HONORARY DEGREE CITATIONS
It is arguable, of course, that a famed football coach of your student days would have been known as Gloomy Gil even if you had not aspired to be his quarterback. We know only that your prowess above Cayuga's waters led but to Harvard's Ph.D. in philosophy and four decades of running interference for both hard-pressed truth and its wayward pursuers in the groves of academe. A teacher in search of self-discovery for himself as well as his students, an administrator who fears not to judge between the quick and the dead, a humanist who honors the relevance of his subject, and an educator who believes in the cross-relevance of all things worth knowing, you have made your leadership of Wesleyan a mission to liberal learning everywhere. On behalf of all who, serving this mission, stand in each other's debt, Dartmouth's Doctorate of Laws honoris causa avows her affection for you and her gratitude for all the second miles you've gone on the presidency you now close.
A man could wear himself out just thinking about the life you've led. Born in Winnipeg, schooled at Shattuck, graduate of Dartmouth, Class of 1931, Oxford M.A., a handy man with a stick either on land or ice, that is to say, either in lacrosse or hockey, a third-generation grainman with grain running out of his elevators all over the place, President of the Junior Board of Trade (that was a while ago), Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, directorships from sea to sea, from banks to professional baseball, civic service on behalf of hospitals, the symphony, your church and two school boards, climaxed currently by your presidency of the United Appeal even as you serve as Chairman of the Council on Higher Learning in Manitoba. Manifestly, Canadian life must be comparatively quiet - for everyone else! And with it all, as a member of the Alumni Council, founder of the Dartmouth Canadian Foundation, and father of two Dartmouth sons, you have been no stranger to Hanover. For all of which Dartmouth is immensely glad and proudly heralds your return as perhaps the busiest Canadian beaver of them all who has truly earned the Doctorate of Laws, honoris causa.
Five years ago you became the tenth Principal and the first graduate to lead your renowned university. Born and long at home in British Columbia, schooled in Switzerland, and graduated in medicine from McGill, you happily brought to your job a continental background in both the Canadian and the European sense. You also brought the professional confidence and downright forthrightness of twenty-five years in surgery as practitioner, professor, and administrator. Five years as the calendar counts says nothing of the transitions you have faced and mastered: from trusting patients to impatient thousands, from the quiet orderliness of the surgical amphitheatre to the noise and disarray of the educational market place, from the comfortable certainty of knowing just where to cut to the uncomfortable perplexity of not knowing what, whom or how to cut. And above all else, you have armed the University's educational strength with statesmanship to make McGill a positive force in the life of an aroused French-Canada and thereby a new bastion of Canadian nationhood. A healer of both men and affairs, you truly grace Dartmouth's Doctorate of Laws, honoris causa.
Born way down east in Nova Scotia where sons - both kinds - get up early, elected a Liberal member of Parliament at 35, before you were 45 you had headed three ministries in Ottawa and stood on the threshold of what today is perhaps Canada's foremost career combining business and government. Now in your fourth Cabinet post, you guide Canada's destiny as one of the great trading nations of the world and the best customer of the United States, a fact that produces both prosperity and problems for you. Above and beyond the daily fret of economics and politics is the way a society takes itself as both witness and agent of humankind's highest trust and largest unfinished work - civilization. You, sir, have devoted yourself to the proposition that the ultimate obligation of an educational enterprise and the first duty of its privileged product are to bear that witness and be that agent. An arts graduate of Mt. Allison University and an M.I.T. engineer, a trustee of both institutions, and a founder of York University, you would be welcome here any time as one of the brethren of the faith. It is an especially happy thing that Dartmouth's Canadian Year should be climaxed with the award of her highest honor, the Doctorate of Laws, honoris causa, in recognition of a distinction that will pass current anywhere in any year.
To praise or not to praise is not the question; to praise and not pretend, that's the trick. It is not merely our layman's fear of pretense in the presence of a mind that has revealed meaning previously unperceived in the whole domain of literature; ever since the publication a decade ago of your Anatomy of Criticism, the world of letters itself has paid you the awesome, if ambivalent, tribute of agreeing only that literary criticism will never be the same again. Our praise here is for one who recognizes that insight is what matters and, leaving "odious comparisons of greatness ... to take care of themselves," raises criticism to the mightiest task of all - "giving man increased power over his own vision." Rooted in Canada by both birth and choice, you exemplify Canada's claim to home-grown national distinction in the community of nations; yet by insistently reaching out to universality you do Canada transcendingly proud and help all men identify with humankind. Dartmouth is privileged to welcome such an expert witness of man's wit into her fellowship as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.
It is said that you started at age 12 wanting to be an engineer and by 14 were sure you had to be a physicist. Today you stand honored in the world-wide communities of both science and technology as one of the foremost accelerators of charged particles whether they be in the form of atoms, ideas or men. A Ph.D. of Cambridge University in 1934, you began your career as a nuclear physicist studying with the great pioneer, Lord Rutherford, and later as a research associate of J. D. Cockcroft working on nuclear disintegrations and the development of the Cambridge cyclotron. Following wartime service on the critical front of radar development, you were called to Canada in 1946 to succeed Cockcroft as Director of Canada's atomic energy research at Chalk River. Unlike science, governments do recognize miracles, especially the man-made variety, and last year you fittingly became the first man to receive Canada's Outstanding Achievement Award of the Public Service for making Canada a leader in the peacetime discoveries and uses of nuclear energy, particularly the use of heavy-water systems for the economical production of electricity. Dartmouth's honorary Doctorate of Science bespeaks the abiding admiration that is your due in this community of higher learning.
