Bailey, Alfred Goldsworthy

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1970
ALFRED GOLDSWORTHY BAILEY
to be Doctor of Letters

The retirement of a former Dean of Arts and Academic Vice-President brings to a close a family’s century and a quarter of distinguished service to the University. From Marshall d’Avray throughout the time of Loring Woart Bailey down to the present year of grace very nearly spans our history and Alfred Bailey has always been mindful of his inheritance in giving thirty-two years of outstanding teaching and scholarship to this institution. Poet, anthropologist and historian, he invariably succeeds in confounding his colleagues by the diversity of his activities and scope of his knowledge that comprehends half a dozen disciplines.

Whimsical in his manners and oblique in pressing his points of view, always a hard man to fathom, he could easily be mistaken for a scholar and nothing else, but in actuality he has been a most successful man of business as well. As a young academic he renovated the old library, making it an up-to-date instrument for the University’s purposes. As an elder statesman of the University, especially in concert with the late Lord Beaverbrook, he shared in many of the cardinal decisions that have brought us forward so rapidly in the past twenty-five years. In this context there is the illustrious anecdote of how, when the late Chancellor was resisting the demands of others to provide the University with a new rink and was supported by Dr. Bailey, he exclaimed in gratitude: "Thank God, Alfie doesn’t skate."

Dr. Bailey stands before us today not only as a leading academic personage but as one whose ambitions and insights, brought to high realization, entitle us to regard him as one of the makers of the contemporary University.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case70, Box 1