Address in Praise of Founders

"Prof. Stephens. Praise of the Founders of the U.N.B. and Thoughts Called up by the Encaenia Day" The Daily Telegraph (16 May 1913): 6-7.

May it please Your Honor;

Mr. President and Members of the University Senate,

Ladies and Gentlemen:--

In the words of Marcus Aurelius Antonius, "Praise does not make our object worse or better;" but gratitude is a happy burden to carry--the happier and the lighter when, as now, it is shared by so many.

It is my duty to remind you of those loyal adventurers who, more than a century ago, petitioned the governor and captain general of the infant province of New Brunswick for the establishment, at Fredericsburg, of an "academy or school of liberal arts and sciences." It is to these men who took the first step in changing existing conditions for the better that our gratitude is due.

Constituted authority can establish academies and schools and give power of granting degrees wherever and to whom it will, but it is only by reputation and general consent that the charter of an university is truly validated. Therefore let us cherish the memory of those few citizens who, in a true spirit of patriotism and love of learning, first worked for the development of education in this province.

While an university is, outwardly, no longer a teacher's and student's guild as in the days of St. Brendan the Navigator and of Peter Lombard, its members are gathered together for the same purpose as of old--for the honor of decency and learning.

In view of the modern larger opportunity everywhere, it is a little discouraging to contemplate the discrepancy between these plain objects of academic work and its results. Although this may, to some extent, be due to haste, verbosity and the ever-increasing number of subjects studied--four consecutive hours of a student's time being devoted, perhaps, to mathematics, psychology, Aristophanes and Christian Evidences--yet partly may we not ascribe the lack of the highest attainment possible to the general absence of some clear end of education, distinctly formulated and striven for continually.

Hard work, steadfast purpose and a "virtuous and gentle discipline" can overcome many obstacles, yet I think we must deplore the fact that the man of action is so seldom found in pedagogic work. No doubt this difficulty is inevitable except in rare and memorable periods such as produced Dun Scotus, Colet or Newman, men who wrought so much more by the forces of personality than by didactic exercises.

While modern universities are becoming more in touch with life, still, perhaps, the profession of the pedagogue is a dangerous one for its followers. Specialization and the tyranny of detail make in the end for that mental inertia which left the belated Scholiasts watching with horror and alarm the lights of the rennaiscence beginning among the Tuscan hills.

But there is a new factor in modern university activity--the attempt at the application of scientific knowledge to the common business of life. In making this statement I am not forgetting that the curriculum at many of the universities of the middle ages partook of a technical character--Bologna was a school of law, Salerno of medicine.

I refer more particularly to the application of experimental science to the infinite problems of manufacturing work, transportation, and the transmutation of energy which were formerly left in the hands of either the artist or the laborer.

It may be form the very newness of these efforts, from the general comparative youth of those engaged in them, and the consequent absence of any definite tradition, that apparently well informed opinion is not yet unanimous on the importance of these studies or the best methods of pursuing them.

When we remember that the Ecole Polytechnique was founded as recently as 1794 and that Sir Alexander Kennedy established the first college engineering laboratory in England in 1878, we may realize the adolescent state of such undertakings.

Even if there has been strife in the past between the humanities and applied science at the universities, let us not look for it in the future.

It has never been observed that civilized man has cared to exist without literature, metaphysics and the other human delights. If he chooses after three thousand years, to add another barrier to his defences against the hardships, erudities and material difficulties of life, who shall say that the addition is not welcome?

I do not wish to be understood as seconding Locke's dictum on Parnassus--" 'Tis a pleasant air but a barren soil," or that of John Knox:--"The Devil fly away with all the fine arts." Permit me to clarify my own turgid sentences by a short quotation from one of Cardinal Newman's lectures:

"Looking always to real utility as our guide, we should see, with equal pleasure, a studious and inquisitive mind arranging the productions of nature, investigating the qualities of bodies, or mastering the difficulties of the learned languages. We shold not care whether he was a chemist, naturalist or scholar, because we know it to be as necessary that matter should be studied and subdued to the use of man, as that taste should be gratified and imagination inflamed."

To return to our own foundation, may we not hope, by hard work without sterility, culture without pedantry, to realize a future worthy of those honest men who fostered us in the beginning.