Coles, James Stacy

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1958
JAMES STACY COLES
to be Doctor of Science

Good neighbour that she is, the state of Maine is always tending to blend and blur with New Brunswick. Her borders march with ours and our University gladly honours her great figures -- never more appropriately, perhaps, than the President of Bowdoin College.

The oldest seat of learning in Maine, Bowdoin presents an uncannily close affinity with the University of New Brunswick -- in beginnings and early history, in the personalities preceding their very foundations, in ideals and traditions, and in their long line of vigorous presidents and gifted faculty.

Their charter as a College was dated 1794; Ours 1800. We were functioning as an Academy in 1787; they opened their doors in 1802. Their home-town is Brunswick. Governor Bowdoin was a friend (until "the troubles") of our General Gage. Both institutions have had their struggles with poverty and prejudice, and both have triumphed -- endowed by their founders, aided by their benefactors, but keeping unflinchingly to their own ideal, to preserve and to bestow all that was best of western civilization in North America.

Like ours, Bowdoin's early curriculum was classical and by modern standards stuffy. But, stuffy though it was, it produced a Longfellow, and a Nathaniel Hawthorne. Its short-lived engineering faculty graduated, in the Class of '77, Rear Admiral Peary.

If in the strict old days the professors "Up the Hill" chased students to bed at 9 p.m., they gave, like ours, of their talents and their society to the town after that early curfew. One professor's home was a station on the "underground railroad" for escaped slaves, and another's saw the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

A President, if like Dr. Coles he is a chemist, has glorious but exacting predecessors to follow. In Presidents, to name but two, he has Woods, who met on their own ground the Oxford Tractarians and talked Latin with the Pope, and Hyde, who forced the light of modern day into a liberal education. In Chemistry professors he has Parker Cleaveland, who corresponded with Davy, Cuvier and Berlioz, and whose great admirer was Goethe.

As if that were not enough, it is a standing tradition at Bowdoin that Presidents shall instruct. But President Coles came equipped for that ordeal also. Trained as a teacher, Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry, he has shown by his wartime research and subsequent academic career that he is a potential Woods, Hyde and Parker Cleaveland rolled in one, with possibly his great predecessor, Sills, thrown in.

Withal he is a very human President. The embodiment of Bowdoin's ideal of physical fitness, he appears with the dawn at Bowdoin's rink (earlier than dawn in winter) there to skate and to meditate, or to meditate and to skate - few have been present to distinguish the processes -- and is an ardent and regular hand on an ocean-going yacht. He performed, however, what must be the ultimate in bringing Higher Education to the Masses, last autumn. When his two young sons were prostrate with 'flu he took on their paper-route, and the astonished citizens of Brunswick were greeted by a smiling President turned paper-boy, delivering the Sunday Telegram on their doorsteps and, I understand, extremely punctually.

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