Graduation Address

"The University and the Individual" (18 May 1950). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

I fulfil with pleasure and gratitude the duty of thanking the university on behalf of my fellow honorary graduates as well as myself for the high distinctions to which we have today been admitted. To receive, on any occasion, an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick would be a great privilege, to be accepted with gratitude and satisfaction. It is the more memorable because the class of 1950, to which, in a sense which is very real to us all, we now belong, is a class so largely made up of men who have already rendered outstanding service to the Dominion and the British Commonwealth. And what is unforgettable is that we are received into your university on so famous an occasion as this - the Encaenia attending its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. That is something which will inspire lifelong pride and devotion.

For this is a splendid and moving occasion. Here, on this beautiful campus, raised a little, but not too remotely, above the historic capital of New Brunswick and in friendly nearness to it, have met to remember the founders who resolved a century and a half ago that his province should have a college of its own, and all who in the years between have laboured to make this vision come true. We recall with gratitude the courage, learning and piety which has transformed the college into a noble university. And this we do as a great company, representing many parts of this Dominion and Empire, and your friends in other lands, who look with affection towards you and share in your happiness.

I, myself, with my fellow guests, am glad to be with you. I am truly grateful for the invitation which brought me and my wife here, for the honour you have done me, for the generous hospitality you have bestowed, and I thank the chancellor, the president, and the Senate with all my heart. I have personal reasons for pleasure. My links with Canada are close. I have a special affection for this ancient, loyal and much-loved part of the Dominion, and for the people it breeds. I know what it has given to Canada and to the world: to be the guest of U.N.B., where so many of its sons have been nurtured for greatness, to feel that here I am with good friends, is an experience I am delighted to renew.

As befits a guest, I come here with greetings: greetings from my college, which evinced its goodwill towards you by doing a rather exceptional thing - giving leave to its Head to be absent during term-time: and those of the University of Oxford, under its Canadian vice-chancellor, which appointed me its delegate to these celebrations. To the messages I have been charged with, may I add my own. Congratulations on things past and present, good wishes for things still to be, are what I bring with me from the oldest university in the Empire to the oldest in the Dominion. They are all the warmer because your president, an Oxford man, belongs to us as well as to you.

Amid all the attention which is so happily and rightly being concentrated on your university as an institution there is perhaps a risk of forgetting that this is a very special occasion for quite a number of its individual members - the class of 1950. They will always be associated, at least in their own minds, with the 150th anniversary of U.N.B. Each might almost feel that the university, having overcome the difficulties of educating him, whatever they were, had thoughtfully build the whole scheme of events round the supreme moment when he received his degree. Not knowing how widely this view is held, I attribute it to no one but myself. But I do suggest it, for even when a university is recalling its own long history as a society devoted to teaching and learning, it cannot forget that the society is made up of individual people, all more and not less individual for having belonged to it. Compared to the total sum of all those who during the long years since your foundation have received degrees, one single individual may not seem to count for much. Every new graduate is nevertheless entitled to feel that, in some way, the whole process is summed up in him. If he were to day to himself "U.N.B. has lived and worked for a century and a half in order to produce me" he would be just about right. The idea wouldn't be arrogant. It would be proud: and also a bit humble.

This occasion is one for a university to put its new-made graduates in the centre of the picture, and ask each of them: "Just what has the university done to you?" "How much better are we for having you here?" And "What sort of a university are you handing over to those who follow?" The truth is that universities are about people, and about people as individuals, not in the mass. They deal not only with learning, but with life. Their pursuit of learning is a pursuit with a dual purpose - not only to organise and add to what is known but to use what is known or discovered as a means of placing a distinctive mark on individual men and women, a hall-mark of personal excellence.

In what ways should that mark be distinctive? No doubt it should mean a more than averagely good command of knowledge and of skill in applying knowledge. Graduates will be expected to be well informed and to make the information usable. The various professions which recruit them all require, and rightly so, that a degree should be a proof of competence in dealing with an intricate and specialised subject-matter. Even if the graduate may be less proficient at the outset than the man recruited at a younger age, he should be able to acquire new knowledge more quickly when he is actually on the job. Whether the knowledge he uses is got in college, or acquired later, it should be applied with an ease and precision, with a striving for perfection, which brings it close to artistry. It should be plainly, though not too obviously, evident that he is not content with less than the best from himself or from anyone else. Accuracy, quickness, mastery of means, quality of finish - all of these should characterise his performance.

All of this is essential: but not sufficient. Many a technician or craftsman can do almost, though not quite, as much. If a university has not taught more than that, it hasn't taught enough. It has not only to impart knowledge, the ability to assess knowledge critically, to see what its limits are, to decide whether it is relevant to particular circumstances, especially new and unfamiliar ones. It is just at this point that mere learning from experience, however long and valuable the experience has been, tends to break down, in comparison with knowledge which has been thoroughly organised and closely related to principles. The supreme quality of the trained graduate should be that when rule of thumb suggests no solution, and even memory is no use because either one never learned about this problem or has forgotten what one learned about it, the power of appreciating a situation even when one has never seen it before comes almost instinctively to the rescue, and set action going.

After knowledge and judgement, imagination, by which I don't mean idle fancy, but ability to see where knowledge leads. The world is unhappily full of highly gifted and admirably trained persons who have little sense of the ultimate meaning of what they are doing: of teachers, say, who cannot see beyond the doubtless admirable syllabus which they are very likely teaching admirably: of economists who can give admirable theoretical advice - at least one hopes so - with no real sense of its social or political implications: of scientists who place power at the service of a community and are heedless of the result. You wouldn't question their knowledge or judgment as displayed on its own narrow front. All you would wonder is whether their university had taught them to think outside the limits of the subject in which it had instructed them. That is a criticism which no university, and no individual graduate of a university, can afford to incur. University studies cover an immensely wide field - letters, philosophy, art, science, law, medicine, history, economics, and much beside. Few of us as individuals can do much more than master one of these. None of us should fail to be constantly aware that all the rest exist, belong together, and are significant for one another. That is a university's central idea.

Unless the graduate has acquired at least these three qualities, he has, no matter how hard he has worked, been partly wasting his time, and completely missing the point of his studies. He has had unique opportunities of making the best of himself and his powers. He has been offered, as he never will be again, an introduction to the stored-up ideas which form the essence of civilisation, and out of which a civilisation could be reconstituted even if its material resources were to be destroyed. These ideas are put before him not as formal dogmatic lessons to be got up by heart, but as material to be critically examined. Through that process of free examination and discussion, with its constant and exciting clash of opinion, his mind is tempered and disciplined, in just the same fashion as those of his fellow-students, those who teach as well as those who learn, in every other branch of study. Out of it all there should emerge men and women having well-developed individual excellences - well-informed, unprejudiced, alert to new ideas, fearless and independent in forming their own opinions, responsive to the opinions of other men whether thy accept them or not. We believe that ideas derive their life and influence not from dogmatism but from free debate.

If one adds all the other excellences which the university world admires - taste in music or drama or art - or proficiency in speaking or writing - or skill in games or in the organisation of student affairs or activities - the range and quality of cultivation opened up to the university man or woman becomes more attractive still. Not everyone can attempt, still less excell in them all. But, as a university teacher, how warmly one remembers the student, who becomes the friend, perhaps the colleague, or later years, whose college career brought him such a varied personal distinction. One I think of in particular - scholar of this college, rowing blue, musician, artist, lecturer in law, beloved in the university he served and in the squadron he led in the Royal Air Force. Any university teacher will recall his like, and regard it as the fulfilment of the university's purpose that it should send out as holders of its degrees not a succession of uniformly patterned graduates, but diversified individuals to each of whom it has given its best, of each whom it has made the most.

I believe this truth needs special emphasis in our time. The numbers of our students have grown enormously, and to the regret of all of us who remember older days, it is no longer possible for the teacher to know the individual student as he used to do. We miss the sense of personal criticism and guidance. More serious still, we all become increasingly specialized, so that students may be less broadly and generally aware of what their university means as a whole. Even worse, we are told that our chief function is a social one - to supply society with the know-how it needs and the people who have got it. To some extent, though not wholly, I should disapprove all three of these tendencies. I don't do so now, because I want to qualify the view I have put forward, in a way which is related not to tendencies I distrust but to principles I accept.

The defects associated with the individualised idea of university education are not hard to see. The pursuit of knowledge may breed pedantry. The habit of criticism may breed scepticism. The wielding of interest may breed dilettantism. Our universities are often under attack. So are their graduates. We are used to being told in the same breath that we are strongholds of privilege and hotbeds of revolution: that our education is both remote from reality and also so utilitarian that we are indistinguishable from technical colleges: that our graduates are unemployable and that they have a monopoly of all the best jobs. All that we can dismiss. What we couldn't dismiss would be the charge that by turning out pedants, sceptics and dilettantes we were spoiling men and women.

I don't believe we are. There is a saving virtue. A university, if it does emphasise individual attainment, doesn't think it enough. Its view is a broader one, and must be. It is a society, and it is in a society. In this place for a century and a half men have thought there could be no fitter way to employ their individual gifts, no finer reason for cultivating them, than to use them for the good of U.N.B., of their province, of all this great Dominion and Empire. As a kind of by-product, they have found some happiness, maybe some reputation, for themselves. Their lives, here and elsewhere, have gained in fullness and interest not only because they were self-sufficient, which is a great thing, but because they made them so full to over-flowing that some outlet had to be found. And found it was, in their dedication of themselves to the service of U.N.B. and the world of which it was for them the centre.

Here, today, we are in their place. We inherit their task. We bring our individual gifts to it as they did. Let us hope we also bring with us some portion of their spirit as we meet to do honour to their university, and to renew its strength for the years to come.

We, the honorary graduates of to-day, whom you have admitted to brotherhood with you, are henceforth with you in this thing. The task here becomes ours as well as yours. We shall not fail you.