Whitehill, Walter Muir

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1959
WALTER MUIR WHITEHILL
to be Doctor of Letters

In the Librarian and Director of the venerable Boston Athenaeum, I present to you the Man who has become an institution and an Institution that is inextricably a man.

An efficiency expert would gnash his pragmatic teeth at this mystic but surprisingly functional union. He would argue that, for even an unstreamlined repository, the Athenaeum hoards too many antiquated tomes in its stacks; that precious square-footage has been wasted on statuary (equestrian statuary included); that its Director's cluttered desk would cost any business executive his job; that as a Company with shareholders it runs on a precarious and, worse, a private budget, but (against the best modern trends) without deficit; that it is staffed by mediaeval scribes, frequented by crackpots, and presided over by an amiable Edwardian, with embroidered waistcoats and a looping watch-chain, unaccountably accounting for its every transaction, said Edwardian being a foe to technocracy, progress and profit. Our critic might sneer that, whereas all good executives are stationary, this one is a mobile editorial office for a score of journals, societies and associations, some without organization, more O horrors!) without minute-books, and all dedicated to lost or highbrow causes, from American clippers to Mozarabic manuscripts; whose business is liable to be patched together on aeroplanes, in taverns or at street corners, and whose records are recklessly transported in a certain vellum valise with no internal filing system. But to the educated world -- and this will mean Boston and a privileged fringe -- and to all fortunate planets that have swum into his genial and civilizing ken, the Athenaeum is, and for thirteen illuminating years has been, Walter Muir Whitehill. And what, Ladies and Gentlemen, what is this luminary of the "vellum valise"?

A scholar of catholic range, the biographer of a modern admiral yet whose magnum opus is a sweet dissertation on Spanish Romanesque architecture, a bibliophile as receptive to books in good type as to books on good food, a lover of fine craftsmanship whenever and wherever his keen nose scents it, he is Brahma to the Brahmins in that temple of Brahminism, not by show of erudition -- there is no show, only the erudition -- and has unobtrusively led humans to learn by keeping his own great learning human. An antiquarian without pedantry, he can be as fierce against the jargon of officialdom as against jerry-built suburbia. On all such creeping cancers he wields so trenchant a scalpel that, according to folklore, no old house in Boston can now be closed up without the Director of the Athenaeum being consulted on the disposition of its books and furnishings. Such are some of the countless facets of the well-rounded genius we are about to honour.

Mr. President, Members of the Senate, make him by all means a Doctor of our University, make him an alumnus; but above all invite him to be a working leaven in our midst. The Humanities and the Sciences, for once in unison, will welcome this moustachio'd and ambidexterous paladin to their ranks.

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