Oral history project
In April 1969, an oral history project to document the Masterson crisis was announced. The project was headed by Joseph Cooper of Political Science, Harold Hyman of History, and Richard Lytle of the University Archives. They asked faculty and students to give them any documents they had collected about the crisis, and to volunteer to be interviewed about their experience. The purpose of the project was for "use in scholarly assessments of these events as Rice history, and in the broader context of academic social change."
Sixty-nine interviews were conducted between May and October 1969 and were recorded on reel-to-reel magnetic tapes, from which transcriptions or abstracts were then made. Because the interviews were scheduled near the end of the school year, students were interviewed first. To assure confidentiality and avoid bias, Polly Moore, a graduate student at the University of Houston, conducted the interviews, and all interviews were closed to everyone until October 1974.
Although the directors of the project reached out to people on both sides of the Masterson crisis, including Masterson himself, many on the "pro-Masterson" or "pro-Trustee" side refused to be interviewed. As a result, the majority of the interviewees were people who had been opposed to the Masterson appointment and were involved in the protests.
