L'Heureux, Willard Joseph

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1967
WILLARD JOSEPH L'HEUREUX
to be Doctor of Laws

The Department of Physical Education at U.N.B. has completed its first ten years with the highest enrolment in Canada for the Bachelor of Physical Education degree.

The Department deserves, and today received, a second testimonial. Serving not only its own discipline but the needs of 'Varsity athletics and Bio-Engineering, it has operated out of a gymnasium never designed for a university department. Now, on the threshold of its second decade, when superbly adequate facilities have been added through the gift of the Beaverbrook Foundation, it is auspicious that at the opening of these two massive wings our Chancellor should have had at his side the most outstanding figure in Canadian physical education and athletics, and a good friend of U.N.B., Willard Joseph L'Heureux.

With twenty-seven years as a practical teacher of his subject, Professor L'Heureux heads at Western one of the four large Canadian university departments of Physical Education. But his influence has a national scope. He was responsible for inducing the Canadian Medical Association to sit around a table with the "Phys. Eds." and to form the Canadian Association for Sports Medicine. The A.U.C.C. have him on their committee for Physical Education and Athletics, and the Federal Government on its National Advisory Council for Fitness and Amateur Sport.

With U.N.B. Professor L'Heureux's ties have been strong and, as more than his name implies, happy. To his penetrating study of Canadian hockey our own Dr. John Meagher was a powerful contributor. On both have been most fitly bestowed the Tait McKenzie Awards of Honour, and Professor L'Heureux delivered the Tait McKenzie Memorial Address in McConnell Hall, 1965.

Though several of his publications betray that the sport closest to his heart is hockey, he has an objective view of all sports at all levels -- recreational, school, national amateur, and professional. This broad vision he has summed up with modest but pungent brevity: "It is quite possible that a re-examination of our purposes at this time may cause to appear a unique Canadian philosophy of sport which will be realistic, virile, and long-lasting."

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.