Gold Medalists: Hobbys Honored

Gold
Medalists: Hobbys honored
…………………………………………………………………

BY DAVID THEIS
Special to the Rice News

Rice’s
Gold Medal is awarded for extraordinary service to the university
and for promoting the ideals of the school’s founder,
William Marsh Rice. The 2001 Gold Medalists, Bill and Diana
Hobby, will be honored, along with the Distinguished Alumni
and the Meritorious Service Award recipients, at a May 12
dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel.

The Hobbys,
William P. (Bill) ’53 and Diana ’81, have dedicated
themselves to both Rice and the greater world. Inside and
outside the hedges, they have given freely of their resources
and personal talents, bringing the best of the world to
Rice and the best of Rice to the world.

“Rice has
graduated few leaders more energetic, generous, unassuming,
effective and beloved than Bill and Diana,” said Robert
Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in the Humanities.

“Bill and
Diana come from distinguished families, but neither chose
a life of leisure,” noted John Boles, the William Pettus
Hobby Professor of History. The Hobbys owned the Houston
Post, where Bill wrote editorials that, with their call
for Texans to consider the common good rather than narrow
self-interest, ruffled a few feathers. He ran the Post until
the paper’s sale to the Toronto Sun in 1983, taking
leaves of absence when the Texas Legislature was in session
so that he could perform an even more important and high-profile
function — his 18-year stint as lieutenant governor
of Texas, widely considered to be the most powerful job
in the state government.

After stepping
down from government in 1990, Hobby intensified his work
in higher education. He held the Sid Richardson Chair at
the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at The
University of Texas at Austin and became chancellor and
president of the University of Houston System. During this
time, Hobby also took on the hard work of teaching classes
on political representation, health policy and criminology
at Rice. He didn’t serve as a guest celebrity merely
lending his famous name but as a hard-working and inspiring
teacher.

If Bill is a
master of policy and politics, Diana is equally distinguished
in art and literature and mental health and children’s
issues. As book editor of the Houston Post and founding
board member of the Houston Cultural Arts Council, Diana
has helped to shape Houston’s cultural life. As a Ph.D.
student at Rice, she wrote a dissertation on the correspondence
of W.B. Yeats. From 1978 until 1991, she co-edited the distinguished
academic journal Studies in English Literature (SEL). Diana
managed to accomplish all this while raising four children
and helping her husband campaign for lieutenant governor.

Diana also is
distinguished by her unflagging service to libraries. Rice’s
own Fondren Library has been a beneficiary. In 1997, the
couple designated nearly $22 million to Fondren Library,
one of the largest gifts to a research library in U.S. history.
Diana labored for two years on the Library Planning Study,
which successfully argued for the library’s extensive
enlargement and renovation.

Finally, the
Hobbys’ support of the arts in Houston was most clearly
demonstrated when ground was broken on the Hobby Center
for the Performing Arts. The name of this striking building
is a fitting tribute to two of Rice’s, and Houston’s,
most generous and spirited citizens.