Boles bids farewell to Rice at retirement reception

History professor thanks university for giving ‘countrified boy’ an intellectual and social home

Not many authors, let alone busy professors, can write a biography so compelling it makes a Washington Post book reviewer come out of retirement.

“I found Rice just exhilarating,” said retiring history professor John Boles at an April 26 reception in his honor. (Photos by Jeff Fitlow)

Rice President David Leebron quoted that review — a 2017 piece by Jonathan Yardley, who served as the Post’s book critic for 33 years — in his speech honoring the teaching career of John Boles ’65, the William P. Hobby Professor of History, at a retirement reception April 26 in the Moody Center for the Arts.

“’Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty’ is perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president,” Yardley wrote. “Boles, a professor of history at Rice University, has spent many years studying Jefferson’s native American South in all its mysteries, contradictions, follies and outrages, as well as its unique contributions to the national culture and literature. This biography is the culmination of a long, distinguished career. I admire it so passionately that, almost 2 1/2 years into a happy retirement, I had no choice except to violate my pledge never again to write another book review.”

This was just one of many triumphs across Boles’ long and distinguished career. The Journal of Southern History published its first issue at Rice in 1959, almost presaging the arrival of a 17-year-old Boles in 1961. The freshman from the deep East Texas town of Center, for whom big-city Houston was like Paris, would become one of the nation’s leading scholars of the American South while simultaneously raising the academic profile of Rice, his adopted home.

“John’s been a part of Rice since 1961,” said Carl Caldwell, chair of the History Department, who hosted the reception alongside Dean of Humanities Kathleen Canning.

“John’s been a part of Rice since 1961,” said Carl Caldwell, chair of the History Department. “That means at the Centennial (in 2012), he’d been part of Rice for half its existence.”

The crowded house at his reception attested to Boles’ status as a fixture at the university. In addition to dozens of former students who came from across the country to wish their former professor well, Leebron noted that the farewell event drew students, staff and faculty from nearly every department at Rice.

“That alone is an extraordinary statement of our appreciation for you,” Leebron said.

Leebron reserved special praise for the relationships that Boles, “one of our most beloved professors,” formed with his graduate students, agreeing with a sentiment put forth by fellow history professor Allen Matusow: “Allen simply said he was the best graduate teacher we ever had.”

‘We owe him enormous thanks’

Boles began his teaching career at Rice in 1981 after earning his bachelor’s degree from Rice in 1965 and his doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1969. Nearly 40 years later, in 2018, his final Ph.D. student graduated.

Boles directed the dissertations of 63 doctoral students, many of whom were in the audience.

All told, Dean of Humanities Kathleen Canning told the audience, Boles directed 63 doctoral dissertations and taught countless more undergraduates. Those 63 grad students produced 29 books of their own under Boles and more than 50 others in their careers as professional historians.

“This is the kind of influence that lasts really into the next several generations,” Canning said. “With this work, John Boles truly reshaped this field, opened it up to all kinds of new humanities and is truly the master of the field, and we owe him enormous thanks on behalf of Rice, the School of Humanities, the History Department and the history profession.”

As three of his former grad students mentioned in speeches during the event, many institutions didn’t consider the history of the American South a prestigious area of study prior to Boles’ influence. That all changed as Boles wrote or edited nearly two dozen books, spent 30 years editing the highly regarded Journal of Southern History and took on numerous directorships of various centers, symposia and societies.

Yet throughout it all, Boles always had time for his students — and time for Rice.

Having worked on four books about Rice’s own history as an institution, including the seminal “University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute,” it came as no surprise when Leebron and Rice Provost Marie Lynn Miranda presented his retirement gift: a scale replica of Lovett’s Centennial statue outside Keck Hall.

Rice President David Leebron presented Boles with a scale replica of the Edgar Odell Lovett statue.

Miranda confessed that she often broke out a pen and pad to take notes whenever she heard Boles give a lecture, but just as often she was so transfixed by his stories she forgot to write anything down once the renowned speaker started talking.

“I know, John, that you are an outstanding scholar, that you have been a tremendous mentor to 63 doctoral students, that you have been an inspired teacher to undergraduates throughout many classes and over many years,” Miranda said. “I know that you have been a fantastic colleague, both to your friends and colleagues in the History Department but really to the entire faculty of the university. I know that you have been all of those things, but for me you are the consummate storyteller. It turns out all that time that you have been telling us your stories you have been teaching us, and I am really grateful for the opportunity to learn from you.”

Boles took the stage following remarks from three Rice graduates who are now historians of note at their own institutions: Elizabeth Hayes Turner ’90, professor of history at the University of North Texas; Luke Harlow ’07, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Michele Gillespie ’83, dean of the college of arts and sciences and Presidential Endowed Professor of Southern History at Wake Forest University.

These members of what Harlow called “the greater John Boles mafia” represented only a small selection of the people whose lives were changed by his mentorship. As the evening continued, colleagues and former students who couldn’t attend in person chimed in on social media.

“Your personal and intellectual generosity are models for your 63 Ph.D. students to pass on in our own work,” read one of many Twitter tributes to Boles, this one from Texas A&M University history professor Carlos Kevin Blanton ’99.

‘Rice has been a wonderful experience’

Perhaps it was only natural that Boles should become a great teacher. Raised in post-war Shelby County, a poor part of the Piney Woods, Boles said his upbringing wasn’t much different from what many others experienced in the rural South in those days—it was almost as though he grew up in an earlier era—his family didn’t have a car at times, heated its home with a wood-burning stove and butchered hogs for food. His schools didn’t have basic scientific instruments like microscopes or facilities like research libraries. But what they did have were passionate educators.

Boles and his family grew up alongside Rice itself.

“Even though my school system was amazingly poor, I had great teachers,” Boles said. Sensing greatness in the young Boles, they occasionally drove him to a nearby teachers’ college—now Stephen F. Austin University—where they were taking extra courses so he could use the college library, before they dropped him off again at the family farm. His teachers invested in him early on, encouraging collegiate pursuits he hadn’t dreamed of.

“They knew we were poor so they suggested that I should go to Rice,” Boles said. “It never occurred to me that you didn’t just sort of show up. Most people I knew just went to Panola Junior College.”

Soon, the East Texas kid who’d never even had a slice of pizza — had never even eaten in a restaurant — was immersed in Rice and in Houston.

“I found Rice just exhilarating,” Boles said. “I’d never actually talked to someone who wasn’t from Texas, and here I had classmates and friends from all over the United States and some from beyond the United States.”

After Rice, Boles went to graduate school at the University of Virginia, where he met his wife, Nancy, a fellow grad student. After teaching in Maryland and at Tulane, Boles found himself back at Rice in 1981. The family watched the children grow up alongside the university itself.

“We were totally engaged in Rice,” Boles said. “We went to plays, we went to athletic events, we went to talks on campus, we went to concerts, we used Rice as our private park. Our boys came down to ride their bikes. Rice was not just our intellectual home but our social home.”

Leebron and Provost Marie Lynn Miranda both gave remarks honoring “one of our most beloved professors.”

The university, Boles said, “took this incredibly countrified boy from East Texas and introduced him to the world — to a whole range of topics and ideas and courses that I’d never thought of — and then it gave me the wonderful privilege of teaching on a beautiful campus in small classes with wonderful students and great support.”

And all of this, he was sure to note, happened because Rice didn’t charge tuition when Boles matriculated.

“I came to Rice because it was free,” he said. “My parents had zero money. I’m really inspired that President Leebron recently introduced “The Rice Investment ”— once again to make Rice free to students whose parents don’t have much money.”

Fittingly for the man who wrote the book on Lovett, Rice’s first president, Boles quoted Lovett’s inauguration speech given Oct. 12, 1912.

“Lovett said it’s really important that the educational opportunities of Rice be available ‘to the deserving student of slender means,’” Boles said. “And I think that’s a wonderful sentiment and phrase.”

“Rice has been a wonderful experience,” Boles finished, addressing the crowd to roaring applause. “Thank you so much. And thank you to Rice for letting me be here all these years.”