Wordless Wednesday: thanks for visiting!

 

Memory Lane has changed

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I think I'm finally getting through some obligations to non-blog-worthy work, and hope to be a little better about this in the rest of 2025.

Like last week, when I spent a delightful few days with some old and new friends from college. This group of women get together every year and I've joined them a few times (once we visited a cave!). This year's outing, back on our old stomping grounds, wasn't one to pass up.

One of the things I was most interested in seeing was the newly designed academic quadrangle. That's a picture of it above. The landscaping is still in the beginning stages, but eventually there will actually be shade there—imagine, wanting shade in Houston! Yes, the iconic hedges of my youth are gone, but the overall design is more flowing and natural-looking, so the hedges' strict perpendicularity would have been out of place.

Here's a shot of one section of the quad where the plantings are really taking off, and you can see the curvature of the path:

The buildings in the background have been changed substantially, too: Anderson Hall on the right, where I had a lot of English classes, is now strictly the Archies' (that's Ar-Kees, or architecture students)

domain; and Fondren Library on the left, where I worked during and after graduation, now has a nice covered area with benches all along its front.

What inspired this transformation of the quad was the question of what to do with the statue of the University's founder, which sat right in the middle of it, in somewhat hagiographic splendor. (Although, some prankster engineering students in the 1980's treated it rather disrespectfully, actually lifting the entire statue around so that it faced the library instead of the administration building. You can see a picture of it flipped here, a shot which incidentally shows you a bit of how the quad looked before the re-design.)

The problem with according William Marsh Rice such elevated status is that he was an enslaver, and therefore some of the wealth used to endow the school—which was originally set up as an institute for whites only—was the result of enslaved people's labor. The University wanted to acknowledge this troublesome past, while at the same time being grateful for the man's vision, which has resulted in this first-class institution.

Not wanting to just jump in and take the statue away somewhere, after much careful thought they came up with the re-design of the quad and a new home for "Willy," as the statue has always been called by students. Here he is in his new digs, and down at eye level, as a human being, not held up as some sort of paragon:

He's still in the quad, just off in this attractive corner between the administration building and Sewell Hall. I feel like my alma mater handled this difficult history about as well as it could be handled. They even researched and published a lengthy report on the institution's history with segregation and injustice. I read the whole thing and it's a fascinating, thoughtful analysis of these issues; you can see it here.

Willy's plinth, or at least the base of it, is still in the center of the quad, just not perpendicular to the buildings any more, but at an angle, befitting the new design aesthetic:

I've read that the designers intend for it to be able to be used as a small performance space...maybe when some of those shade trees have grown a bit. I really like the quotation attached to it. Everyone's heard of Kennedy's speech at Rice Stadium, where he talks about going to the moon, but I've never heard this part of the speech before. The guy (or someone who worked for him) really knew how to write speeches, eh?

After a couple of days of contributing a ton of oral history for the University Historian (which brought back so many memories!) we took a tour of another building that wasn't around when we went to school. Just as I was leaving, the Shepherd School of Music was being born, and their enormous, but lovely, building now takes up part of what used to be the stadium parking lot. (It was opened in 1975.) A bit more of that lot was taken to build the new opera house, which was just dedicated in 2022. The Shepherd School is on the right here, and the Brockman Music and Performing Arts Center (the opera house) is on the left. I made sure some of my friends were in the frame so you could see the scale of these behemoths!

We had an informative talk by the Brockman's director, and then got to sit in on a rehearsal, which was super cool...

the hall's impressive ceiling,
with a bit of some of the seating levels

...and what was even more amazing, was a look backstage, and a talk by the guy who almost single-handedly makes all the sets. Here's a piece left over from a previous show, that will probably get used again:

you can almost smell the fresh-cut wood, can't you?

All this grandeur tends to color my memories of the campus now, although whenever I have one of those "there's an exam and I forgot to study!" nightmares, I'm usually on the "ghost campus" as it  was in 1967-71. So walking around is both familiar and strange...a little unsettling, but still worthwhile. (You can read of previous trips to campus, and see other changes and artistic touches, by following the Rice University label on the right.)

I'll close with a shot of the fabulous opera house, looking worthy of being in London or Milan, don't you think?