Hoar, William Stewart

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1965
WILLAM STEWART HOAR
to be Doctor of Science

The Zoology Department of the University of British Columbia is renowned for its fine blending of laboratory with field-oriented experimental research. It is also the largest Zoology department in Canada, with a staff of thirty-two and an enrolment of some two thousand undergraduate, and one hundred and ten post-graduate, students.

Of this great department the Head and, as will become apparent, the heart is Dr. William Stewart Hoar, who is certainly the most field-oriented, and by implication the muddiest, experimenter among them. "In my work" he says, "you must go out and puddle about where the fish live". The published results of his researches run already to sixty-seven papers, and he has a textbook in the press. In 1955 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A continuing tribute to his worth as a scientist is that he has attracted more post-doctoral Fellows to work under him than any other Zoologist colleague, and that these Fellows hail from India, Pakistan, Great Britain and the United States.

With all his graduate students he is prone to contract firm and lasting friendships, and he has been a father-confessor to an unknown number of them. The hearts of his colleagues, any Head's severest critics, he has won by his deep integrity, utter modesty, and transparently human spirit, and their respect by a certain rock-like firmness when critical decisions have to be made.

It is good for us all to remember that Bill Hoar was a New Brunswick lad, born in Moncton; for our Arts and Science Faculties to remember that he took his biology Honours in Arts; and for myself, that he was for two years one of my outstanding Latinists. His Alma Mater is indeed welcoming to the home fold one of her most brilliant alumni.

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