Jensen, Merrill

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1976
MERRILL JENSEN
to be Doctor of Letters

Having left the Iowa of his birth and the South Dakota of his early upbringing Merrill Jensen went to the University of Washington for his BA and MA, the University of Wisconsin for his PhD and seems to be in orbit ever since. A man of many contrasts, he is equally at home in Madison, Wisconsin, where he taught brilliantly for nearly three and a half decades; in Oxford where he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History in 1949-50; in Tokyo and Kyoto where he has shuttled back and forth for the past twenty years and where he has been the guiding hand if not the founding father of American Studies in Japan; or in two idylic islands of the Pacific North West, a stone’s throw from Canada, where he has summered with his charming wife and helpmate Genevieve, for many years. A man who strikes notes of both terror and deep and abiding affection in the hearts of his graduate students, who wittily and wickedly can refer to his mild mannered and gentle secretary as The Sergeant so she might impose some order on the energetic chaos that surrounds this warm and friendly man, a man who reads out legislators for their woefully inadequate level of support for historical studies, he is yet the man who is given the rare privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States, and the Supreme Court, and into whose capable hands is given responsibility for major national editorial projects in history.

It is as a superb scholar and truly great teacher that Professor Jensen leaves his greatest marks in a long career of eminence and distinction. In such major works as The Articles of Confederation, The New Nation, The Founding of a Nation, and The American Revolution within America he has left a legacy of detail and interpretation that will stand as long as scholars study the American Revolution and its aftermath. As a scholar’s scholar we are all in his debt for such indispensable works as American Colonial Documents to 1776, the Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, and The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Very many Universities including our own, on this continent and abroad, are in his debt for a host of outstanding professors of American history so ably trained and inspired by Merrill Jensen. With him, they know that in history, while the facts may not speak for themselves, any historian worth his salt had better have all the facts before speaking.

Merrill Jensen pays this University great honor in allowing us to honor him in this year of America’s bicentennary.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2