Foreign Guests Are Honored With Degrees
AT an academic ceremony in the Bema on Saturday afternoon, closing the Convocation events, President Dickey conferred Dartmouth honorary degrees on the six participants from England, India, and Canada. Following are the citations delivered by President Dickey:
MOHAMEDALI CURRIM CHAGLA Doctor of Laws
IN both the official and the popular sense you are truly an Ambassador Extraordinary. Educated in Bombay and an honors graduate of Oxford, trained in the law at London's Inner Temple, you came to diplomacy as a lawyer who became a professor, a professor who became a judge, a judge who in becoming a Chief Justice also shouldered the extra burdens of serving his nation abroad at the International Court of Justice and at home as a one-man commission of inquiry into an alleged misuse of high public trust. Your demonstrated capacity for measuring up to the intellectual and moral challenges of leadership in a newly free India made you Prime Minister Nehru's choice for the mission to America, where nothing less is at stake than that our vastly different societies should find mutuality in putting to its hard proof the democratic proposition that men matter and that they matter most when free to matter. Beyond the missions you have borne on behalf of others, your devotion to the fine arts and the drama as emissaries of truth reminds us that the liberating spirit has no boundaries either within a man or in the affairs of men. Dartmouth is privileged to enroll such a plenipotentiary to the state of mankind as Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
BROCK CHISHOLM Doctor of Science
CANADIAN by birth, world citizen by concern and conviction, out of a small-town boyhood, old-fashioned soldiering in World War I, a medical education at Toronto, British psychiatric training, exposure in depth to the ills and ignorance of men as both a general practitioner and a psychiatrist, the direction of Canada's Medical Services as a Major-General in World War II, and then seven years of international pioneering as a founder and first Director-General of the World Health Organization, you have become one of modern man's most articulate voices bespeaking his emotional stability, his intellectual integrity and his social maturity. A wholesaler as well as a retailer of health, you practice your preachment that " 'progress' has little meaning today unless it is applied in a total sense." If our civilization escapes becoming an exhibit in history's museum as a society that was mentally unprepared for the mature use of knowledge, you, sir, are assured a high place among those who fearlessly sought disenthrallment from the past. In recognition of your extraordinary efforts on behalf of the well-being of men everywhere, Dartmouth awards you her honorary Doctorate of Science.
SIR GEORGE PICKERING Doctor of Science
PHYSICIAN and scholar, your perceptive professional eye sees more in man than a curious mixture of blood and lymph. Cambridge graduate, for seventeen years Professor of Medicine at the University of London, you now grace the renowned Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford. Product of a great heritage, you personify the long line of leadership in British medical culture from which the world has often taken inspiration and guidance. Your brilliant research on the mechanism of headache, on peptic ulcer, and most notably on that vast, enigmatic disease - high blood pressure, has never drawn you from the pivotal fact that headaches, ulcers and high blood pressure occur not in research reports or textbooks but in people, and that for man, the central element in all this, there is therefore a world of difference between headaches and a headache. Both for that aggregate called society, and for that lonely wayfarer called student, you are a proponent of greater freedom. With you medical education is a liberating experience; by your example you teach us all that only by venturing into the unknown does man discover he is free. In tribute to such a leader of British medicine and in gratitude for that continuing concern for education in your country that nearly two centuries ago gave this College its life, Dartmouth welcomes you into her fellowship as Doctor of Science.
WILDER GRAVES PENFIELD Doctor of Science
IN these parts yours is a name known both to fame and infamy. Fifty years ago as a Princeton football star and coach you operated no less than five times on Dartmouth (once in desperation by inventing the "Penfield ricochet"), and invariably with fatal results - for Dartmouth. What a happy day for both mankind and Dartmouth when you turned to brain surgery! Out of science and surgery, literature and conscience, a questing spirit and a warm heart, you fashioned a career that adorns even your illustrious profession. From the world-commanding citadel of neurological healing and study you created in Montreal to the surgical amphitheatres of Moscow; from Hippocrates to Osier to Alan Gregg, on whose counsel so largely rests today's refounding of Dartmouth's Medical School; from your epic work on epilepsy to your novel about Abraham of ancient Ur; from research on man's brain to the enhancement of his mind, you sir, have been an apostle of greatness. It is a happy day for Dartmouth when her special affinity for Canada is witnessed by the acceptance of her honorary Doctorate of Science by you whose life and work span both nations.
ALDOUS HUXLEY Doctor of Letters
SEASONED traveller on the steepest road to fame - the enhancement of an already great name - in a literary career of perhaps unmatched versatility for our time you have never lost the touchstone of artistic vitality: you are usually leaving as the critics arrive. They have traced your unpredieted trail through fifty-some works of poetry, novel, drama, short story, travel, essay, biography, and editing, the fruit of nearly half a century of transposing the experiences of your mind into lettered sights and insights for pondering by other minds. Some critics divide your career by two; others, perhaps with more advanced math, by three; but whether the oversimplification be from intellectual to mystic or from the aesthetic to the ethical en route to the religious, your mind has been a dominating force in Western letters for not one but two generations, and as the sweep and thrust of your sharp, bright blade at this tourney of conscience and science made evident, the end of our profit from your enlightenment is happily neither foretold nor near. Dartmouth is privileged to have the colors of her Doctorate of Letters borne by such an adventurer into the inner realms of freedom.
SIR CHARLES SNOW Doctor of Letters
IN our riven time when it is the boastful hallmark of some men of letters that they cannot tell a quantum from a quahog, while just across the street certain devotees of science tolerate literature for others as charming nonsense and reject outright the claim of conscience as an unmeasurable irrelevance, and when, in turn, both the humanist and the scientist are often suspect by men of affairs as being well-poisoners of the idyllic spring of man's common sense, in such a world you stand forth as one who has done the work of all three and therefore speaks as a professional to the perspective that sees man whole. Pervasively in your novels, precisely in your physics, perceptively in your essay, "The Two Cultures ..and responsibly in the direction of affairs, you have taken the measure of power in all its dimensions and you tell us that a knowledge of matter not bounded by morality is but a higher ignorance, while a morality not in harmony with matter is a futility that denies the condition of man. Higher education, like other forms of modern life, suffers from the malaise of divisiveness but it is a happy testimonial to our instinct for better health that the Dartmouth community is as one in acknowledging you to be a most efficacious and exemplary Doctor of Letters.
Honorary degree recipients with President Dickey before the start of the procession to the Bema. Seated (l to r): Ambassador Chagla, Mr. Dickey, Aldous Huxley, Sir Charles Snow; standing: Dr. Chisholm, Dr. Penfield, Sir George Pickering.
The Pipers O' Ben Dhu, Scotsmen from the Hanover area, lead the academic procession.
