From Frogs to Fundraising:
All Paths Lead Back to Rice

Elizabeth Guffy has done what many of us do during our lives—start down one path only to turn around and take another. That, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference” for Elizabeth, her family, and Rice.

For example, Elizabeth was accepted by both Bryn Mawr and Rice but chose Bryn Mawr. After two weeks there, she decided she was miserable, toughed it out until the end of the semester, and started at Rice the following spring.

Then she wanted to live on campus, but there was no space for her, so she lived off campus. In her sophomore year, she married her high school sweetheart, Michael, from tiny Newton, Texas, where they met while dissecting frogs in biology. Since her husband “kinda objected about my living on campus without him,” Elizabeth never lived in her residential college—Brown.

At Rice, she majored in biology, worked part time in the Medical Center and the Rice biology lab, and decided to get her graduate degree in biology from Rice. But after three years of postgraduate work, Elizabeth realized she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a lab “cutting up tadpoles.” So she went to law school at the University of Houston and now is a bankruptcy lawyer.

These days, she’s putting her husband through college at the University of Houston as he too travels another path, from Xerox technician to school counselor.

“We had an agreement that when I reached a certain income level, he could quit work, and I’d support him through school like he did for me,” Elizabeth says.

Her son, Philip, also is attending the University of Houston as a theater major. “I joke with people that Philip attended Rice for a while,” she says. “The professors I worked with as a graduate student in the biology lab gave me a playpen at my baby shower so I could bring him to work with me.”

Their support, as well as the monetary support she received from Rice to obtain a first-rate education, has motivated her to give back to the university.

“For me, there’s a sense you were given something that nobody had to give you,” she says. “You know that your education is subsidized by somebody, and when that happens, you turn around and pay it forward.”

She has served as co-chair for the class of 1980 for a decade, has consistently contributed to the Rice Annual Fund, and now serves as chair of Annual Gifts.

Elizabeth encourages alumni who may not be currently active in the university to take the path back to their educational roots and support their alma mater.

“Any time you get a degree from an institution, the value of your degree is wrapped up in the reputation of the institution,” she says. “It’s in your best interest to ensure, through your support, that the institution stays as good and gets better than it was when you were there.”

—Lynette James