Alumni Oration

"College Loyalty and Value Discussed by Alumni Orator" Daily Gleaner (12 May 1932). (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

The Alumni Oration at the Encaenia of the University of New Brunswick this afternoon was by Dr. Allan Hoben, president of Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Unfortunately, an attack of heart trouble made it impossible for Dr. Hoben to attend to-day’s exercises to his marked disappointment, and his oration was read by a staunch friend and fellow student at U.N.B., Dr. W.C. Keirstead, Professor of Philosophy and Education.

Dr. Hoben’s address was as follows:

Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Alumni and Alumnae of the University of New Brunswick, Ladies and Gentlemen:-

In acknowledging the honor of being asked to speak on this occasion I find, interwoven with any attempt to formulate and discuss a subject, an almost embarrassing flood of sentiment flowing from the boyhood and youth spent here and accumulated through long absence. To return at last, not only to Alma Mater, but to a thousand early impressions of this landscape and rive, of the old Collegiate High School hard by the Cathedral, of chimes across the water and of soldiers marching to band music on Sunday mornings, and to add to that the memory of good parents who now rest nearby—all of this threatens the self-restraint demanded by a formal gathering of this sort.

Son of the Province

May I thank you all for this opportunity to come home and at a time when the University is in session? While my life work has been in the country from which my people were exiled as Loyalists and while friendship is fortunately not limited by national boundaries, nevertheless to have grown up here in your midst and to have had the advantages of this school, makes me at heart, and permanently, a son of this province and an alumnus of the University of New Brunswick.

Contrasting Views

But to proceed with the topic announced there are those who regard loyalty as a social liability, a bar to progress and a handicap to science. They deem it to be all too often an arbitrary set or caste of emotion, a fixed valuation, premature and hard to alter, a serious threat against that mental detachment which alone enables one to treat the data of experience in a scientific way. To them, loyalty is to beg the question, to tamper with the court of pure reason, to befuddle the facts. It may be a pleasant or even necessary attitude for immature minds, but it is better for adults to put away childish things.

Even a casual view of the role of loyalty in human affairs will lend some color to this negative view. Self-interest in pursuit of private gain demands freedom from all such sentiment, for loyalties interfere with profits. The emancipated modern to whom one woman is as good as another, whose good is himself, whose aim is self-realization and whose children, if any, belong to the state, gives a wide berth to loyalty. Possibly the philosophy of Bertrand Russell runs in that directions.

However, loyalty cannot be seriously discredited by is inconvenience for the business buccaneer and the libertine. It is rather on account of inferior and doubtful uses, questionable attachments, that it comes into question. For there must be some discrimination between canine loyalty whereby the dog takes no account of his master’s status or character, and the devotion of scientist or a missionary dying at his post.

In other words, there are loyalists of all sorts, some of them outmoded by social evolution. For example, the passing of Knight errantry, feudalism, slavery, trade guilds, and tribal organization bas made certain historic forms of loyalty almost obsolete; and the occasional survival of an earlier type as in the predatory gangs and racketeers of modern times creates a serious social problem.

Clash of Loyalties

Then again the clash of loyalties in what might be called normal society is thought-provoking, as John Glasworthy strikingly shows in his play of that name. The English club-man stands up for colleagues within his select group; and the cede of what is to them decent and accepted threatens to be stronger than the Decalogue. De Levis, the Jew, is loyal to the truth of the case, but obnoxiously so. The General is loyal to the army, and Colford, a true comrade in arms, is for the unfortunate Captain Dancy, uphill and down, right or wrong, come what may. Dancy’s young wife proves loyal in spite of proof that he is a liar, thief, and profligate. And while the drama throws these loyalties into conflict, there emerges in the part of old Twisden, the attorney-at-law, the most beautiful of all the loyalties in review, namely that of the jurist to the code of his profession at its best.

Numerous examples of such conflict supply ground for debate. Ramsay MacDonald, in sympathy with the labouring masses of Britain but construing loyalty as opposition to his country’s policy of war with the central powers and again in the crisis of last August, asserting a loyalty to the nation above loyalty to the class which gave him power. Everywhere in the play of party politics such issues arise. Will the elected official be merely the champion of those interests that elected him, an obedient business agent in behalf of his constituency or party, or will he enlarge his loyalty in fearless service for all the people? Clearly the zones, within which loyalty applies, affect its quality; and some demand of alignment from small to great, from immediate to remote, from tangible to spiritual may rightly be laid upon this potential allegiance experienced in some degree by all mankind.

College Loyalty

It is from that high point that one may best see the social significance of college loyalty. For the value of this common by-product of higher education must be tested at last by its worth the commonwealth rather than by any esoteric and pleasurable fancy on the part of those who enjoy the privileges of college life.

What then are the loyalties commonly found in colleges and how do we come at them? The beginnings are humble as every freshman knows. How could it be otherwise? Here come these young amorphous candidates for civilization. At the time they are of little use at home or in the overcrowded occupations of adults. Yet they are the heirs apparent of material wealth, world culture, institutions of law, government, education, literature, art, religion, science—all, in fact, that has resulted from millennia of thought, toll, experiment, failure and success. But no camouflage can conceal the fact that they are raw. Alas, even the bumptious sophomores are but calves of a year old.

Student Experiences

Well to begin with the barbarous hazing of forty-one years ago served no good purpose that remains in memory, unless perchance it hardened one to endure injustice when it is inevitable, and to dread mob rule. Possibly there resulted also a defensive loyalty within class limits, a fellowship of common danger, a solidarity under attack.

Fortunately there were other experiences more constructive and better calculated to win one of the school as a whole. The wearing of cap and gown was the regalia of belonging; while the song sessions in the reading rooms, athletic teams, self-organized and self-trained, contests, college colors, yells, debating societies, mock parliament, the college paper and one or two dramatic performances were all voluntary and informal ways of merging into group enterprise and of building, unconsciously, a vital loyalty to U.N.B. Possibly one of the chief ends of extra-curricular activities is to awaken and deepen the magic affirmation, "My College." For all this random programme calls for action and drafts one’s best effort. It has zest and collectivity and is, so to speak, under a banner.

But even so, much of it is still at the rah rah or jingo level, smeared with the paint of tribal ferocity and vibrant with a narrow and hard nationalism. It is, especially under the impact of intercollegiate athletics, "My College" against the enemy. It serves, therefore, only as the rough beginning of a loyalty that may become ever more intelligent and therefore ever more spiritual and enduring. For we do not remain youngsters forever, and athletic prowess, glorious as it is at the right period of life, gives way to reflective thought; which probably has some place in the scheme of even those institutions whose fame centers in football teams.

Therefore, with the exception of those few alumni who remain arrested in the adolescent fervor of athletic combat and whoa re rather a nuisance to administrators, the college man moves on into a realm of rational loyalties dealing with the mind.

Autobiographical

But lest I should be understood as unfriendly to college athletics and strenuous sports, I must, at the risk of being auto-biographical, offer, the testimony of a small lad who timidly crept into this university in the fall of 1891. He came from the wrong side of the river and the vicinity of the sawdust piles. This chap was not stalwart or sure of himself or even normally aggressive. If you had called him, Smith, Jones or Brown, he would probably have consented without protest, without self-assertion. In the latter half of the freshman year, Van Thorn, a senior who will always be enshrined in grateful memory, induced this raw recruit, and outfitted him, to enter the annual track and field meet in which he got a taste of victory and a will to win that finally made him high-point man for the four years’ course. If one can view impartially his own evolving self, I should say that the primary factor making for self-discovery and confidence in those four years was athletic competition.

Respect for Barriers

But to proceed with the more rational grounds of college loyalty, matriculants at this school should be grateful for the dignified and stern barriers set up at entrance for the examinations designed to select the human material worthy of public expenditure and teaching effort and for the authority which remains neutral and free from all suspicion of solicitation. One can be loyal to an organization of that sort whereas one is tempted to be flippant or patronizing toward a school that advertises, solicits and dickers after the fashion of competitive business. Frankly, I would not exchange my respect for this university for that which any of the institutions subsequently attended may have evoked. That, I think, is a good part of the foundation of lasting loyalty.

Beloved Instructors

And now for those factors which come still closer to the heart, those beloved persons still clearly delineated who shared with us who were all unworthy and slow of heart, the very treasures of the ages. I know not how to thank them!

Chancellor Harrison, who succeeded in making even a dumb person master a good bit of higher mathematics, whose justice as administrator was tempered with mercy so that he refrained from sending my father a bill of $25.00 representing my fine for a misdemeanour, and allowed me to pay it off myself.

Dr. H.S. Bridges, forever my ideal of a great teacher, in grace of stature and dignity of manner, in calm enjoyment of the classics, himself like a Greek god to me and his praise on one occasion when I hit upon a lucky phrase in translation. Somehow I have always felt that these men were backing me. Indeed, their generous recommendations opened other educational doors after I had left the old hill.

Memories of Stockley

What shall be said of Stockley, whose gentleness and exquisite taste and personal concern brought one into the sunlit fields of English literature. His method of requiring one to memorize great portions of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury has been fully justified by the mind’s recovery of many lovely lines in peaceful moments in military hospitals and in sleepless nights; while, if there is any such thing as taste and style in one’s literary diet and in one’s intermittent effort to write, the credit lies with him who first made literature beautiful and highly to be desired.

Some of you will remember Duff, who left at the end of our sophomore year. Physics was a field of magic then, and no doubt still is. Nearly every one of us intended to major in it, until he left. Scientific method, precision and romance of the first order made his class room galvanic with interest so that we were really eager to work, to experiment, to play with the imponderable forces then being explored preparatory to the marvellous uses since developed.

Bailey was a saint of the same order and fortunately remained with the university through a long and distinguished career that bound many generations of students together in the familiar smells of chemicals, the hiss of Bunsen burners and the slop of the pneumatic trough. His image remains in the mind as that of the typical scientist, a symbol of devotion and truthfulness and withal a man whose kindly interest in the individual student was proven time and again.

Davidson came while we were here. He used to shout to me from the side line what to do with those burly St. John Shamrocks when I was playing quarterback on the football team. His lectures on logic were a bit trying for youngsters. Economics and philosophy were also rather beyond our ready comprehension. But he was a scholar and a good Scot and stood rather close in with us in working out student affairs. One of the best rebukes I ever got came from him where one day in the midst of a lecture, I got some smart sophomore remark. He paused. Silence followed. He looked at me until we all were doing the same. Then he said in good round Scotch, "Mr. Hoben, the only excuse for making a joke is making a good one." He had uttered a truth that I have tried to remember.

Now when we speak of college loyalty, we speak of these men who were the life of the University, whose life was shared with us. And they were and are worth of loyalty, not alone for the friendship which they proffered, but in the last analysis, because they were the trustees of sound learning, because they would not sell out what was fine and true, because they had a code and had taken solemn vows of fidelity to the good, the true and the beautiful.

Basic Philosophy

College loyalty so conceived is not fanciful emotion but basic philosophy. The school stands between barbarism and enlightenment. It largely selects and determines the leadership of the future. For many of us it meant release into new worlds of enjoyment and potential service. Our loyalty rests upon the firm belief that only the best minds and these when best trained, can save society from chaos, that there is an aristocracy of ability whose reward is hard labor, responsibility, hazard, misunderstanding, and not much else; that this university is rightfully a place where such selection, irrespective of social status, is made and where such training is given at public expense and for the public wealth.

And is it not apparent that the loyalty which has enriched this university with generous private gifts and the loyalty of citizens acting through the provincial assembly for the support and development of higher learning are based alike in the conviction that enlightened leadership is the most important concern of society: that sound learning and unimpeachable honor are the bulwarks of the state.

It is in that faith that we of former days return as to a shrine, a place hallowed with blessings in days gone, a place vibrant with promise for days to come.