Born in Austin, Texas in 1950, Greg Hicks attended Yale before going to Oxford to study for a BPhil in comparative literature. After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, he practised law and then took up a post at the University of Washington in Seattle. There, Hicks switched his area of focus to issues of water law, property law and history and public lands. He continues as Professor of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle and is involved in a range of projects across Spain, the US and South America, exploring natural resources and architecture. Hicks also serves on the boards of The Nature Conservancy of Washington and the Pacific Forest Trust and is an adviser to the Officer of the Washington State Attorney General on water law and policy matters. This narrative is excerpted and edited from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 17 June 2024.
Greg Hicks
Texas & Exeter 1972
‘This was a moment of change in America’
I was born and grew up in Texas. My parents had met there when my dad had come back after serving in the Marine Corps in World War Two. He returned to Huston-Tillotson University, an historically black university, where my mom, who was just a few years older than him, was teaching English. She had spent part of the war as an information analyst at the Pentagon after graduating from Howard University. After my parents were married, my mom went on to become an editor at the University of Texas Press and my dad became a key person working in the desegregation of teaching staffs and school administrators in Texas, shortly after Brown against Board.
My dad’s family was deeply Texas, part of that involuntary movement of African Americans from east to west. His grandfather, Fayette, remembered being told about emancipation in 1865. The woman on the farm to which he was, effectively, leased out, said, ‘You’re as free as I am.’ I’ve always loved the ambiguity in that statement: a woman saying this when her degree of freedom and emancipation was also limited. My parents were hugely dynamic and energetic on behalf of me and my brothers, exposing us to everything possible. This was a moment of change in America: the movie theatres and public libraries, the swimming pools and schools, had all been segregated and then, suddenly, they weren’t.
I went to St. Stephen’s boarding school. It was a remarkable place, and a very progressive environment, and I was a very self-confident kid, in a way. When I got to Yale, I’d really been prepared, so I was not only ready, but felt myself ready. There was never any sense that I wasn’t in the right place.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
At Yale, I was drawn to an English major because of the energy of the humanities there. There were these wonderful literary evenings where you would meet people, like Robert Penn Warren (Kentucky & New College 1928), Willie Morris (Texas & New College 1956) and Cleanth Brooks (Louisiana & Exeter 1929). I was just totally into it and absolutely in a state of continuing happiness and engagement.
Things began to feel more complicated with the coming to New Haven of the Bobby Seale trial, the trial of the Black Panthers. For me, it brought along with it a real sense of turmoil. I remember going over to the Elizabethan Club, this beautiful place that served tea and sandwiches in the afternoons, and the noise from the federal courthouse just a couple of blocks down would drift over. It was too much dissonance, and one day, I just slipped my key to the club under the door and stopped going. All those issues of race and identity and solidarity and resistance were coming to the fore for me.
I’d become friends with Kurt Schmoke (Maryland & Balliol 1971), and I’d seen him, and others, go off to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. There was this sense of community that I wasn’t a member of, but I felt, if you like, very Rhodes-adjacent. I had a lot of support from Yale in applying, and I was just feeling eager for things.
‘This time where you were able to just let things flow through you’
Oxford really proved to be important in sorting out my enthusiasm. It was so valuable to have this time where you were able to just let things flow through you. I was studying literature and enjoying it immensely, but at the same time, I began to have this strong sense of the value of really being connected to a place. I was absorbed at this time in the literary form of pastoral. I read Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, and the very last sentence of that was what sent me to law school: in it, he emphasises the importance of politics as against aesthetics, and right then, I realised I knew nothing about how actual landscapes, either physical or social, get shaped and framed.
When I wasn’t studying, I did a lot of acting at Oxford, and some of my enduring English friendships come from that time. We had a rehearsal and performance space down in Jericho, and it felt very grounding to be there. Then, one of the most important things that happened to me during my time in Oxford was going with John Gaventa (Tennessee & Balliol 1971) to the North of England where he was making a set of videos about working life there, to be shown in union halls in Appalachia and in the Middle West. We were in Lancashire, in a mill town, which had a long tradition of dissent and a strong struggle with class identity. It’s come to me a lot since that that trip to the North really opened a point of view for me that wound up supporting my later work.
‘I had this moment of terror, of having lost the thread’
I sent in exactly one law school application, because I was determined to go back and make Texas home. That isn’t how it worked out, because I found out I was more alien to the place than I had supposed. Instead, I moved out to the Pacific Northwest, where the possibilities of community and involvement just seemed plainer to me.
I started off working in a private law firm and then I went to Washington, DC for a period to work for the US Export-Import Bank for the last couple of years of the Carter administration. It was amazing training and very interesting, but when I went back to my law firm, I realised I was adrift. I was not thriving. The dean of the University of Washington law school was convinced he saw an academic lawyer in me, and he offered me a position. I started teaching there, but it wasn’t until I got over the tenure hump that I understood I had this unfinished business and I wanted to pivot and work on issues of property and ownership and landscape and water.
I had this moment of terror, of having lost the thread and needing to get back. So, I just set aside what I was doing and started over. A lot of things came together then. I met a cultural anthropologist who was doing gorgeous work in Mexican American irrigation communities. That led to an invitation to join a project with Wageningen University in the Netherlands on a project in Cuzco. I’ve also been lucky enough to work with several architectural groups on questions of how buildings and cities are used, and some of the work I’ve done with others has even led to recognition for how communities in Southern Colorado use Acequias water institutions as a legitimate form of governance. There is so much more to be done, but still, this is a very significant step for those communities.
On staying true to what propels you
One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever had for students of mine is: if, as I did, you find yourself in a position where you need to start over, do it. It might feel like it’s going to kill you in the early stages, but you’ll be where you need to be and it’s worth it. It’s worth the effort. It’s worth the time.
To today’s Rhodes Scholars, I would say, be aware that, by virtue of having won this honour, you will be presented with an unusual wealth and breadth of opportunities. There’s a risk that can start to feel a bit like a candy store, so just stay true to those things that have propelled you and mattered to you. They deserve at least a moment of examination and consideration to see whether they are still alive and something that you still need to be responding to. And one other thing: if you feel that there is something you did wrong that needs to be righted in some way, don’t let it wait. Take care of any unfinished business as honestly as you can.