1959 Fredericton Convocation
Bissell, Claude Thomas
Doctor of Laws (LL.D.)
Orator: Cattley, Robert E.D.
Citation:
CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1959
CLAUDE THOMAS BISSELL
to be Doctor of Laws
The two men whom our University honours today, for all their engaging but widely different personalities, have one supreme characteristic in common. It is one which in our modern urge to specialization we cannot but admire, and must respect. They are each brilliant but many-sided individuals.
Claude Bissell is President of the largest university in Canada, and is shouldering the Herculean task of its expansion. A scholar powerful in research and pungent in instruction, he is an articulate and fearless mouthpiece of all higher learning, be it in the Sciences, the Social Sciences, or the Humanities. A literary critic, deeply versed in Canadian and Australian letters, he never hesitates to apply the lash wherever humbug masquerades as art, or bunkered adulation as the higher criticism. Yet he remains through and above his exacting professional life a human being, devoted to drama and to Scottish country dancing, to Mozart, Hi-Fi and colour photography, and withal a delightful colleague, husband, and father.
If our growth and its financing sometimes staggers us, let us regard the University of Toronto, which envisages by 1968 an enrollment of 23,000 and is committed to a building programme of $50 million. Small wonder that President Bissell thinks that this great complex of learning should bud off a second university in the same city - a
destiny for which, to our relief, we ourselves are not yet ripe.
On one condition alone he welcomes these increases as inevitable but salutary. The numbers must be the numbers of the highly intelligent. No Sputniks and no makers of Sputniks can scare him into the mass production of technicians, however skilled. The battle is for the strong of intellect, and the race for the swift of wit. But all the magnificence of bricks and mortar will be reared in vain if the walls thereof bulge to breaking from pressure of the mediocre. He thrusts the problem squarely back onto the schools and the College selection boards.
The age he heralds is not that of the common but of the uncommon man; and Bissell's uncommon man may be artist or historian, chemist, physicist or political scientist. Sometimes he may be several of these in one. Of that age Bissell himself is an early and shining precursor.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
CLAUDE THOMAS BISSELL
to be Doctor of Laws
The two men whom our University honours today, for all their engaging but widely different personalities, have one supreme characteristic in common. It is one which in our modern urge to specialization we cannot but admire, and must respect. They are each brilliant but many-sided individuals.
Claude Bissell is President of the largest university in Canada, and is shouldering the Herculean task of its expansion. A scholar powerful in research and pungent in instruction, he is an articulate and fearless mouthpiece of all higher learning, be it in the Sciences, the Social Sciences, or the Humanities. A literary critic, deeply versed in Canadian and Australian letters, he never hesitates to apply the lash wherever humbug masquerades as art, or bunkered adulation as the higher criticism. Yet he remains through and above his exacting professional life a human being, devoted to drama and to Scottish country dancing, to Mozart, Hi-Fi and colour photography, and withal a delightful colleague, husband, and father.
If our growth and its financing sometimes staggers us, let us regard the University of Toronto, which envisages by 1968 an enrollment of 23,000 and is committed to a building programme of $50 million. Small wonder that President Bissell thinks that this great complex of learning should bud off a second university in the same city - a
destiny for which, to our relief, we ourselves are not yet ripe.
On one condition alone he welcomes these increases as inevitable but salutary. The numbers must be the numbers of the highly intelligent. No Sputniks and no makers of Sputniks can scare him into the mass production of technicians, however skilled. The battle is for the strong of intellect, and the race for the swift of wit. But all the magnificence of bricks and mortar will be reared in vain if the walls thereof bulge to breaking from pressure of the mediocre. He thrusts the problem squarely back onto the schools and the College selection boards.
The age he heralds is not that of the common but of the uncommon man; and Bissell's uncommon man may be artist or historian, chemist, physicist or political scientist. Sometimes he may be several of these in one. Of that age Bissell himself is an early and shining precursor.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
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