D. Kent Anderson and Alan J. Chapman Receive Gold Medals for Extraordinary Service

D. Kent Anderson and Alan J. Chapman Receive Gold Medals for Extraordinary Service

BY DAVID D. MEDINA
Special to the Rice News
May 13, 1999

D. Kent Anderson

Rice’s Gold Medal is awarded by the alumni association for extraordinary service to the university and for promoting the ideals of the school’s founder, William Marsh Rice. D. Kent Anderson, one of the 1999 Gold Medalists, fits those qualifications perfectly.

Anderson graduated from Rice University in 1962, not sure that he would return to his alma mater to be an active alumnus. “But I did come back, and I started picking up a sense of responsibility that I owed Rice,” he explains.

He began working on the Fund Council, and he did such a great job that he was asked to join the Rice Board of Governors in 1986, now called the Board of Trustees. In 1989, Anderson was elected a trustee.

“Whenever a modern history of Rice is written, I suspect Kent will be remembered as one of a handful of people who had done the most to move Rice to a new level of excellence,” says E. William Barnett ’55, chair of the Rice Board of Trustees.

Anderson has served on all the board committees and currently chairs the building and grounds committee and the newly formed nominations committee. Anderson has also worked on several search committees and chaired the one that found Rice President Malcolm Gillis.

He also co-chaired the leadership committee for Anne and Charles Duncan Hall and led the associates from 1987 to 1994 and the Lovett Society from 1992 to 1994. He was an adjunct professor of administration science for the 1981–82 term and served on the Shepherd Society Governing Council.

Anderson majored in geology and received a master’s of business administration in 1964 from the University of Virginia’s Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. He eventually became chair of several banks, including Post Oak Bank, Allied Bank and First Interstate Bank. He is now serving on several corporate boards and manages his family investment interests.

“Rice has done a lot for me,” he says. “And I have really enjoyed making a contribution to Rice.”

Alan J. Chapman

Alan J. Chapman, the second 1999 Gold Medalist, has been at Rice for more than half a century–three as an undergraduate and 53 as a teacher and administrator.

“I have been devoted to this place,” says Chapman, the Harry S. Cameron Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering. “Every school says it is unique, but Rice really is. It is small and offers a quality education and conducts outstanding research.”

Chapman has served on a number of university committees, including the faculty committee on athletics. He served as faculty athletics representative, president of the Southwest Conference and president of the NCAA in 1973. He has been the NCAA parliamentarian since 1975.

He also served as chair of the mechanical engineering department three different times, was vice president for administration for one year and worked as dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering from 1975 to 1980.

But the activity he has enjoyed the most at Rice, Chapman says, is teaching. And it shows. Chapman stands among the pantheon of Rice professors who have won the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching; he received the award five times. He was also honored in 1984 with the George R. Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching.

He did it by carefully preparing for his classes and simply enjoying his job. “I also had some good examples,” he explains. Lewis Ryon, a civil engineering professor, and math professor Hubert Bray were two of his favorite teachers. Bray, who later became his father-in-law, “was a man of ideals and he demanded excellence,” Chapman says.

When he graduated from Houston’s Lamar High School, Chapman had no intention of attending Rice or becoming a teacher. But it was 1940 and the country was still suffering from the Great Depression, so his parents told him to attend Rice, which had no tuition back then.

He went to school year–round because of World War II, finishing in three years with a mechanical engineering degree. He spent one year in the navy and then joined Rice in 1946. He studied during the summers at the University of Colorado and in 1949 received his master’s in mechanical engineering. In 1953, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has written a number of technical articles and a book, “Heat Transfer.”

At 74, Chapman hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for teaching. “I will continue teaching as long as I am useful,” he says. “It has been delightful and continues to be delightful.”