Martel erroneously labeled as a mistake

By Sean McBeath     12/3/09 6:00pm

I've been listening to people call the founding of Martel College a "mistake" for about a year now, and it's time someone set the record straight: The "Martel mistake" is a Rice myth. Admittedly, it's a pervasive one. So pervasive, in fact, that we allowed it to shape the way in which we most recently undertook the founding of our two newest colleges.First, let's rewind nine years. With the charge to form a new college at Rice, Martel's first masters, Joan and Arthur Few, selected the members of Martel's Founding Committee: a group of 16 students - two each from the eight existing colleges - whose charge was to create the foundation upon which Martel would be built. The Founding Committee met for the first time in October 2000, more than a year before any students would move into Martel, to discuss how to begin the first new college in 31 years.

The Founding Committee spent months researching and writing Martel's constitution and bylaws. Martel began wooing applicants in Fall 2000, and selected their founding classes in the Spring of 2001.

This selection process is the "mistake" that the university attempted to avoid by creating the "random invitation" system. For years after its opening, Martel was labeled the home of "social rejects" based on the impression that only friendless introverts would leave their homes to join a fledgling college.

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The vitriol Martel faced in its younger years was more the result of the other colleges' jealousy and bitterness than it was a reflection of a failure in the process by which it was founded. But the perception that it was some part of its founding that created that resentment permeated Rice so thoroughly that members of the administration have come to believe it, and so conceived the new colleges' invitation system to avoid the "Martel mistake."

Unfortunately, the system did not unfold as planned. Bypassing invitations, Orientation Week coordinators and advisers were given the first opportunity to join the new colleges, removing any semblance of randomness from the makeup of their upper classes. These people, in essence, are the new Founding Committees: They are upperclassmen selected through application, by commitee, in one form or another.

As for the rest of the new colleges' upper classes, it is difficult to predict how they will play out. While Martel put its applicants through a screening process to select those members whose contributions would be greatest, Duncan and McMurtry can only hope that their upperclassmen are transferring to help build a new community and are not merely seeking a room in a newer building and quicker access to the new West Servery.

Ultimately, the systems do not differ greatly: Martel's Founding Committee selected our predecessors, while Duncan and McMurtry's have selected themselves. Certainly, under both systems, the students most excited about building a new college found a way to make themselves a part of it. And both systems will find themselves in possession of students who don't have the best interest of a new college at heart.

That's not to say that Martel's founding and those of Duncan and McMurtry are duplicates. There is one key difference: We were months ahead of our young neighbors.

Martel drafted a constitution and selected its upperclassmen six months in advance of its opening. Duncan and McMurtry boast freshman classes, but no upperclassmen. They have no masters and no official government. Instead, they're forced to piggyback on their "sister" colleges, Baker College and Will Rice College.

The delay is not accidental, though perhaps partially an effect of Duncan and McMurtry sharing their homes with the South Colleges. As a part of the founding plan, the Dean's Office left the creation of the college, in its entirety, to the founding students. Where Martel's first Masters were selected by President Gillis, McMurtry's and Duncan's are to be selected by their founding students.

Supposedly, this change was motivated by Martelians who complained we should have been given some say in the selection of our first Masters. I can't guess at the identity of these students, none of whom would have been at Rice in the last four years.

Whether Duncan and McMurtry sink or swim in these first years, I think, will not depend so much on the system of their founding as the students. And not just the students who choose to transfer, and those who have the honor of being selected as its first native classes, but the entire student body.

Martel's image as a failed experiment is the result of the behavior of the other eight colleges during our founding. Ask any Martelian - especially those who remember the first classes - and they'll tell you: Martel was not a mistake.

I asked one of our founders what he thought about people calling Martel a "mistake." His response? "Martel was a college before we had a building. Now the university has two new buildings and no new colleges."

Sean McBeath is a senior and Martel College president.

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