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John A. Rice is the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution. He attracted many important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors. Among them, John Cage, Robert Creeley, William de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline. During World War II, Rice opened the door as a haven for refugee European artsts such as Josef and Anni Albers, who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. Later, Black Mountain College became the platform for the work of Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome. The college became the site of the first dome. Because of his strong ideas and unusual educational philosophy, Rice became involved in many debates in the socially conservative 30's, 40's and 50's. He was known as a critic of many of the widely implemented methods of higher education and as such was very outspoken in his observations.

Rice was born in Lynchburg, South Carolina. He was the son of a Methodist minister and his mother, Annabelle Smith was from a prominent South Carolina family. Rice attended The Webb School, a highly regarded boarding school located in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. He encountered the teacher he would revere all his life, John Webb. Rice then attended Tulane University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. After Rice graduated 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. John never completed his doctoral studies; he secured a faculty position at the University of Nebraska. He proved himself brilliant in the classroom and in counseling students. His teaching methods were aimed at accelerating the student's emotional and intellectual maturity, rather than encouraging a reliance on a store of subject knowledge. From the University of Nebraska, Rice took his unique teaching strategies to the New Jersey College for Women. He was forced to resign after two years amid a faculty controversy which was not resolved. He then landed a faculty position at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. At Rollins, he found himself again in a controversial position, as faculty and students found him to be either brilliant and charismatic, or divisive and argumentative. Rice also spoke out against the institutions of fraternities and sororities and objecting to various policies of the president of Rollins, Hamilton Holt and was asked to resign.

Rice then began planning for the learning community that became Black Mountain College. The college opened in 1933 with twenty-one students and eventually grew to nearly one-hundred students. Rice brought a number of new innovative ideas. He brought with him the values of experimental learning and the contribution of social and cultural endeavors outside the classroom. Rice enjoyed incorporating visitors into his classrooms and encouraging the students to take part in community work projects. Rice became known for his new ideas and his open mind to unusual teaching methods. Black Mountain College began to be recognized nationally and Rice's name lives on in the halls of Black Mountain.

After a divorce from his first wife, Rice married Dikka Moen and had two children. He then began another career as a writer, contributing many short stories to such publications as Colliers and The New Yorker. He also published a book of short stories entitled "Local Color" and wrote his memoir entitled "I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century".

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Lane, Mervin, ed. 1990. Black Mountain College, Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Reynolds, Katherine Chaddock. 1998. Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

"John A. Rice (1888-1968) - Black Mountain College, Life as a Writer". State University.com, 2008

"John Andrew Rice: Black Mountain College's Provocative Patriarch". Blackmountaincollege.org.

Ritholz, Robert E. A. P. 1999. History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 349-350. Blackwell.