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“I was the man who came to dinner, and I quickly stayed—or overstayed, as the case may be.” —Doc C
Last spring during Beer Bike week, Doc C received a welldeserved tribute as about 200 students and alumni gathered to honor him at Will Rice College. His admirers prepared a crawfish boil, cookies, and refreshments and handed Doc C a “Thanks for the Memories” book replete with humorous and moving letters. They also chose the Beer Bike theme in his honor and made a maroon-colored T-shirt emblazoned with an image of a lemon and the words: “Doc C’s Hard Lemon, Beer Bike 2004, 40 years of Doc C’s Excellence.” The biggest present, however, was the dedication of the Will Rice game room to him. The room includes a lasting tribute to Doc C’s legacy at the residential college: a mural painted on one of the game room walls that depicts Doc C and longtime Will Rice College coordinator Babs Willis sitting together on a bench in the college patio. “Little” Bobby Duncan ’71 painted it and, in his dedication, thanked the two for having “done so much for all of us.” “Students have been driving me up a wall for 40 years,” Doc C jokes, “and now one of our alumni has decided to paint a mural and put me up on the wall.” But even without his picture on the wall, Doc C would be a permanent part of the myth of Will Rice. “He is an institution,” says Will Rice College Master Traci Wolfe. “He is the college.” In many ways, Doc C is the father of Will Rice. The college was in its infancy—only seven years
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old—when Doc C became a resident associate in 1964. He played a big role in nurturing Will Rice’s growth, personality, and tradition. Doc C came to Rice University in 1963 after receiving his PhD in political science from Harvard University, but his decision to work at Rice had been made in his senior year at the University of Kansas. He was at a student conference for national affairs when he met Rice philosophy professor Radoslav Tsanoff. “I was so impressed with Dr. Tsanoff’s intellectual ability that I wanted to come to Rice after I graduated from Harvard,” says the 67-yearold Doc C. “Dr. Tsanoff has always been a model for me.” When Doc C arrived at Rice, there were only six colleges: Wiess, Baker, Hanszen, Jones, Brown, and Will Rice. The campus had so many open spaces that students could hear the lions roar from the Houston Zoo in Hermann Park. Students, however, had to suffer the Houston heat because the colleges didn’t have air conditioning or refrigerators. What’s more, liquor wasn’t allowed in the colleges at the time, and women were not allowed in the men’s colleges and vice versa. “Therefore, the problem was how to keep people from living off campus, which is quite different from today,” Doc C says. He decided to become a resident associate after having dinner one night at Will Rice. Students wanted to know what kind of questions might be on his final exam the next day and gathered around the table to probe his mind. After some discussion, the group came up with questions
that captured the essence of the class, and some of those questions did appear on the test. The students were so grateful that they invited Doc C to become part of the college. “I was the man who came to dinner, and I quickly stayed—or overstayed, as the case may be,” Doc C says. He remained because he wanted to make a difference in students’ lives. “I feel the colleges are closely connected with the teaching and academic process. I think that my effectiveness as an educator has been developed through the close participation with the students in the college,” he says. “It gives you an opportunity to develop an awareness of student attitude toward both campus and national issues.”
The college system, Doc C continues, has a transforming effect on the students. “You come into the college, and you are not the same after you have left. It is an intellectual experience, a social experience, but also a mythological or spiritual experience. It is like going out the Sallyport into the world beyond the hedges at commencement. There is a change.” Will Rice especially encourages students to think independently, according to Doc C. While other colleges might have more formal rules, Will Rice cultivates a laissezfaire environment. “We are the college of individuals, or even the college of revolutionaries, because we have relatively few formal rules for conduct and procedure.”
Looking ever-so young, the new resident associate often was mistaken for an undergraduate. Bob Vanzant ’70 remembers the first time he saw Doc C. The professor was playing bridge with a group of students, and Vanzant wondered who this “young student” was and why he was called “Doc.” On the last day of freshman week, Doc C could not be found, and students feared that he would miss the matriculation address. “Imagine our surprise when we spotted whom we had assumed to be just another freshman, sitting on the stage in his Crimson Harvard regalia, among the other department chairs.” In his four decades at Will Rice, Doc C has lived in only two rooms. He resided on the fourth floor for a few years, but moved when students decided to convert the sundeck into a swimming pool by blocking the drain. “When water from the blocked drain leaked into my room, I decided to move down one flight to save the stairs and not have to worry about swimming pools, sundecks, or leakage, not to mention the noise.” Doc C is hard of hearing, but there are many pranks that have caught his ears. “I remember back in the ’60s” he says, “when Fidel Castro was threatening to bomb a coastal city, and I woke up in the middle of the night and students were playing a World War II bombing record full blast up on the sundeck, simulating a bombing raid.” Another prank that would have landed some students in serious trouble had Doc C not intervened was the UFO incident.