<p>Are you kidding? Stanford doesn’t call itself “The Leland Stanford Junior University.” The only university I can think of that regularly goes by its full name is Johns Hopkins, which I think does well despite its name.</p>
<p>EDIT: Also, You are not a Rice student yet if you are the class of 2014. You are a future Rice student. Don’t profess to understand the school on the same level as those of us who have been here four years.</p>
<p>Historically, it doesn’t make sense to elevate our founder, because the only thing he has to do with this university is that he gave a lot of money to start it. He had no intention of founding a great university; he wanted to start a trade school for workers in Houston, where they could take night classes on new technologies like typewriters and telephones. The board of trustees decided, “Hey, we’re sitting on this huge pile of cash; we have an opportunity to do something much better than this.” They decided to buy a new, larger plot of land away from the center of Houston (on a pig farm, actually), and to hire a young, charismatic leader to be the new president of The William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art. They wrote letters to presidents of all the major US universities, and one of those letters wound up in the hands of Woodrow Wilson, who was then the president of Princeton. He knew a young mathematician named Edgar Odell Lovett, who he believed would be perfect for the job. After a bit of persuasion from the board, Lovett accepted the job, and he spent the next year of his life traveling around the world to all these different great universities, picking and choosing what he liked for the new university in Houston. Lovett, not Rice, shaped the initial vision of this university, and he is what made it great. RRF.</p>