1959 Fredericton Encaenia
Robbins, John Everett
Doctor of Laws (LL.D.)
Orator: Cattley, Robert E.D.
Image
Image Caption
L to R: Walter Whitehill, Pierre Dansereau, John Everett Robbins, Geoffrey Abbot Gaherty, K.C. Irving
Second Image Caption
Source: UA PC-4 no.7ac; Photo by Joe Stone
Citation:
ENCAENIA, MAY, 1959
JOHN EVERETT ROBBINS
to be Doctor of Laws
We are honouring today two leading but widely dissimilar engineers of Canada. The first, as we have seen, is the developer of the nation's physical resources: his work is all with hydro dams, transmission lines, and atomic power.
The other now stands before you. With his opposite he shares the basic discipline of mathematics. It is perhaps no coincidence that his first serious research project was "Hydro-electric development in the British Empire". But John Robbins' forte was to be statistics; and by a refinement of this vocation he has concerned himself with the subtler kilowatts of the Canadian spirit.
Modest and to outward view retiring, he works indefatigably beyond the common gaze, the mainspring of those councils, committees, and associations which are the real time-pieces of Canadian nationhood. The very list is symbolic of the man. It ranges from UNESCO to the Canadian Legion, from Carleton College to the YMCA, from Lebanon to London, from Mexico to Beirut. Not a few of the Faculty of this University owe their sabbatical leaves to the John Robbins who unlocked to them the coffers of the Humanities and the Social Sciences Councils.
On one theme alone can this shy and self-effacing genius be roused to Olympian passion, and that is the forging of Canadian scholarship unalloyed. Then the banked fires blaze, blown by the bellows of this intellectual Vulcan. The white-hot metal is gripped in the relentless tongs, beaten out on the editorial anvil, held up to piercing scrutiny, and finally plunged, for such tempering as its nature can take, hissing into the trough . . . of the Encyclopaedia Canadiana.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
JOHN EVERETT ROBBINS
to be Doctor of Laws
We are honouring today two leading but widely dissimilar engineers of Canada. The first, as we have seen, is the developer of the nation's physical resources: his work is all with hydro dams, transmission lines, and atomic power.
The other now stands before you. With his opposite he shares the basic discipline of mathematics. It is perhaps no coincidence that his first serious research project was "Hydro-electric development in the British Empire". But John Robbins' forte was to be statistics; and by a refinement of this vocation he has concerned himself with the subtler kilowatts of the Canadian spirit.
Modest and to outward view retiring, he works indefatigably beyond the common gaze, the mainspring of those councils, committees, and associations which are the real time-pieces of Canadian nationhood. The very list is symbolic of the man. It ranges from UNESCO to the Canadian Legion, from Carleton College to the YMCA, from Lebanon to London, from Mexico to Beirut. Not a few of the Faculty of this University owe their sabbatical leaves to the John Robbins who unlocked to them the coffers of the Humanities and the Social Sciences Councils.
On one theme alone can this shy and self-effacing genius be roused to Olympian passion, and that is the forging of Canadian scholarship unalloyed. Then the banked fires blaze, blown by the bellows of this intellectual Vulcan. The white-hot metal is gripped in the relentless tongs, beaten out on the editorial anvil, held up to piercing scrutiny, and finally plunged, for such tempering as its nature can take, hissing into the trough . . . of the Encyclopaedia Canadiana.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
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