The Jacks at Rice

Rice was ranked the “Coolest College in the Land” by Seventeen magazine in 2002 (cite). Them teenage anorexic girls should know a thing or two about being cool.

Dr Malcolm Gillis, our then president, declared on that day, “If people insist on calling us cool, then maybe we should act the part. At least part of the time.” He asked all Owls (Rice students) to wear shades both inside and outside for a week or two as badges of coolness. So asking, he fished out his shades from his blazer and put ‘em on. (This explains my wearing-shades-inside-buildings habit)

A huge part of the reason why Rice is cool, is most definitely the Jacks during Willy Week. You can refer to Wikipedia here. Let me copy & paste the relevant section:

"Jack" is the Rice term for a prank, often an elaborate one. A simple jack might be replacing "you are here" campus map with a map of an amusement park. A well-known jack in the 1980s was "stacking" a commons, in which students went to the commons of another college late at night and stacked all the tables and chairs on top of each other, forcing the residents to disassemble the stack when they came down for meals the next morning. During Willy Week, large-scale jacks are often organized by one college on another college.

The most notorious and legendary jack in Rice history was the turning of William Marsh Rice's statue in the Academic Quadrangle in April 1988. After several months of detailed planning, a group of Wiessmen [as the name says, from Weiss college] succeeded in lifting the bronze statue (using a hoist mounted on an A-frame), rotating it 180 degrees, and setting it back down undamaged on its stone pedestal. ^[8]. The university hired a contractor to turn Willy's statue back to its original position. While the students apparatus cost only a couple of hundred dollars, the contractor used a hydraulic crane, charging several thousands of dollars, and managing to bend one of the pins in the process. The culprits were fined the cost of the job. They raised more than enough funds by selling t-shirts printed with the blue prints of the a-frame structure. This jack instantly gained national publicity for Rice. Today the turning of the statue stands out as the epitome of a successful jack: creative, elaborate, highly visible, and harmless. In later years, legends evolved that the students were protesting a planned tuition increase or that the stunt symbolized the Founder turning his back on the administration in Lovett Hall. In fact, the prank was merely that--a prank.

What Wikipedia didn’t mention is that, jacks are highly organized secret missions. If a Jacksman is caught discussing his college’s intended jack over a pint of beer, he will become a social pariah and be forced to transfer to Martel College or something equally bad.

I was personally involved in one cool jack we Hanszen-ites pulled off on Weiss College (our arch enemies). It was Operation Yellow Water. But I will save it for another day.

I shall talk about one of the most memorable jacks during my time at Rice. It was a jack on Sid Richardson College by Lovett College in the year 2003. Sid Richardson is the tallest building and college on campus. They have been misusing this privilege since 1960s by mounting monstrous speakers on top of their tower and blasting the most godawfully diabolic ‘music’ every Friday evening announcing the coming of the weekend (or the Devil). Over the years, traumatized students filed petitions, rival colleges united in campaigns demanding Administration to intervene to protect the sanity of the squirrels on campus (needless to say the Administration didn’t get involved in murky college politics). All to no avail. In 2003, a gutsy group of Lovett jacksmen drew up a highly daring, complicated secret plan that involved consultations with archies, mechies, and even chemies. Not only did they successfully steal Sid’s monstrosities but also hid them so ingeniously that they weren’t discovered for a full week (in spite of the campus wide hunt by the Sid Rich men). This meant Sid Rich was the only college that, humiliatingly, couldn’t play music for the entire Beer Bike Week. This is akin to celebrating a birthday party with no birthday cake or a bachelor’s party with no ..ahem .. ‘special’ dancer. Since, then, Sid Rich always has a bunch of people guarding the Sid Rich speakers during the weeks leading to Beer Bike and Willy Week. This jack is the stuff for legends.

Sid Rich had its revenge the very next year, in 2004. This is another cool (but not legendary) Beer Bike jack during my time. Sid Rich jacksmen systematically stole Lovett students’ information (through devious means and connections within the Administration as well as some moles in Lovett) and wrote to every Lovett student’s parents a letter, in a very official tone, complete with Rice logo and the jazz. A letter saying something along the lines of:

“…..Owing to the following reasons:

• the Lovett College Chef ABC has been shipped off to oversee the meals at XYX State Penitentiary,
• the building’s bomb-shelter-type-architecture being an eye sore on the Rice campus, has prompted the Board of Trustees to allow the demolition of the college building,

your son/daughter will no longer belong to the soon-to-be-annihilated Lovett College, and his/her accommodation will be arranged at the nearest Motel 8, which has been deemed luxurious enough for a Lovett-ite”...

!

(Note: the quality of a college chef is an extremely important, and touchy status symbol for the colleges. And may I add that Hanszen’s Chef Roger was Italian, and ranked second to some Hilton Hotel chef in the South-West or something equally impressive. So popular was he that the Administration added a Cooking with Chef Roger course into the syllabi at Rice

Also note: Motel 8 rating is probably minus 4 stars. No offense meant to anybody who stayed in a motel with a number for its name at some point in your lives. I confess, I did too. )

Soon, Lovett College received about 200 calls over the next few days from puzzled, worried, befuddled and amused (since some parents were Rice alums, and they suspected it was a jack), parents asking what the hell was going on!

Ah! The Jacks! The glory of a successful jack! A Place in the Sun!