A bronze statue of the university’s founder, William Marsh Rice, by sculptor John Angel, was unveiled in 1930 and originally seated on a granite plinth in the middle of the Academic Quadrangle until the 2024 redesign of the quad. As part of the redesign, the statue was removed from its base and relocated to the southeast corner of the quadrangle.
"Willy's Statue" is often decorated according to the season and, on April 12, 1988, a group of ten undergraduate students and one recent alumnus (a shadowy figure known only as "The Mastermind") decided to turn the one-ton bronze sculpture 180 degrees so that Willy could, for the first time ever, admire Fondren Library (whose Woodson Research Center staff had unwittingly provided the students with the technical specifications of the sculpture so that they could plan, build, and test their homemade statue-turning apparatus).