President's Address

"Installation Address" (16 October 1980). (UA Case 135, no. 13)

Your Honour, Mr. Premier, Mr. Chief Justice, Your Worship, Fellow Presidents and other distinguished platform guests, members of the Board of Governors and the University Senate, members of faculty, and graduates of Fall Convocation 1980.

My first words must be ones of personal gratitude: to the Board of Governors and the Senate of the University of New Brunswick for the honour they have conferred in nominating me as UNB’s 14th President; to the Government of New Brunswick for the confidence they have shown in appointing me to the position; to the faculty, students, and staff of the University, and to the people of Fredericton and Saint John who have so generously welcomed me, and my family, into their midst; to Carleton University in Ottawa where I was encouraged to discover and develop my interests as a scholar, teacher, and administrator; finally, to all of you who have come here today to take part in this occasion. Thank you.

I am deeply conscious of the honour bestowed upon me. The University of New Brunswick is not only a venerable and respected university, it is, as it has been throughout its life, an institution of strategic importance to New Brunswick and Canada. For almost 200 years, in several incarnations, its improving and civilizing presence has been felt in this community, this province, this region, and this nation. Its graduates have distinguished themselves and their alma mater in the arts, sciences, the professions, and public life. Its programs of instruction and research have enhanced our culture, improved the quality and efficiency of life, and enriched the personal lives of countless men and women. As an employer, landowner, centre of cultural and recreational activities and facilities, and as consumer of goods and services, its roots and branches extend into many areas of New Brunswick community and commercial life. As the custodian of a tradition of distinguished achievement in higher education, shared generously, through its graduates, with the rest of Canada, it is symbolic of what New Brunswick itself has stood and still stands for within Confederation.

It is remarkable, and indicative of its stability, that in the long life of UNB there have been only fourteen presidents. It is equally remarkable that the first thirteen were all men of ability and distinction, who in their several ways and times build wisely and well. (Of the fourteenth I shall, as I hope you will, reserve judgement for the moment.) It gives me much satisfaction today to be able to acknowledge the presence in our platform party of three of those former presidents: Albert W. Trueman (1948-53); Colin B. Mackay (1953-69); and John M. Anderson (1973-1979). I should also like to acknowledge the presence of the man who, as Acting President in 1979-80, so capably piloted the University through a full and difficult year of transition: Thomas J. Condon. To these men, and to all those men and women who have laboured to build here a university of quality and distinction, I wish to express my admiration and thanks.

I am under no illusion that the job I have been given is anything less than complex and demanding. And it would be ingenuous or worse to pretend that the issues and challenges this University will face during the next few years will be other than difficult. But when indeed have they not been difficult? Things were difficult enough for King’s College (our second incarnation) during the War of 1812 that the legislative authorities of the day, casting about for ways to keep us from slipping inexorably into bankruptcy, conferred upon the College the exclusive right to operate a common ferry “in, upon, and over, the River St. John … from side to side, and from either to the other side…together with all rates fares tolls rights liberties profits and advantages to the said Ferry”. In return for this prerogative, the College would pay an annual fee (or “quit rent”) of one penny to His Majesty. Your Honour, it is not clear when, or indeed if, this institution’s right to control traffic across the St. John River lapsed. It is entirely possible, Your Worship, that, when this matter has been thoroughly researched, Councillor Beattie will be pressing at City Hall our claim for a UNB toll gate on either end of the new Westmorland Street bridge.

The ferry helped, but not enough. By 1823 finances were so precarious that the College Council, on which only Anglicans sat, was forced to seek a Royal Charter, under the Great Seal of Great Britain, and agree to the admission and matriculation of non-Anglicans, in order to get more substantial grants.

It is remarkable how often fixed and unswerving principle is temporized by economic necessity. It is no less remarkable how quickly the ensuing change is thought to be for the better. There is little argument now that the first institutions of higher learning in Canada were, as Claude Bissell has said, “conceived of as political weapons.”

They stood in the front line of the counter-revolutionary attack. They were to preserve class divisions, constitutional monarchy, and sound moral principles against the threat of American revolutionary subversion. They were the creations – not so much of the state, … as of a small privileged group who embodied authority in the colony – the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church of England and the officials – chiefly officers in the British forces, minor aristocrats, and bureaucrats versed in the ritual of the law.

In admitting Non-conformists and Catholics, King’s College was, in the opinion of some of its supporters of the time, selling out a high principle. Some later supporters were no less chagrined when, in 1886, the character of what had become by then UNB was further compromised when the first woman, Mary Tibbits, took her place (or, as the tabloid of the day put it, created a “slight bustle”) in the freshman class.

It is chastening to remember how frequently universities as institutions, as distinct from some of the people who teach and learn in them, have been slow to accept what in retrospect seems an unassailable progressive principle, and that it has sometimes been economic or political circumstance which has brought about that acceptance. Which goes to show either that times of financial duress may be times of opportunity for enlightened action, or that we have an infinite capacity to rationalize whatever happens to us or our institution.

(I fear, however, Your Honour, that the liberalizing of this institution may have gone too far in this afternoon’s ceremony, and I fear we may have alienated the watchful care of Jonathan Odell, Ward Chipman, and the rest of our Founding Fathers. For not only has a Roman Catholic priest offered up the prayer of invocation, but a Non-conformist, and a Newfoundlander to boot, has taken the pledge as President!)

Perhaps it’s because historians, like the rest of us, are fascinated by crisis and disaster that the more one reads of the history of an institution like UNB, the harder it is to believe that there ever was a time when life in the Groves of Academe was free from the struggle for survival.

Such a time, if it ever did exist, was certainly not the first quarter of this century, which culminated in a vexed and vexatious debate in 1922-23 over whether UNB should be forced to surrender its charter in order to create, under Carnegie Corporation sponsorship, a great united University of the Maritime Provinces in Halifax. Nor was it the second quarter, with its pre-War penury and the post-War scramble to accommodate returning Veterans who wished a university education. Bust and boom are alike exhilarating and challenging; but neither is easy to cope with. It is to the credit of this institution that those who coped, and those – like C. C. Jones, Norman MacKenzie, and Milton Gregg – who presided over the coping, did it imaginatively and well.

The third quarter of this century is the one we know best, for all of us here today over thirty have lived through it. Many of you spent some or all of that time at UNB. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”

It was anything but easy times. It began here at UNB with an alarming enrollment decline. In 1948-49 enrolment had reached a peak of 1,356. By 1954-55 the figure had fallen to 874, of whom, incidentally, only 9% were women. Then, unanticipated by that branch of necromancy known as “manpower projections”, the world of post-secondary education in Canada was transformed. In quest of scientific and technological advancement, on the one hand, and equal opportunity, on the other, governments federal and provincial placed the highest fiscal priority on expanding university facilities and programs to accommodate every qualified applicant. Belief in the social and personal benefits conferred by a university degree seemed unshakable. By the mid-sixties the Canadian university system, from Memorial to the University of Victoria, looked like the empire on which the concrete would never set.

Who could have predicted in the midst of such frenetic activity that within a decade the bloom would have faded from the youth-cult rose; that governments everywhere would have all but turned off the tap on capital spending for higher education; that professors and their students alike would be worried about the getting or keeping of jobs? This is not the time to probe the causes of the discontent of the seventies. We are too close; the scar tissue is too tender. And the issues are too complex. I refer to it only to make a couple of, I hope, timely observations about it.

i) The first is that we have come through the seventies, as we came through other difficult seasons in our long history, with our sense of purpose and community intact. Despite the difficulties associated with the selection of a new president and the negotiating of a first collective agreement with the faculty, I find no evidence in this community of rancourous division. I find instead, and blessedly, a great desire to let the past bury the past and to get on with the essential labour of scholarship. And that is how it should and must be. For better or worse the nature of our body politic has been irreversibly altered by the events of the past couple of years, and we must begin where we are and with the new structures of governance we have set in place, and we must—all of us, have enough patience, forbearance, and trust to make them work well. We cannot afford the luxury of lingering nostalgia for roads missed or lingering regret for paths taken. The next few years will be hard on institutions that fail to mobilize all of their psychic and material resources for the challenges that lie ahead.

ii) My second observation is that our problems and prosperity as an institution are, as they have been from the beginning, inseparably linked to those of our province and our country. We serve New Brunswick and Canada in a variety of important, even essential ways: in discovering and disseminating knowledge; in the preservation and enhancement of our cultural and intellectual resources; in teaching men and women how to question and inquire, to reason and form judgements. But not least of all do we serve when we offer informed criticism of our governments, our institutions, our values and our mores. Nor, in spite of our many material and cultural advantages, are we in Canada free of the kinds of belief and behaviour that make such criticism necessary. Racism, bigotry, injustice, violations of civil liberties, and acts of inhumanity are regrettably not unknown in Canadian society, and universities must attempt to create a social and intellectual climate in which such behaviour is exposed and opposed. Such a service is not always appreciated and sometimes engenders mistrust and tension between a university and its surrounding society. Nevertheless, no enlightened democracy can afford not to have institutions within it which attempt to make it aware of the need for change and to propose means of achieving change in a reasonable and non-violent manner. This has been a traditional and crucial role for the university.

In its commitment to understanding its social context and examining the values of society, as in its other tasks, a university must know and, where it can, respond to the essential needs of its society. This is not to say that it should chase after the modish in its programs of instruction or research. Today’s fetishes are tomorrow’s fossils, and a university serves society best in the long run by taking the long view. I believe it cannot be said too often that the primary mission of the university is not to train but to educate; not to prepare students for jobs but to make them wiser and more civilized people. And that goes for all students, even those who are learning the mental and technical skills of a profession. I believe, with Cyril Belshaw, that

A university is only justified in giving a medical or engineering, or any other, degree, if in the process the doctor or engineer has learned to question and enquire, to exercise relevant intellectual and moral judgement, and to add to knowledge if the opportunity and circumstances of his career permit. This means that the university had helped him develop his powers of intellectual awareness, …to know what is needed to provide answers (as distinct from jumping to conclusions or accepting what one is told); and to be mature, disciplined and wise in making judgements.

It is those universities which, while holding steadfast to this central purpose, remain flexible and responsive to their society’s needs; which, while drawing stability from their traditions, can compromise with them; it is those universities which have and will succeed best.

iii) My third observation is both more sober and inescapable, in the context of an address which attempts to relate, however superficially, where we are to what has gone before. It is best summed up by an injunction of St. Augustine’s: “Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.”

Of these two Cardinal Sins, it is presumption which has traditionally been thought to be the greater spiritual threat to universities. This was partly because, as secular institutions, universities aspired to knowledge God had not intended mere mortals to have; partly because their patrons and clients have been and, for the most part, remain a social and economic elite; and partly because any social organization in which youth so predominates is bound at times to exhibit attitudes and behaviour which may be mistaken for, and sometimes will be, presumption. To be sure there have been times in the history of UNB when the antics of the students, combined with the eccentricities of the professors, have led to strained relations between town and gown.

More menacing of late, however, to the spirit of universities, and to the young people graduating from them, has been an anxiety that at times borders on despair.

Now to inherit such a world as the twentieth century has bequeathed us is, God knows, at one level of our being, cause enough for despair. The geography of that despair is etched indelibly on our collective psyche: Passchendaele, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Biafra. So many of the confident and comfortable assumptions about the nature of civilization we brought into the twentieth century have had to be abandoned along the way. If often appears that civilization isn’t so much bound together but, as W. B. Yeats said,

“hooped together, brought
Under … the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion.”

Recently it was reported that one of the aspirants for the American presidency said he could envisage a nuclear war in which the United States could declare victory – with two-thirds of its population dead! (And to think that some censor boards and school boards in Canada worry about obscenity in a film like The Tin Drum or in the books of Margaret Laurence.) The reality of such terror cannot be ignored or wished away: it is part of the world we inherit. More importantly and disturbingly, it is part of what we are. As Margaret Laurence has said, “the enemy is always to some extent within. We are all prey to anger; we are all capable of hurting other people and of violating our own principles of integrity and humanity. We are all capable of giving way to self-righteousness, to spiritual pride. And yes, we are all too capable of giving way to despair.” Particularly since we are bombarded on all sides by reports and dire predictions of economic and political uncertainties and disasters.

Although we have reason enough for despair, we ought not to fool ourselves: we didn’t invent it (the early Church Fathers didn’t designate it one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing) and it isn’t, as they say, a “viable alternative” for us. The history of this institution, and history generally, reveals that there is always reason enough for despair – individual and institutional – if one chooses to embrace it. It also shows that the people who were most creative were those who dared to hope, to risk, and to act in the face of uncertainty and adversity.

Despite the manifold uncertainties (or, in a sense, because of them), I am optimistic about the eighties for UNB and its graduates. No more than you do I know what is going to happen or in what precise ways we will be challenged and tested. What I do think I know are two things. This first is that you who graduate today, like those who have preceded you, have been well-equipped with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to meet the opportunities and vicissitudes of living and making a living. You are joining the ranks of a privileged minority in this land – those who have had the social and personal benefits of a university education. Privileged minorities are not necessarily self-interested elites, and I hope you will join me in attempting to persuade our governments and our several publics of the need for adequate support so that we may reach and instruct as many of the people of this province, of whatever age or socio-economic stratum, as desire and can profit by a university education. You should know and be proud that you have attended a fine university and you should stay in touch. Your courses are over but your learning goes on, and we would like to know how we might help you throughout your careers and lives.

The second thing I believe I know is that we have here at UNB the people, the talent, and the spirit to keep faith with those whose vision and courage built and sustained this institution, and to serve our students, our province, and our country as well and wisely as they served theirs. The sentiment may now strike us as excessively optimistic, the tone somewhat too imperial, and the language overly rhetorical, but the words of Sir Howard Douglas, spoken at the opening of King’s College on New Year’s Day, 1829, have a resonance and spirit suitable to this occasion: “Firm may this Institution ever stand and flourish …enlarging and extending its material form, and all its capacities to do good, to meet the increasing demands of a rising, prosperous, and intellectual people; and may it soon acquire, and ever maintain, a high and distinguished reputation, as a place of general learning and useful knowledge.” UNB has long ago acquired a high and distinguished reputation. As its President I dedicate myself to the task and privilege of maintaining and enhancing it.