John Andrew Rice

John Andrew Rice Jr. (February 1, 1888, to November 16, 1968) was the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, North Carolina. During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution, attracting many important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors, including John Cage, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline. During World War II, he made it a haven for refugee European artists, including Josef Albers and Anni Albers, who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. Later, Black Mountain College became the platform for the work of Buckminster Fuller, who made the college the site of the first geodesic dome. Because of his strong ideas and unusual educational philosophy, Rice became involved in many debates in the socially conservative 1930s, '40s and '50s, becoming known as a very outspoken critic of the standard model of higher education in the United States. Early and family life Rice was the son of Methodist minister John Andrew Rice Sr. and Annabelle Smith, who was from a prominent South Carolina family. He was born at Tanglewood Plantation, near Lynchburg, South Carolina, and attended The Webb School, a highly regarded boarding school located in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, where he met the teacher he would revere all his life, John Webb. Rice then attended Tulane University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. After graduating from Oxford, he married Nell Aydelotte and began teaching at Webb School, but left after a year to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, which he never completed. He had three children with Nell Aydelotte before their divorce, of which one son died as an infant and daughter Mary A. R. Marshall and son Frank survived. Career Rice secured a faculty position at the University of Nebraska, where he proved himself brilliant in the classroom and in counseling students. His teaching methods were aimed at accelerating the students' emotional and intellectual maturity, rather than encouraging a reliance on a store of subject knowledge.