Love, Robert James

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1972
ROBERT JAMES LOVE
to be Doctor of Laws

It is perhaps always difficult for one Dean to heap praise upon another Dean. But when one is the University Orator, appointed an Assistant Professor in the same year as the other was appointed Dean, and the other is R.J. Love who for over a quarter century has cast a long shadow of impressive achievement over UNB and education in the Province of New Brunswick, you may understand my present predicament.

The accomplishments of Dean Love are visible all around us: a department of Education at UNB that became a Faculty and will soon become even more directly linked with Teachers College, the first Physical Education degree programme in the Atlantic area which very quickly attained national distinction after its establishment in 1957, the creation of the University Extension programme in 1950, and the development of the UNB Summer Session to the point that by 1960 it was the largest Summer School in the region. Indeed if this were not the oldest University in Canada, and Bob Love not such a youthful man, one would have to call him a "founding father."

But such a list of accomplishments -- and it is a sharply abbreviated one -- while it seems to tell all, tells almost nothing, for it reveals too little of the man. Dean Love would have large accomplishments to note on his retirement from whatever field he had entered. It has only been our good fortune and that of the Province of New Brunswick that it was education which held his interest over the years.

Dean Love has been both a man of vision and a man capable of adjusting his vision at regular intervals to urge himself and his colleagues to newer and more appropriate goals. On leaving office he suggested, typically, that we chart new goals for all those areas with which he had been closely associated and, also typically, for those with which he had not been so closely associated. In this there is a measure of the man.

Courageous and unafraid of controversy Bob Love threw himself into work and play with an energy that few can match. He fought hard for the things that he had dreamed hard about and he did it all with grace, and charm, and authentic Maritime humour. His teaching will long be remembered as will the gracious hospitality of Hazel and Bob Love by generations of grateful students.

He leaves behind a University stronger because of his presence and a host of teachers across the Province better prepared because he cared enough to challenge them. He leaves behind, too, a legion of friends and colleagues who have loved and admired him and who cannot for the life of them imagine what Bob Love will do to those quiet tranquil golden years that until now at least we have termed retirement.

Praeses admittit Robertum Jacobum Love honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris of Utroque Jure.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 1