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>> Tom Blocher: In 1970 I was president of Hanszen College.
And I put together a committee with -- together with people from Brown College.
Brown and Hanszen were the leaders in what we today called coed colleges.
At that time Jones and Brown were all women and the other five colleges were all men.
But we put together a student committee and we proposed to the student council,
which I was a member, that we put a referendum in front of the student body.
Should we go coed?
It was an intense debate.
Most of the debaters were heavily against going coed as a breach of tradition.
And the women were very, very much against this because they did not believe
that our colleges were as clean and sanitary as the women's colleges.
Nevertheless, it passed the student body, 85 percent.
So we then took it through Dean Pfeiffer, who was the dean of students at the time,
to the actual board of directors, and I met with Malcolm Lovett and the assembled board
of directors here in Rice Memorial Center
and I told them what had happened with the election and all.
They gave us the okay.
We took it to student -- I mean, to the Faculty Senate.
Dean Pfeiffer took it to the faculty.
The faculty voted in favor.
President Hackerman okayed it.
And within the next year the colleges started shifting over to coed.
The first three were Brown, Baker and Hanszen.
And it's basically because of me, when you get right down to it.
And my name is Tom Blocher.
You can check it out.
But here's the interesting thing.
Freshmen were admitted based on the number of freshmen beds available.
So at that time the quota for women coming to Rice University was about 28 to 30 percent.
Now it's open admission. No quota.
We had won a football game, and after the football game we were going
to have a BYOM party at the Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown, near Allen's landing.
The BOYM means bring your own mattress.
The kegs were provided.
Restrooms were not provided.
However, we made do with what mother nature allowed us.
The next day there were so many beer soaked mattresses that we put them on the roof
of the new section of Hanszen, which you can access easily,
and they were up there to dry out.
This caused attention.
And the attention resulted in a ruling that you're not allowed
to use university mattresses for BYOM parties in the future.
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