KU News Release

May 14, 2009
Contact: Kevin Boatright, Office of Research and Graduate Studies, (785) 864-7240.

Graduation stories: Fairway couple will receive KU doctoral hoods together

LAWRENCE — He hadn’t intended to go through with the centuries-old ritual of the doctoral “hooding” ceremony, and she certainly had no such plans herself.

After all, Jane Mobley skipped it 35 years ago when she completed her doctorate in English at the University of Kansas, and she wasn’t about to be hooded now.

But after she insisted her husband, Phil Hofstra, go through with it, he said, “Well, let’s do you, too.”

KU honored their unusual request. The net result: On May 16, the couple, both 61, will receive their doctoral hoods on the same day, on the same stage, at the Lied Center in Lawrence.

It’s been a long and twisting saga up to this point, marked by a cryptic message left behind by Hofstra’s mother and two grim cancer diagnoses for Mobley.

“No one knows why I’m still alive,” said Mobley, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1996 and primary breast cancer in 2003. “The whole darned story is just too melodramatic.”

Mobley’s cancer, it turns out, prompted her husband to plunge into doctoral studies. He wanted to spend time at home with her and, in order to do that, he sold his partnership in an architectural firm in 1997 but continued teaching design and architecture studios in the School of Fine Arts at KU.

Since he’d be on campus anyway, and because the university suddenly was the focus of his professional life, he reasoned that it would be a good time to add a doctoral degree to his two master’s degrees — one in marketing, the other in computer systems design. Their daughter, Sarah Hofstra, was a freshman at KU the same year.

So, at age 48, Hofstra decided to strike out in an entirely new field — American studies, a combination of literature, culture and history with a generous dollop of postmodern theory, which struck a particular chord with him.

The response to Hofstra’s unconventional academic choice has been “astonishing,” according to Mobley.

“People are captivated that he pursued a course of study in his maturity,” she said. “People are lifted up by that. People who hear about it say, ‘That makes me feel like I could.’ ”

Hofstra’s studies turned out to be enriching for both him and his wife. She says she feels like she “got a second Ph.D. by listening to Phil.”

“When he began — almost on a lark — he’d read books and we’d talk about them,” said Mobley, who owns a communications firm in Kansas City. “It was a good couple of years.”

The intellectual pursuits took a turn for the tougher, though, when the class work ended, and Hofstra had to pony up a dissertation.

“The ‘omigod’ factor sets in,” Mobley said. “That lasted for seven years.”

Hofstra was feeling intimidated by blank pages when, in 2000, his mother died. In sifting through her belongings, Hofstra and Mobley came across a white business envelope with cash inside and a brief handwritten vision articulated on the outside: “For Phillip’s hood.”

“Every time Phil would think, ‘I’m not going to finish this degree,’ the specter of his mother being disappointed was too much,” Mobley said.

Hofstra retired from KU in 2007. Six months later, after working intermittently on the project “for bloody ever,” according to Mobley, Hofstra “took a deep breath and plunged in.” By December, he'd completed what Mobley calls "a great piece of work.”

“And I can say that, as a former English teacher,” she said.

So Hofstra says he’s going through the hooding ceremony “because of a personal obligation to my deceased mother.” And Mobley is getting what she calls her “mushroom head” hat decades late because “Phil thought it was a good idea.”

Whoever conceived the notion, the university made a special exception, and Cheryl Lester, director of American studies and an associate professor of English, will hood Hofstra and, much belatedly, Mobley.

The point of all the pomp and circumstance, according to Mobley and Hofstra, is to reiterate one value they hold dear: that education should continue forever.

Their daughter Sarah, now a first-grade teacher who, like them, lives in the Kansas City suburb of Fairway, has a son named Shea. “We want him to know that we think education is not over when college is over. That you never, never, never, never quit,” Mobley said.

She and Hofstra already have in mind that their grandson, one day, might have a “mushroom head” to call his own.

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