Acknowledgments
The photographs in this book have been selected from a considerable collection in the Dalhousie University Archives. While some duplicate prints have surfaced, most of the photographs have been copied by Findlay Muir, of Dalhousie Audio-Visual Services, to whose skill and assiduity with some murky originals (the Tito one especially), I am most grateful. Karen Smith of Dalhousie Special Collections has made several thoughtful suggestions. Dr. Donald Betts has lent two of the photographs, the rugby game and Hugh Bell’s class in biology. Mrs. Oriole Aitchison has lent the picture of J.H. Aitchison, and Mrs. Nita Graham the picture of J.F. Graham.
Preface
Ten years ago W.A. MacKay, president of Dalhousie from 1980 to 1986, asked me to write its history. I thought it could be done in one volume and three years; it has taken two volumes and ten years, eleven by the time this book gets into print. Much of that time was needed for research; the Dalhousie Archives are comprehensive. Besides that, every so often a sudden and compelling richness of papers had to be exploited, and later would impose shifts in the balance of the narrative. Thus chapter 5 on the fall of President Carleton Stanley was made possible by the wealth of material in the Stanley Papers in the Dalhousie Archives; chapter 8 on C.D. Howe and Lady Dunn was enriched by correspondence in the C.D. Howe Papers in [Library and Archives Canada] in Ottawa.
This book is about lives, personal and institutional. There are many across this third half-century of Dalhousie’s existence - students, professors, clerical staff, engineers, cleaners, deans, and presidents. One wishes there were more personal reminiscences. Many have had to be sought out. To do this systematically was never possible; the best one could do was to discuss Dalhousie lives and living with colleagues, students, widows, widowers, as opportunity served or necessity suggested. This becomes the more important in the period from 1960 to 1980 when Dalhousie’s enrolment expands from two thousand to nine thousand students. There develops then a plethora of institutional evidence, and one has to make sure character and personalities do not become submerged.
Dalhousie had to have new buildings in those years, and for the first time it got massive help from the government of Nova Scotia. In those twenty years Dalhousie shifted habits, ideas, and philosophy, emerging by 1980 as a very different place. The “little college by the sea” of Archibald MacMechan’s time, 1889 to 1931, had started to disappear by the end of the Second World War, though vestiges of it lingered on pleasantly into the 1950s. But the 1960s and 1970s brought a world of new dimensions and new challenges, and the old Dalhousie was finally transformed.
Thus the last four chapters, dealing with the presidency of Henry Hicks, soon become a horror of omissions. In one decade, 1960 to 1970, Dalhousie trebled its enrolment; by 1970 new problems, new buildings, new professors, new issues fill the campus. Thus what has been left out of this book could be as significant as what has been put in. Selection is a judgment call, always arbitrary; the historian can’t include everything, he has to prevent his book from becoming an unreadable catalogue.
In this question of selection I have been greatly helped by advice from colleagues. There has been more than one delight in this long endeavour, but one has certainly been much support and comment, given graciously and without stint. Professor Murray Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Dalhousie, historian of Nova Scotia, who read all of volume I and all of this volume, chapter by chapter, offering encouraging comments but noting, in inexorable detail, aberrations of style, syntax, argument and errors of fact. He will know that I have taken up 95 per cent of his suggestions.
Dr. Alan Wilson, Dalhousian, former professor of history at Acadia, Western Ontario, and Trent universities, was a searching critic, raising awkward questions based on his wealth of knowledge about Halifax, about Nova Scotia and the Atlantic provinces, to say nothing of his long experience of Trent. He has reviewed chapters 6 to 12. He was a student at Dalhousie in the later 1940s and knew its world far better than I. He has offered extended and critical comments on weaknesses of structure and faults of argument. I have listened, his advice made cogent by relevance.
Dr. Guy MacLean, another Dalhousian, president emeritus of Mount Allison University, was at Dalhousie from the late 1940s to 1980 in ascending spheres of responsibility, from student to professor and eventually vice-president academic. That has given him a wealth of experience which he has brought to bear on the last five chapters of this book. Dr. H.B.S. Cooke, dean of arts from 1963 to 1968, has read chapters 9 to 12 and offered valuable suggestions. So also D.H. McNeill, Dalhousie’s business manager after 1948 and vice-president finance from 1969, who has saved me from making too much of a fool of myself with Dalhousie’s finances. I have also been fortunate in persuading Dalhousie’s architect, J.G. Sykes, to read the last four chapters about buildings in whose development he has played a conspicuous part.
Dr. Rudolph Ozere has read and commented on all the sections that deal with the Faculty of Medicine. A former professor of pediatrics, he made suggestions about the men, women, and issues in Medicine that an historian, even one who knew medical professors from the small-campus days of the 1950s, would have hesitated to describe. In this state of ignorance, especially as medical events crowded up in the 1960s and 1970s, I am particularly grateful to my brother-in-law, Dr. J.J. Sidorov, former professor of gastroenterology, for answering innumerable questions about the life and work of the faculty in which he played a significant role. In fact I have called upon numerous colleagues and friends for information and for critical readings of parts of this book. Their names I have set down in the notes, and they appear in the index. One of my most useful consultants was Professor A.J. Tingley of Mathematics, a historian of Dalhousie by avocation, who was Dalhousie registrar from 1973 to 1985, at the centre of a whole web of information.
William Allen White advised biographers, “First, kill the widow!” The widows whom I have consulted about their husband’s careers were however both forbearing and forthcoming. But White’s remark does point to a problem as history approaches the present. In a book ending in 1980 many of the men and women, and their children, are very much alive; the conscientious historian is caught between his duty to the truth as he sees it, and avoiding gratuitous offence to the living. Where there are doubts, one way out is suppression of hard truths; it is also a route one ought to avoid. The best answer to this dilemma is perhaps that of Philip Ziegler, one of the great contemporary British biographers; he wrote to Professor J.H. Aitchison (Political Science, Dalhousie) in 1986: “One will never get entirely right the balance between duty to the reader and respect for the privacy of others, but if at the end of the day one is satisfied that nothing has been left out which had to go in, and nothing put in just to shock and titillate, then I reckon one can sleep the sleep of the just.” Despite that, it is harder than it looks.
This book may be a disappointment for scholars of university history, although they might enjoy it anyway. They may well object to lack of analysis of Dalhousie students, their family backgrounds, their later careers, why they came here and whither they went. I have been glad to use such studies, but have focused on narrative rather than analysis, trying to produce a readable life and times of Dalhousie.
The original manuscript was written by hand, then typed; eventually it was made over on the Department of History’s word processor, first by Mary Wyman-LeBlanc, latterly by Dr. Kathryn Brammall, a new Dalhousie PH.D., happily for the book between one fellowship and another. Both young women have been wonderful; Kathryn Brammall has coped brilliantly with the last five chapters and their revisions. Input from readers and author’s second thoughts were trials she managed with deftness and aplomb. Mary Wyman-LeBlanc returned to work to encounter my not having used the McGill-Queen’s house style; every date in every note had to be redone, a task she took on with singular good grace.
Diane Mew has edited the whole manuscript. Editing takes persistence, patience, perspicacity; besides that she is furnished with ranges of information from the Olduvai Gorge to Samarkand, from the Shetlands to the Falklands. She is a superb editor and I have accepted nearly all her suggestions.
Professor Denis Stairs of Political Science Department was vice-president academic from 1988 to 1993; through him this project has reported to Dalhousie’s administration. It has been a happy arrangement that he has since continued his supervision, at once solicitous and enthusiastic.
Dr. Charles Armour, Dalhousie University archivist, has put up with a presence haunting the back stretches of his domain on and off for the best part of a decade. He has dug out material selflessly and this book owes much to him and the institution he supervises. We have enjoyed swapping stories about Dalhousie’s past and also about opera. There have been times, with parts of Dalhousie’s history not always printable, when the one began to resemble the other!
My wife Masha has been arbiter of taste and form. I have relied on her discretion and good sense, needed the more as the narrative has come close to the present. There are many participants in this Lives of Dalhousie who still relish their own lives; I trust that this book is sufficiently frank to be interesting, honest enough to be challenging, and decent enough to hurt no one. Having set out that hope, it is time to get on with the story.
P.B.W.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
December 1996