Graduation Address

"Francess G. Halpenny’s Spring Convocation Address" (1983). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

It is a particular pleasure for me to be in Saint John and on the campus of the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. Last year when the National Library Advisory Baord held a series of meetings in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, we were received with both warmth and imagination in Saint John. I remember especially the excitement of touring the rising Market Square complex which was going to bring modern building concepts and techniques to the service of an historic site with many remembrances of the city’s past. But my pleasure in being in New Brunswick and the Maritimes, and in being honoured by this University, has deeper and stronger roots. My first acquaintance goes back to my service in World War Two, all of it on the East Coast, and to the many journeys I made then about Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland on duty or on leave. There were those many long train rides up to Upper Canada and back and the names of passage reverberate still in my memory as though someone were calling the watches of the night: Truro, Amherst, Sackville, Moncton, Cape Tormentine, Bathurst, Campbellton, and on to Matapedia, Port Joli, Rimouski, Rivière du Loup, Quebec, Montreal. Towns and the great reaches of river, the St. John, the St. Lawrence, the gulf, and the ocean. Tide and fog and wind, sea birds and the salt marshes, and the sound of the surf. The frame buildings with their lore of generations and tales of loyalist settlement and sailing voyages. For me, the ocean has always been and will be the Atlantic.

Later my visits in the Maritimes, in this province, and in this university were often associated with traveling of quite a different kind. I would be attending the meetings in May-June of a number of academic groups – teachers of literature or history or political science or languages – from all over Canada who come together once a year on a campus to inform one another about developments in the fields in which they teach and do research. The Fredericton campus has been a fine host to the Learned Societies, as they are called, on several occasions. Sometimes I’ve attended at the University of New Brunswick special meetings of scholars during the term to hear and discuss papers on a particular theme. The Saint John campus earlier this month was host to a meeting of Atlantic historians which had excellent sessions related, appropriately, to the loyalists. As a teacher of Canadian Studies and the General Editor of the DCB I find such meetings often invaluable because they tell audiences of discoveries about a literary work or a set of historical events or new theories of social groups and one can see ideas emerging and interpretations changing. Usually at these meetings there are displays of scholarly books and journals for they are the forms by which the results of scholarly inquiry will be shared with academics or students or general readers in numbers far beyond those who attend any conference. It was my privilege, some years ago, when I was a senior editor in the Editorial Department of the University of Toronto Press, to be associated with these displays and so to profit at meetings from contacts with the authors we were publishing and those we found we wished to publish. Indeed, some of my keenest memories of visits to the Maritimes centre around other personal visits I made to campuses as an editor to talk about publishing and scholarship with experienced and aspiring authors alike, to see where new directions were developing and how they might affect the list of books my press should publish.

I describe these occasions not just because this fine ceremony today has given nostalgia an unusual chance to work its way with me but because they all have a character and an implication I should like to underline to you in this audience who are graduating and for your family and friends. A university is first of all its students and those who instruct them, and this vital teaching relationship is made visible here today. The content and quality of that teaching, however, can be strangely and wonderfully enhanced when teachers are not just repeaters of the already accepted but, in a sense, students themselves because they are also active, concerned, and imaginative scholars pursuing research inquiries about some topic in search of new insights. Those insights will in due course be shared with other scholars and when refined and tested will make their way into the scholarly record by publication. In turn they can then be the means of suggesting to others further promising lines of investigation, and so t he route to discovery is found. The combination of all this effort, suitably shared with many through scholarly books and journals, will certainly come to inform teaching at the university level. It will eventually affect the content of teaching at other levels, and it will make its way also into the general community. Herein lies the value of scholarship which cannot be quantified, and it must be protected and preserved in these days of constraint and retrenchment. I count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity so many times to hear and see scholarly insight truly at work and to have had a share in the process whereby it reaches the stability of print and so becomes a resource for all who can benefit from it. [Dawson] [Literary History]

My experience has been especially with research in the humanities and social sciences, and about it I wish to speak more particularly. For many reasons research in science receives much more publicity, much more discussion in the public press. One reason, though it is not a favourite one with scientists themselves, is its apparently close relation to the practice of life and to economic advance. And so, we read in the media of research on new sources of energy, the uncovering of the geological record of the earth, the habits of marine life, the patterns of biological cells, the constantly surprising activity of the brain, the seemingly infinite possibilities of the microchip. But the humanities and social sciences have their own claims to attention. [Royal Society] Their business, after all, is with the stuff of life, with mind and heart, with our instinct for society and our sympathy for the individual, with our patterns of speech and our ways of responding through music and art, with the meaning of traditions and the roots of change. If we are to become more sophisticated about communication we must recognize linguistics; if Canadians are to be citizens of the world and traders with many, we must increase work in languages not curtail it; if Canadians are to understand the many ethnic groups that make up our population we must become aware of their histories and their literatures; if we wish to grasp the factors that have moulded the Western world in which we live and continue to affect it, we would do well to remember the contributions to such knowledge of archaeology and the study of classics, to understand the record in history and literature and art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the 19th century: their legacy is all about us and within us. If we wish to know what Canada is, or what a region of Canada is, we must know the full, authentic story of its past and we must listen to the voices of its writers, past and present. Not all activity in the humanities and social sciences, it is true, rises above the routine, the mediocre, the pedantic, even the ridiculous and the obscure, and perhaps the only useful effect of the financial uncertainty of scholarly publishing today is that manuscripts with these marks are increasingly less likely to reach publication. However, it cannot be affirmed too strongly that when scholarship in the field I have been surveying is well and truly conceived, and pursued with enthusiasm, rigour, and sympathy with the subject, value is created that this country, let alone others, cannot and should not, in 1983, be without.

Canadian scholars in the humanities and social sciences have, indeed, a strong record of achievement at home and abroad in many subject areas. We have individual scholars of world repute, and we have many who are welcomed at international conferences. Their publications are reviewed in the significant journals. Such verdicts are important for sound scholarship is international in intent and significance. Scholars working with matters Canadian have had a particular challenge to overcome the too prevalent disinterest of the past in such subjects. In the last twenty-five years they have created a growing understanding of our literature, our history, our society, our artistic and cultural past and present which has made possible teaching programs of significant extent in Canadian studies in this country and increasingly abroad in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Australia. The University of New Brunswick was a proud pioneer in teaching and research and library collecting about Canadian literature, engaged in it when too few other centres thought it a credible activity and maintaining in this way continuity with its own late 19th century literary and cultural traditions. To know ourselves, is, in 1983, an accepted aim for students and scholars in Canada though it is still not always served as effectively and fully as one could wish.

Canadian scholarship is, today, noted internationally and envied internationally for a particular kind of scholarly activity in the humanities and social sciences: research pursued by a group of scholars, often working with graduate students, on long-term, large-scale projects. Financial support has come from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the federal government as well as from some foundations and from universities at which the projects are based. Such a project, centred at Memorial University, created the recently published Dictionary of Newfoundland English, already in its third printing, a splendid book in which words are usually defined by tales and says so that the voices of Newfoundland sing out from every page. Another is the Atlantic Canada Shipping study, this one also centred in Newfoundland, whose team has gathered together immense amounts of information about the history of the Maritime trade in earlier centuries so that is cargoes and its ports, its ships and its captains, its close links with sources of finance such as England’s West Country are revealed and can now inform study of the trade of the present.

Large in scope also but very different in subject matter are other Canadian projects. One is known colloquially as Reed: Records of Early English Drama. Its purpose is to present in published volumes the known records in archives in Great Britain of how medieval drama was presented there by the guilds of tradesmen or other secular or religious groups: once collected, these records will form the secure base for descriptions and analyses of that important dramatic activity from which the theatre we know developed. Professor David Galloway of UNB was one of the founders who organized many scholars in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain for this project, and his volumn in the series will deal with the records of the city of Norwich. The whole project may seem strange and faraway to you, but it is not. Canada happens to be a leader in research in medieval studies (a fact reflected strongly in the publishing list of my own press) and this field is a dynamic, exciting area full of discovery and vigorous scholarly debate. Out of the field has come in Canada yet another major scholarly project, a new Old English Dictionary compiled by scholars from several campuses which, by using the techniques and memory of a computer, will offer to readers every word used in the entire corpus of Old English literature. The scholarly excitement is shared in many ways by the general public. One was exemplified over the May 24th weekend on the University of Toronto campus by presentation of the entire cycle of the Chester mystery plays of the fourteenth century, telling the biblical story from creation through the life of Christ and after. The scholarship of the Reed project, based on the records of the city of Chester, made this huge effort possible, but the 25 plays were performed for a general audience of all ages over three six-hour days by some eighteen dramatic troupes coming from a variety of colleges and parishes in Ontario and northeastern United States to perform on stages set up on traveling wagons. Here was scholarship made visible and audible, and the results for the audience were by turns amusing, thoughtful, and very moving.

Let me refer also to the Historical Atlas of Canada. Its three great volumes when completed will present to the people of Canada a new interpretation of its history embodied in a modern cartography of heroic proportions in size and concept. The long stretch of geologic time and the centuries of the native peoples, the patterns of exploration and settlement and trade will all be presented with newly discovered facts and original conclusions that will encourage yet other efforts of scholarship and stimulate the imaginations of students and general public. This project too enlists many scholars from across Canada.

All of this scholarly endeavour, whether by individuals or groups, represents a collaboration in support. There is the essential financial support of governments through grants to universities and research councils and to such institutions as the National Library and the archives of Canada and the provinces. This support is augmented by the assistance of private foundations and donors. Universities then support research by the provision of workplace and time, special grants, and a hospital environment. Scholars count on the collaboration of a host of librarians and archivists who give them access to essential source material. The scholarly publishers must rely often on subsidies for works of merit but limited market if they are to carry the results of research to the world. All of these units in the scholarly process – authors, universities, archives and libraries, publishers – face a time when the activities of research and teaching are threatened by yearly reductions in financial support. They need the vocal backing of persons such as yourselves who can let it be known publicly for politicians and others to hear that you consider the humanities and social sciences, and the sciences, important for the life and well-being of this country.

And here I come to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, with which I have the honour to be associated as general editor. It too is one of the large scholarly endeavours I have been describing. Originating with an unusual bequest from a Toronto businessman, and assisted by a variety of government grants, it is now, as a ward of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the largest research project the country has mounted. But what is it? It is an historical survey of the Canadian people through biography, taking the form of a many-volumed work with entries on individuals, each volume being assembled chronologically by the death dates. Thus the volume I have here, volume IV, presents persons who died between 1771 and 1800. These chronological divisions reflect the peopling of the land of Canada. Volumes I-IV (1001-1800) takes us through the French Régime, volumes V-VIII (1801-1860) cover years of colonial reorganization and settlement. Volumes IX-XIII (1861-1900) present the filling out of the Canada of today and the establishment of characteristic political, social, and cultural organizations. We have published seven of these volumes to date, containing biographies of 3883 persons. We are praying that financial support will continue to take us to the end of the 19th century and on into the 20th century before the country itself moves into the 21st.

The DCB is a national project, and so it covers all parts of the country and all kinds of people, including the known and the almost forgotten. The persons to appear in each volume as selected after a series of consultations by mail or in person with experts across the country. At the meeting of Atlantic historians earlier this month in Saint John, for instance, the DCB took advice about Maritimes figures for volume XII, in which Tilley will be a prominent entry. Our biographies are prepared by hundreds of contributors in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and France – contributors from universities, from libraries and archives, from research centres supported by Historic Sites and Parks programs such as the Fortress of Louisbourg and King’s Landing, and from other heritage programs both national and provincial. The DCB/DBC is a bilingual, bicultural project: contributors write in either English or French and their texts are translated into the other language with great care for accuracy and nuance. There are two editorial offices, at the University of Toronto and l’université Laval (I spend some days each month at Laval), and these offices share equally the work of preparation in a daily collaboration of editorial detail and policy that is unique in this country. Each published volume appears simultaneously in two editions, English and French.

Our preoccupation for many months has been the people of volumn V, persons who died between 1801 and 1820. Those persons thus include many who participated in the founding of this province: its first governor, Thomas Carleton; leading loyalists such as Edward Winslow and the brothers Ludlow [Gabriel George and George Duncan], Gabriel George as you will know being the first mayor of Saint John; James Glenie who spoke up in the assembly with views that challenged the establishment;…Let me introduce you also to

As you will see the DCB/DBC is a huge books of stories, alive with the vitality of a great variety of people, with their adventures and ambitions, their hope and despair, their achievements and their determination. The stories are the product of scholarship but they are prepared with general readers in mind, and through the gift of Simpson Sears a copy of each volume is presented to every high school in Canada. I have never failed to be struck by how strongly these stories underline the connection of Canada with sea and lake and river: its native peoples lived by those means, and the newcomers found their homes and workplaces by coming over and up the waters that surround Canada and link its regions. We need a full maritime history of Canada to reflect this central fact. But Canadians are something else: the pages of the DCB/DBC show us as the people of the rock, the people who in all times and all places have faced the challenge of living in a northern land. These volumes have much to tell us as we search to discover who we are. Let me remind you of Margaret Laurence’s Morag in The Diviners, coming to realize that the parents she lost as a child and has felt to be so elusive are, after all, really insider her, "flowing unknown in her blood and moving unrecognized in her skull." And then at last she understands the message of a river near her home which she has watched for so long: a river that might well be the Saint John. Its current flows from north to south but the wind will often ripple the water in the opposite direction so that the river seems to flow both ways. Its message is constant: "Look ahead into the past and back into the future." I commend that message to all of us graduating today. We have an honourable past as our companion in life, and part of it is this University.