1965 Fredericton Encaenia
Morton, William Lewis
Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)
Orator: Cattley, Robert E.D.
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L to R: Colin B. Mackay, William Lewis Morton, C.L. Mahan
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Source: UA PC-4 no.12(49); Photo by Harvey Studios
Citation:
ENCAENIA, MAY, 1965
WILLIAM LEWIS MORTON
to be Doctor of Letters
This degree we reserve for those whose pens have proved their worth. There could be no worthier recipient than Dr. Morton, who ranks with Creighton and Innis, Lower and Underhill, as one of the nation's leading historians.
With point and some hardihood he proclaims the Kingdom of Canada, and he writes her history in an admirable prose where scholarly discipline controls, without concealing, his appreciation of the romantic. It is the Canada of the Laurentian school, of East-West geography, of the old fur-trading river routes, the C.P.R., and the inevitable centralizing of power. Not all will accept this as true of Canada to-day, but at least it sanctions the smug contrast of our own orderly de-devopment under law with that of the Wild American West. Morton, in The Canadian Identity, has emphasized that in a country of "economic hazard, external dependence and plural culture", authority must perforce precede liberty, and, as the Literary History of Canada phrases it, government possess an objective life of its own. But this conservative Manitoban has been equally and eloquently alive to the injustices of Confederation -- which will be no bar to a Maritime honorary degree!
It is no bar to his becoming an editor of historians. In the arduous task of organizing the 17-volume Centenary History, to which he has himself contributed The Critical Years, it gladdens us that he has assigned one volume to our own Stewart MacNutt, and is typical of his impartiality that he has commissioned two from Quebec separatists.
To crown his career this scholar, author, teacher, administrator, gentleman and, withal, gentle man is now the first Provost of University College, Manitoba. It had long been his dream to see arise within the huge complex of the provincial University a residential college on the Oxford model. In this little community of scholars he will perhaps be able to prove the thesis he has so consistently upheld that, as at Oxford, scholars are their own wisest governors.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
WILLIAM LEWIS MORTON
to be Doctor of Letters
This degree we reserve for those whose pens have proved their worth. There could be no worthier recipient than Dr. Morton, who ranks with Creighton and Innis, Lower and Underhill, as one of the nation's leading historians.
With point and some hardihood he proclaims the Kingdom of Canada, and he writes her history in an admirable prose where scholarly discipline controls, without concealing, his appreciation of the romantic. It is the Canada of the Laurentian school, of East-West geography, of the old fur-trading river routes, the C.P.R., and the inevitable centralizing of power. Not all will accept this as true of Canada to-day, but at least it sanctions the smug contrast of our own orderly de-devopment under law with that of the Wild American West. Morton, in The Canadian Identity, has emphasized that in a country of "economic hazard, external dependence and plural culture", authority must perforce precede liberty, and, as the Literary History of Canada phrases it, government possess an objective life of its own. But this conservative Manitoban has been equally and eloquently alive to the injustices of Confederation -- which will be no bar to a Maritime honorary degree!
It is no bar to his becoming an editor of historians. In the arduous task of organizing the 17-volume Centenary History, to which he has himself contributed The Critical Years, it gladdens us that he has assigned one volume to our own Stewart MacNutt, and is typical of his impartiality that he has commissioned two from Quebec separatists.
To crown his career this scholar, author, teacher, administrator, gentleman and, withal, gentle man is now the first Provost of University College, Manitoba. It had long been his dream to see arise within the huge complex of the provincial University a residential college on the Oxford model. In this little community of scholars he will perhaps be able to prove the thesis he has so consistently upheld that, as at Oxford, scholars are their own wisest governors.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
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