For Chapman, it’s been a 54-year affair to remember

For Chapman, it’s been a 54-year affair to remember

BY DAVID MEDINA
Special to the Rice News

With the start
of this semester and after years of hard work, Alan J. Chapman ’45 has become the longest-teaching professor at Rice
University, breaking the old record of 54 years set by his
father-in-law, Hubert Bray ’18.

Having just
passed the 54-year mark, Chapman, the Harry S. Cameron Professor
Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering, takes his monumental
achievement with a humble stride. “I feel the same,” he says and cracks a smile. Sitting behind his cluttered
desk in the Mechanical Engineering Building, he is thankful
that he is able to prepare for another class.

“It’s
been a continuous love affair,” he says. “It’s
been a very enjoyable experience. The students are a delight
to work with.”

Chapman’s
love affair with Rice University began early in life. He
was a teenager when he enrolled here, and because of World
War II, he went to classes year-round. In 1945, three years
after starting college, Chapman graduated with a mechanical
engineering degree.

He spent one
year in the navy on the aircraft carrier USS Midway in the
Atlantic and then joined the Rice faculty in 1946. He was
21. He is now 75. Counting his student and teaching days,
Chapman has been at Rice 58 years.

In the span
of more than half a century, Chapman is one of the very
few to witness the vast changes at Rice. When he started
teaching here, the 285-acre campus occupied only a few scattered
buildings, his department had five professors (now it has
20) and Edgar Odell Lovett, the school’s first president,
was still in office. Rice has had five presidents since
then, and Chapman has served under all of them.

“Rice is
different in every aspect,” Chapman explains. “The
students are more talented, the faculty is much larger and
more accomplished and the research activity is more intense
and a bigger part of the university. Rice was good back
then, but not as well-known. Now it is internationally recognized
as a first-class university that still retains a dedication
to the undergraduate.”

Over the years,
Chapman has garnered an array of honors. He served as chair
of the mechanical engineering department three different
times, was vice president for administration one year and
worked as dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering
from 1975 to 1980. He also was president of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and has been the
NCAA parliamentarian since 1975.

“There
is no other person that I know of who has had [such] devotion
to this university,” says Franz Brotzen, the Stanley
C. Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science.

Brotzen, who
has been at Rice for several decades, remembers the spring
of 1955, when the department chair left at midsemester and
Chapman, who was then a young assistant professor, was asked
to take over. “He did an admirable job for years,” Brotzen recalls.

In addition
to his many honors and positions, Chapman also has won the
Brown Award for Superior Teaching five times, and in 1984,
he received the Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Chapman credits
his teaching success, in part, to his father-in-law Bray,
a math professor. Bray started at Rice in 1916 as a teaching
assistant, received Rice’s first Ph.D. in 1918 and
retired in 1970.

“I admired
my father-in-law very much,” says Chapman. “He
was a great teacher who demanded the best from his students.”
Chapman says he still uses some of Bray’s phrases to
teach his classes. For example, he asks his students: “How
do you solve this problem if you were shipwrecked on a deserted
island and you didn’t have your textbook?”

Noel Willis ’59, who also received a Rice master’s degree
in ’61 and a doctorate in ’66 and studied under
Chapman as an undergraduate and graduate student, says he
remembers those quirky problems and a few more. Chapman,
Willis says, once gave the class an assignment to figure
out how long it would take to cook a turkey under certain
conditions.

“He had
a great sense of humor and he had a personal interest in
all the students,” explains Willis. “I remember
he would encourage us to be on time by locking the classroom
door.”

For Chapman,
teaching is what he has enjoyed the most at Rice. He doesn’t
plan to stop anytime soon. “Students keep you on your
toes and you have to be prepared,” says Chapman. “As
long as I am useful and Rice wants me to teach, I will continue.”

— David
Medina is a senior editor for the Sallyport and the minority
affairs director.