Rice University

paid no tuition. Classes were difficult, however, and about half of Rice's students had failed after the first 1912 term. At its first commencement ceremony, held on June 12, 1916, Rice awarded 35 bachelor's degrees and one master's degree. That year, the student body also voted to adopt the Honor System, which still exists today. The first Ph.D. was awarded in 1918 in mathematics.
In the 1920s, many of the university's early students were active supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, with a 1922 yearbook showing approximately twenty students wearing Klan robes in a posed photograph. President David Leebron reacted to the re-circulation of these images in 2019 by stating that "It is unsurprising but nonetheless deeply disturbing that racist imagery, including students in blackface and KKK outfits, appeared at Rice with some frequency during the years prior to the admission of black students." In 1923, a Ku Klux Klan event was held on a Rice-owned Louisiana Street location, near to the home of a Black woman who had …