Alumni Oration

"The Alumni Oration" University Monthly 33, 7-9 (April-June 1914): 329-331. (UA Case 67a, Box 1)

The theme of the Alumni Oration, delivered by Dr. A. Stanley MacKenzie was "University and State," which phrase, he said was copied from the better known one, "Church and State." The space at our disposal does not permit of our quoting the address in full.

The speaker traced the gradual separation of the Church from both State and University, although "we owe many of our college to the legitimate desire of some school or sect to train up others to carry on their ways of thought; but by its very nature such college is not intended to find out but to propagate. Legitimate as it may seem on the surface, it is a poor foundation for a university, for it carries with it fetters." Dr. MacKenzie went on to show some of the needs of the present, and how they are being met by the universities of Germany and the United States.

Continuing, he said: "You in New Brunswick have here in this University an institution which deserves your support in a way you cannot overestimate, and you have not, as in my unfortunate Province, much to undo before you can go forward in bringing to bear on your future greatness one of the greatest influences a State can possess, a free and broad-based, State assisted seat of learning. I would like to say to you—strain a point to cherish it; let it, make it, grow; the period you must wait for the product of its fruition will not be long, and will amply repay the privations you may suffer in the days of its growing.

The present inefficiency of our governmental methods, whether civic, provincial or federal, has become almost a byword. We have set up all sorts of technical and special schools and commissions for the training of men for trade, for commerce, for journalism, for manufacture; but we train and select no men for the far greater business of managing administrative affairs. We are glad to give that to the man who offers himself for it, well knowing that in the majority of cases his unfitness for any great work is the reason he is free to accept this one. It is almost pitiful to observe our cities casting about for new forms of government, city commissions, boards of control, etc., as if the form, not the personal element, were the factors for success. Until the political spoils system is eradicated from our national life, and we call to its service the educated intelligence and trained conscience of the community, so long we must retard our own progress and make the criminal blunders we are making today, from which coming generations will suffer even more than we. Such men as we need should be found among our college-bred men, and it is the fault of the universities if they do not breed such, and do not make it clear to them that service to the State is part of their bounden duty.

It is perfectly true, as is often stated, that the running of a government is a business proposition; and they follow it with the statement that it can be run by ordinary business methods, and, therefore, by ordinary business men. There is enough element of untruth in this last to vitiate the first statement. Government is a business enterprise, but not an ordinary one. It cannot, like the latter, be run for immediate profit, nor often for profit at all in the business sense; the profit is often for the distant future, and it includes health, happiness, intellectual and moral elevation, as no small part. And again, even in so far as the problems which confront governments today are business ones, they are exceedingly difficult ones, and the need of employing financial, economic and sociological experts in our governmental affairs becomes more and more apparent. It is a hopeful sign of progress in civilization that the interests which engage state attention are becoming decidedly more, sociological. We live in an age which may be remembered as one marked by a notable awakening of the public conscience to its interests and duties in social welfare work. The existence of the slum is felt as a moral stain on a community; the proper housing of the poor is some of our business, and the mortality in our midst we are partly responsible for. If our consciences are pricked in these matters there is hope that they may soon feel goaded in the direction of our duty to the state itself.

The willingness of Legislatures to give largely of public monies to the universities is evidence that the public are beginning to recognize that the inefficiency and extravagance and corruption in government are intolerable, and that the expert and the trained intelligence must be called in; and they look to the universities in turn to produce such men and to direct them to the duty of service to their country.

How can the university meet the call? Not by giving way to the base cry of utilitarianism, Let the universities hold fast, by its humanities and its discipline; in these is it, sole, strength. Not by turning the university into a school; let the boy stay in high school while he is still a boy. But make the university democratic; let the students live in residential communities, largely self-governing, to learn the art of living, and of governing and being governed; bring these into touch by means of their own organizations with men of affairs and men of ideals of the present, as well as with those of the great past through their books; thus to develop a sense of conscious purpose in their training, to develop in time into a wider and more immediate sense of duty to the state.