Graduation Address

"Great Men: The Inspiration of Universities" (27 October 1955). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

There are many delusions about education – almost as many as about life itself. One delusion is that subjects are more important than teachers. Another, which covers all life, is to discount the influence of great men, or through sloth or ingratitude to forget their achievements.

I want in passing to say a few words to you today about a great but neglected man, the first Chancellor of this university, General Sir Howard Douglas, Governor of New Brunswick. More than a century and a quarter have passed sine he, the King’s appointed Chancellor, came to a modest building in Fredericton to hand you charter to your first President. Douglas had to fight for the charter against redoubtable opponents led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Douglas floored the Archbishop as thoroughly as he floored all his opponents. Without him the little Loyalist college which began teaching under a draft charter in 1787 might never have blossomed into a university. Will aspiring historians in the splendid Dalhousie University note this year 1787?

You should be very proud of the Scottish worthy who was your first Chancellor. Sir Howard Douglas was a great but not a solemn or orthodox man. Like your present Chancellor his bump of reverence was not unduly developed. They had some other things in common. Each created three shining careers.

Douglas, in the words of his great friend Sir Walter Scott, was “a roaring boy and desperately pugnacious,” as were all fine, braw boys bred in Edinburgh in the 18th century. They tell me that Newcastle, New Brunswick, did not breed them differently towards the end of the nineteenth century.

I know well the place where Douglas spent his boyhood. Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden and I are trustees of scholarships in a school near Douglas’ home. Your Chancellor told you of his lamentable school record. Douglas’ was even worse. He was almost an honorary schoolboy as his father was an admiral, rarely at home. So his son was able to spend much of his school-time sailing and scrapping with the fisher-lads of Musselburgh.

Here is his schoolboy record. On his first attempt to pass the entrance examination of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he was ploughed because he ill understood reading, writing and the rule of three. Surely your Chancellor Douglas would have fervently applauded Sir Winston Churchill’s saying on becoming Chancellor of Bristol University: “Thank Heaven, there is no examination for Chancellors!” In years to come, Douglas became commandant of Woolwich and the reformer of army education.

One could spend hours in recalling the achievements manifold of your first Chancellor. I must compress them into minutes.

Of General Douglas’ quality as a soldier I can give you the best of testimonials from a man sparse in praise. Of Douglas, the Duke of Wellington said: “Douglas is a damned clever fellow, - Douglas was always right; he was the only man who told me the truth.”

If Douglas was a good soldier, he was also a fine sailor. Apart from General Blake, he was the only soldier I ever heard of who was given command of a cruiser, and who forced a reluctant admiralty to found a school of naval gunnery.

As governor of New Brunswick he was a great improver. His splendid leadership during the great fire was one of his sacrifices for the province. Timber in his time was your greatest industry, and his great fight was to preserve your interest. Baltic timber traders were very jealous of the preferential tariff given to New Brunswick. When a feeble British government surrendered to the free traders and Baltic advocates, this is what happened. Your Governor and Chancellor was a first-rate propagandist. He wrote at white heat a scarifying pamphlet against the betrayal of New Brunswick, and handed the first stitched copy to Lord Goderich, then colonial secretary (afterwards prime minister), with these words, “I have published this pamphlet against the repeal of the timber duties, my Lord, and I beg, to present your lordship with the first copy. And here, my lord,” he added producing a letter, “is my resignation of the government of New Brunswick.”

Douglas had nothing but his official pay: and a large family. He surrendered his living for your sake, and he tried to do more for New Brunswick. Being a great man, he would never give in. He sent his fierce pamphlet to every member of parliament, and when New Brunswick’s grievances were debated in the House of Commons, the government was defeated. Bonfires were lit all over New Brunswick. The colony swamped him with messages of affection and praise.

After four years of unemployment another British government made him low high commissioner of the Ioanian Islands where a noble monument commemorates his rule. Thereafter, he had a distinguished career in the House of Commons. But he never forgot your university. Thirty years after he left the colony he was still corresponding with the Principal of your university who spoke of him at your commemoration in 1859 as the “ever watchful and faithful friend of the University of New Brunswick”.

This inadequate account of Sir Howard Douglas’ life will, I hope, stir you to combat the cardinal delusion that nations or universities can prosper without great men.

Since the last war ended there has been a lively controversy between many who hold high responsibilities in universities about what subjects should be taught within their walls. Academics have always been fierce controversialists. Indeed, educational arguments seem to bring out all that it bellicose in the human being. When university presidents or vice-chancellors deem each other deluded that can always find appropriately acidulated words. American universities have been foremost in this continuing controversy about what universities should teach. This controversy has been healthy.

There seems now to be agreement among the best of the universities about the need for a return to simpler and proven standards, and a heartening condemnation of the 20th century curse of materialism in university affairs. Since the beginning of this century some universities, animated by material motives, have been offered a profusion of exotic courses and splintered subjects. They have been enameling illiteracy.

A craze for bigness has also afflicted some universities with the result that faculties have been at arm’s length, and students have had few common interests and no corporate life. External pressure has often cause increases in numbers and a lowering of standards. This pressure should be resisted. University education for all may mean university education for none.

Happily today there is a growing condemnation of the delusion that a university should be a shell encasing an ill-contrived collection of technical schools. A university is a house of liberal and humane learning; a place which offers a good general education to all its students. Such an education is the rock upon which vocational training should be built. A sound general education is in Cardinal Newman’s words:

"The best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason, and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste and formed his judgement will not indeed be at once a lawyer, or a statesman or a physician, or a man of business, or an engineer or a chemist or a geologist, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the callings or sciences I have referred to or any other for which he has a taste of a special talent, with an ease, a grace, or a versatility and a success, to which another is a stranger."

"A man of well improved faculties has the command of another’s knowledge. A man without them has not the command of his own."

Newman’s ‘Idea of University’ contains more wisdom and grace than anything ever written in English on the purposes of a university. It sweeps away the sterile and dogmatic controversies about the relations between the liberal arts and the sciences which has plagued universities for more than a generation.

A splendid justification of the value of a liberal education is shown in the fairly recent re-organization of the curriculum of the greatest technological teaching institution in the world – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the Mecca of scientists and engineers. At M.I.T. it is now ordained that almost forty per cent of the student’s working time must be given over to the humanities and the social sciences. Surely this is the best answer to those who question the worth and usefulness of a liberal education.

A university has many functions. Its main one is to teach students how to learn. University education is only the beginning of a man’s or woman’s education, for education is an endless effort and an abiding interest.

A few days ago your Chancellor gave you some characteristically pithy and wise advice. He told you to take trouble in practicing writing. He told you of the happiness and the benefits you will derive from widely reading good books. No one can write well without wide reading. Incoherence is one of the major mental diseases of the age. You may have the best of ideas and a store of knowledge. They will be of little use to you or the community if you cannot clearly express them. Expression is one of the few things which can be precisely defined. It means mastery of the thought and the word, both of which are inseparable.

Another silly delusion is that in university life the professor or lecturer plays the active part, the student the passive. This condition still prevails in some of the mass producing American universities and it debases education. Professors are no funnels to fill the student vacuum. Students in a University obtain a lot of unconscious learning from each other.

A University is a society in which youngsters by freely mixing with each other gain new ideas and views and thus learn one from another. This is particularly true of universities set apart from the distraction of those ant heaps called cities. Self-education really begins in a university and ends in a grave.

This university is now witnessing a second spring. It has never lacked devoted teachers, men of light and learning. But its buildings and equipment have not been worthy of the men and women who have used them. A university without a good library is desperately handicapped. Today you have a splendid ever-growing library. The world is being ransacked for the papers of men who have played a part in great affairs. A collection of some of the best pictures of many schools has been formed for your benefit. Few universities have such an advantage. In no far distant time Fredericton will become a place of pilgrimage and the centre of historical research. It will, I hope, also foster many well chosen post-graduate studies.

I have talked at some length about your first Chancellor. Let me now say a few words about your present Chancellor. Cocksure Europeans believe that atomic energy was found in Europe in this generation. I believe that it was found in Canada in 1879.

I shall say nothing today about Lord Beaverbrook’s tremendous life beyond the boundaries of this university. He is to be thought of now as your Chancellor. Nor shall I speak of his material benefactions to the university. Here is one of the busiest men in the world, who never ceases to strive for the university. No Chancellor of any university has ever worked harder in its service. If he is good to the university it returns good to him. It makes him younger in heart, and preserves his eagerness and zeal.

Your university is fortunate in being placed in lovely hilly country. One of the springs of Lord Beaverbrook’s affection for the university must come from the metrical psalm he so often heard in his father’s kirk –

"I to the Hills will lift mines eyes
From when doth come mine aid."