Football should serve principally to provide necessary physical relaxation." His first big task: to get the people of Houston (who pronounce it hew-ston) to pronounce his name how-ston.

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