HOUSTON » You almost have to know they’re there beforehand to notice them. Among the 4,300 trees on the Rice University campus stand three palms, near the stadium that is home to one of the best college baseball programs in the country, and not far from where the Owls and the University of Hawaii tangle Saturday in a college football game.

"Those are new since I’ve arrived. I felt I wanted some palm trees," Rice president David Leebron said. "It was inspired by my time in Hawaii."

It was long ago, back in 1980. And it was brief.

The native of Philadelphia was trying to decide what to do between his second and third years of Harvard Law School. Leebron wanted to try something different. So he ended up in Honolulu, at the prominent firm of Goodsill, Anderson and Quinn.

It was just three weeks, but he returned the following summer after graduation and passed the Hawaii bar exam.

"It’s extremely rare that you get the No. 1-ranked student in his class at Harvard Law and the editor of the Harvard Law Review to spend a summer clerking at a firm in the middle of the Pacific," said Kenneth Wong, who was another young attorney at the firm, and befriended Leebron.

"You could tell right off the bat that he was brilliant and that he was going to be extraordinary. Yet he had a humble demeanor which endeared him to the attorneys at the firm. He fit right into the culture of the law firm and the culture of Hawaii."

But after three months Leebron went on to what he termed a "conventional path," practicing corporate law in New York before teaching it at Columbia and eventually landing at Rice in 2004.

He’s been back to visit a few times. The closest he came to working in Hawaii again was when a search firm contacted him in 2006 about the UH president’s job.

"The headhunter asked me for suggestions, and asked if I was interested," Leebron said. "I told her ‘no’ because I’d been at Rice only a little while.

"I didn’t know if I’d ever come back, but I kind of fell in love with Hawaii. I love the people and thought it was a spectacularly beautiful, friendly place. Well, maybe if I’m a member of the Hawaii bar … but it never worked out that way."

On the surface, Rice and UH don’t have much in common — one being a small private school the other a large public one. But when it comes to athletics they’re in the same boat. A leaky one, considering they are not members of the so-called Power Five conferences.

And some might consider it ironic that Leebron, as a member of the NCAA Division I steering committee on governance, may have helped the elite become more powerful by supporting proposals to allow them more autonomy in spending. But Leebron said changes like allowing compensation for full cost of attendance are about helping student-athletes.

"It will in some sense be up to the five ‘high resource’ conferences to discipline themselves, and try to find their way back to a true sense of the student-athlete and the true collaborative values of intercollegiate athletics," Leebron said.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. His blog is at staradvertiser.com/quickreads.