President's Address

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT  (22 May 1981 - UA RG 285, Box 1, File 2)

Somewhere between the Pepsi Set and the Geritol Generation there is a period of life which, for want of imagination, we call 'middle age'. It is, by and large, an ambivalent period: a time when thoughts turn from passion to pension, when it takes longer to rest than to get up tired; a time for hearing voices -- the one saying 'why not', the other, 'why bother?'

Mostly, however, it affects the memory. Not that we begin to lose it; that, if we're lucky, comes later. It's that we begin to make over the past to suit our present, generally disenchanted, state of mind. As the ambitions of youth are pared down to fit the achievements of middle age, little wonder we should look back with rose-tinted nostalgia at a time when we had licence to dream.

As Wordsworth put it:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
Rhe glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore--
Turn whereso'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

More prosaically, we can all remember when life was simpler, freer of tensions and anxieties, when values were more firmly held and wedely shared, when the air was purer and the summers longer, when people were more honest and charitable. In a word, we can, with very little prompting, feel nostalgia for what never was at the expense of our acceptance of what is.

Nowhere does this tendency to idealize the past over the present operate more powerfully than as it bears on young people and education. Lamentations about the deteriorating behaviour of youth and declining standards of education are at least as old as the Greeks. At present the lament is that the graduates of our high schools and universities are deficient in the basic skills of writing and mathematics. Standards it would appear have declined from some pristine age -- of, one gathers, about twenty years or so ago. If you press for evidence of this you'll find it's largely impressionistic.

I for one am not convinced. It doesn't square with my experience as a teacher of undergraduate students for the past fourteen years. Neither does it accord with the performance of our own graduates here at UNB. And I say this as someone who places the highest value on literacy and numeracy.

Apart from the positive reports I hear from time to time about our graduates from employers, once in a while we get a concrete indication of how our students compare with those from other universities in Canada. For students in science, engineering, forestry, mathematics, and certain areas of psychology, perhaps the best indication of the quality of our students is revealed in how well they do in competition for the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Scholarships. This is a national scholarship program and the competition is keen.

To say UNB students have done and continue to do superbly well is perhaps to understate the case. 1981 was not, I am reliably told, an exceptional year for us in this competition, yet in the results recently announced no fewer than forty-six students received  NSERC postgraduate scholarships. This is a ninety percent success rate. The number of scholarships awarded to UNB students is at least one and a half times the number awarded to students of any other Atlantic university and puts us well ahead of many universities across the country which are more than twice our size. Of fifty eligible universities in Canada, UNB ranks twelfth in the number of NSERC scholarships received by its students.

As if that weren't kudos enough for one year, three of our Spring graduands have been awarded the most prestigious and lucrative scholarships the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council sponsors. These are the '1967 Science Scholarships' and are worth $14,000 per year to students about to begin postgraduate studies in science or applied science. The students are: biologist Lois Margaret Mulligan, physicist Michael J. Hogan, and geologist Douglas E. McNulty. All three are from Saint John and began their programs of study at UNBSJ. Only two universities in Canada, Manitoba and Toronto, had more successful candidates than UNB in this competition.

The performance of the '1967 Science Scholarship' winners represents not only a distinction for UNB but another clear indication of the coming of age of the Saint John campus. Further evidence of this is to be found in the articles and books published, in the research grants received, in the service being rendered to the community, in the new programs being designed, but, above all, in the quality and achievements of our students.

In this enterprise of enhancing the quality and maturity of our campus and university we all have a part. Faculty, because it is in the classroom and laboratory that the vital transactions take place and it is principally through your scholarly deeds that the rest of the academic world shall know us. Support staff, because without your dedicated professionalism and service many of our programs of instruction and research could not function. Friends of the university, because in this time of financial restraint we need people who are prepared to speak out about the importance of what we do and represent. Our graduates, because in the end you are the best proof of our quality and of our value to the province and the nation.

May I end on an existential note. Now that I am in my forties and looking forward to the first glimmerings of the approach of the beginning of the first foothills of early middle age, I can look back on my growing up in outport Newfoundland, with its long summers of uninterrupted sunshine refreshed by cooling breezes from the North Atlantic; with its bronzed and handsome and hardy and God-fearing and soft-spoken (but eloquent) breed of fishermen; with its simple but efficacious school system where teachers and pupils always spoke in whole sentences, knew their times tables from back to front and sideways, could spot a gerund at twenty paces, and never dangled their participles -- at least not in public; where every day was full of intrigue and adventure and morally edifying experiences, and I wonder what the world has come to a'tall, a'tall.