Woods, Douglas Henry

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1964
DOUGLAS HENRY WOODS
to be Doctor of Laws

It is always warming to present an alumnus. It is fascinating when he is the product of an older era wrestling with the problems of a new.

He graduated from the U.N.B. of 1930 with honours in Philosophy and Economics. His M.A. he took at McGill, and to McGill after his war service he returned, to launch on a career that has made him, at home and abroad, an expert in labour relations. He has been I.L.O. adviser in the Philippines, consultant in a major industrial dispute to the Jamaican Government, and arbitrator in the C.B.C. strike of 1959. He has published and documented widely. He has been Director of McGill's School of Commerce, and was chairman of the Social Science group until his recent appointment, when his authorities, from sagacity or cunning, made their most obstreperous critic Dean of Arts and Science.

We are as proud of him as he is of the older U.N.B. which set him on his path.

Let us recall that Alma Mater as she was in what with nostalgia and justice has been dubbed the Golden Age of Chancellor Jones. There were no frills, just hard work and hard play; no art centre, no student centre, no residence; a pigmy gymnasium and an antique library. Books, Biology and the Boardman Collection shared the top floor of the old Arts building; Chemistry leaked on Physics in Memorial Hall. The Faculty proper numbered fourteen and held their meetings in the Classics lecture room, where under an impervious chairman they settled university affairs in an hour a week. Miss Edith McLeod -- bless her untiring fingers -- in addition to being the only secretary, typed all the exam stencils, except the Greek. From Dr. W.C. Kierstead you took Philosophy, Economics (with overtones of Politics) and Education -- subjects that now employ some fifteen lecturers -- and, as Woods admits, you never were certain exactly which shade of course you were attending!

Whatever that education, it had a grand unity. And it shared a grander and almost Athenian unity with athletics. Though an honours student, "Bus" turned out for 'rugger' and his team brought back the McTier Cup. For all four years he played 'Varsity basketball and was sure of a place, if never of a prize, in track . . . One's mind drifts back two thousand years to compare (Acropolis with Hill) that other Golden Age, where education was for the whole man and Pericles could boast: "We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness."

But Golden Ages pass, as pass they must. Today, as in later Greece, the talented amateur is hard to find and harder to place. In the herd we bow down to conformity (pace Bishop Robinson) as to a god. Our real aristocrat is the mathematician, whose computer Plato would have idealized as his Supreme Good. Yet, when honouring a Squires or a Woods, one is fain to quote the ancient statesman once again: "They yield to none, man by man, for independence of spirit, manysidedness of attainment, and complete self-reliance in limbs and brain."

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