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.IX.

Dalhousie Being Transformed: The First Years of Henry Hicks, 1963-1968

Henry Hicks, president and presence. Stanfield intervenes with government support. University Grants Committee, 1963. Changes in federal funding. Proposal to unite Nova Scotia Technical College and Dalhousie. Capital grants for buildings. Dorothy Johnston Killam and her will. Graduate Studies. The Tupper Medical Building. Faculty of Health Professions, 1962. The Weldon Law Building. H.B.S. Cooke of Arts and Science. Grade 12 admission, 1966. A Student Union building, at last.

He’s a bon vivant and scholar whose white locks curl past his collar And on whose nose there sits a pair of gold-rimmed semi-specs, ’Tween town and gown a catalyst, politico, philatelist, Part pragmatist, part poet, part Tyrannosaurus Rex. In Oxford days a rowing Blue, a middling hockey player too, An advocate in later years who reached the Premier’s chair Now Senator and President and alternating resident Of gracious South End Halifax and Ottawa so fair. He knows the vintages of wines from labels to the very vines, He knows his jazz recordings and he knows his Oscar Wilde; He even knows a thing or two about the TV interview And how to leave a viewer half-annoyed and half-beguiled. He loves the limelight, loves the chair, loves gallivanting here and there Loves pontificial perks and all prerogatives of rank. In fact, to sum up everything, it might be well to crown him King... He’d likely be the best one since the days of Louis Cinq.

That 1979 sketch of Henry Davies Hicks by Jim Bennet ('53), introduces the man who moved into the president’s office on 1 September 1963. Hicks was neither tall nor especially dignified; he was slim and energetic, mercurial and quick-witted, not strong on patience or persistence; he gave the impression of being ready to jump at fences before he had quite got to them. But he had considerable talents. He had a politician’s tolerance of critics and criticism; he was not thin-skinned. He also had style, a happy amalgam of Nova Scotia and Oxford, a knack for making celebratory occasions memorable, a rich and engaging blend of black tie formality and earthy humour. Delicacy was not his strong point, and some could be offended by his abrupt and salty shafts. Nor was he subtle; if his bowler hats were from St. James Square, London, his humour was from Hicks’ Ferry, Nova Scotia.

The Hicks family were Yankee stock out of Rhode Island who had come in 1759 to take up old Acadian land in the Annapolis valley. John Hicks, JP, was a member of the Assembly from 1768 to 1770. Originally Quakers, the Hicks men married Anglican and Methodist women and by the time Henry was born in 1915, the eldest of four children, the family at Hicks’ Ferry were Methodist. Motor cars forced the building of a bridge over the Annapolis River and the name Hicks’ Ferry was given up for Bridgetown. Hicks’s father ran a woodworking and lumber business; when a local undertaker, who owed a great deal of money, went bankrupt, Hicks’s father became a funeral director and licensed embalmer. Young Hicks finished high school in Bridgetown in 1932 with the highest graduation marks of any in the provincial examinations. His parents thought him young at seventeen for the rigours and temptations of college, so he taught a one-room school for a year. His bent was chemistry and physics; with several scholarships on offer, Hicks chose not the nearest college (Acadia) but Mount Allison over in Sackville, New Brunswick, with its Methodist connection. By the time he graduated from Mount Allison in 1936 his interest in chemistry and physics had begun to wane and he wanted courses about the world, its history, and the way it worked. So he came to Dalhousie and took a fat roster of classes in the social sciences. There was also a story, not ill-founded, that he came to Dalhousie to polish possibilities for getting a Rhodes scholarship. That he did in 1937.

By that time Hicks had decided to study law. In Exeter College, Oxford, his Nova Scotia Latin saved him, for two of the five final law papers were in Latin, though they could be answered in English. Hicks had come to Oxford a Methodist teetotaller, but he rapidly developed a palate for wines, and within two years he was one of the more knowledgeable members of his college about Rhine wines. Hicks learned rapidly. Within one year, knowing nothing about rowing, he was coxswain of his college crew, being too light to row. He acquired fame in a bold and definitely unorthodox manoeuvre on the Thames at Oxford, and in the spring of 1940 was coxswain of the Oxford crew in the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Oxford lost by five lengths, rather a lot, though probably not owing to their coxswain.¹

In 1941 he joined the Canadian army, became a specialist in radar, and had risen to captain when he was discharged in 1945. He ran in the Nova Scotia provincial election of October 1945 as a Liberal for Annapolis County, the same year as his marriage to Paulene Banks, daughter of a newspaper editor in Caledonia, Queens County. They had four children.

Hicks had flair, elegance, and self-confidence. Careful, calculating, cool judgments were not for him. He was impatient of fools and rarely hesitated to show it, hypocrisy not coming naturally to him. He was frank and open, almost to a fault, and thought Dalhousie should be too. “If I can’t show Dalhousie’s books to anyone - and still get away with what I want to do - I shouldn’t be president,” he told a colleague once. He enjoyed being outspoken. He liked to excel at whatever he chose to do, carpentry, stamps, wine, indulging his literary tastes for authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde. His intellectual agility was considerable. More than one observer noted how quickly Hicks would get at the nub of a problem, even after hearing only part of the evidence; businessmen liked him for that. He could recognize talent in others, and was attracted to brilliant, off-centre people, “odd-balls” as one friend remarked, and would bring them into Dalhousie’s service. This worked, though there was occasionally a disastrous misjudgement. It was clear that Hicks would be a president very different from his predecessor.²

By the end of 1962 Senate’s Committee on University Government had considered the appointment of a president, proposing a joint committee of four each from Senate and Board of Governors, all the proceedings to be confidential. The proposal had not yet been accepted by the board. At Senate’s request, four members, Dickson, Edwards, Guptill, and Read, met with McInnes before Christmas 1962, suggesting they would like a joint meeting with the board executive on the appointment of a president, that while it was not their purpose to transgress upon the power and function of the board, they would like an interchange of information. McInnes agreed to try to arrange it. But the board did not wait. On 4 February the executive committee reviewed the names of several possibilities and agreed that Henry Hicks was their man, and so recommended to the full board that very day. By this time Hicks really wanted to be president and would have been disappointed had he not been asked.³

The board was uneasy about Hicks’s political connections and asked him to pledge not to take an active role in politics or express political opinions. They produced a letter to that effect for him to sign. Hicks refused. “Gentlemen,” said Hicks to the board committee, “you’ve made a mistake. First of all, you’ve made a mistake in offering the presidency of the university to someone who[m] you think you have to tie by a commitment like this, but secondly, you’ve made a mistake if you think I would ever sign such a letter.” In the past three years, he said, his minor political activities had been quite harmless and they would so continue. But he refused to be bound. The committee picked up the letter and the matter was never heard of again. Hicks believed that members of the university should be allowed to become MPs, MLAs or whatever, and later persuaded the board to make it as convenient as possible for staff members to run in elections. That was a tradition that went back eighty years to Weldon’s election to the Canadian House of Commons in 1887.⁴

The question of the president’s house on Oxford Street was more awkward. The official residence, given by R.B. Bennett in 1925, actually abutted part of Hicks’s lot, which faced Coburg Road. Hicks’s house was a big comfortable place, in good repair, and he had no wish to move his whole household a distance of a mere two hundred feet. Moreover, he was convinced the board would not spend the money needed to bring the old place, built about 1890, up to scratch. Thus he preferred to stay where he was; to that end in 1964 he sold his house to Dalhousie for about $40,000, a fair market price. Dalhousie would thus pay upkeep and taxes. On Hicks’s retirement he would have the option of buying it back. The regular president’s house on Oxford Street would now be vacant. But nothing around Dalhousie in those days was vacant for long. There was talk about using the house for space desperately needed for the Psychology Department. R.B. Cameron, chairman of the board’s Building Committee, took “rather violent exception” to that idea, but he was eventually overruled by necessities.⁵

Thus was Hicks appointed, effective 1 September 1963. He was forty-eight years old. His appointment was officially until the 31 August after his sixty-fifth birthday - that is, until 1980. His salary would be $18,000 a year, with a car allowance of $1,000 a year and a similar entertainment allowance.

As Hicks was being installed as president on 31 January 1964, his wife Paulene was dying of leukemia. She was diagnosed with it in December; the drugs given her to conquer the disease broke down her immune system, and she died of pneumonia in February. The last time she was out of hospital was to attend her husband’s installation. Hicks was left to cope with his house and four children, ages ten to sixteen, growing up and needing attention. His domestic life under some strain, a year later Hicks would marry a lady he had first known when he was at Dalhousie in 1936-7, Margaret Gene Morison. They had also faced each other in the 1950s when he was minister of education and she the negotiator for the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union. They were both fifty years old.

Hicks was fortunate also in another partnership, his vice-president, Horace Read, dean of law from 1950 to 1964, who would remain vice-president until 1969. Read was a good choice, well respected downtown in legal circles, cool, unflappable, knowledgeable. In Hicks’s absences from Dalhousie for weeks at UNESCO conferences in Paris in the autumns of 1964 and 1966, to say nothing of university business outside Halifax, Read was the solid back-up; if conservative, he was so in the best sense, wanting what was best of the old, while ready to adopt what was useful in the new. He was also good at smoothing academic feathers ruffled by Hicks’s abrupt ways.

While in important respects Dalhousie and Hicks were lucky to find each other, it was also true that both benefited by the turn of federal politics. The Diefenbaker administration was defeated in the general election of April 1963 and the Liberal government which succeeded it would last until 1979, through nearly all of Hicks’s presidency. With fifteen years’ experience as a Liberal politician in Nova Scotia, Hicks could count on friends and political colleagues in Ottawa, and he was never averse to using them. It also happened that the Nova Scotian government, under Robert Stanfield, was for Dalhousie a benign presence. Stanfield was fair-minded, intelligent, judicious, a Dalhousie alumnus ('36), who had long been a friend of Dalhousie. As both Conservative premier and minister of education, within the limits of being seen to be fair to other universities, he would continue his support, even if at times he would find Hicks headlong and demanding.

Nova Scotia Decides to Support its Universities

In 1958 Stanfield had decided that the Nova Scotian universities needed some modest financial support, and provided a grant of $150,000 for all the Nova Scotian universities to strengthen Arts and Science. Of that Dalhousie got 17 per cent. The sharing was not derived from a formula but represented Stanfield’s judgment of what each university should get. It would stay the same for the next four years, while Dalhousie and other Nova Scotian universities wrestled with increasing expenses and stationary revenue, with serious and potentially overwhelming increases in student numbers looming portentously on the horizon.⁶

In 1955 Edward Sheffield, former registrar at Carleton, then with the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, launched a blockbuster paper at the annual meeting of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC); he predicted drastic increases in student numbers over the next decade. How right he was! The university-age population in Canada almost doubled, from 860,000 in 1950 to one and a half million in 1970. More significantly, the percentage of that population attending university increased markedly, from 7 per cent in 1950 to 20 per cent in 1970. Those figures meant formidable changes. McGill would more than double its student numbers from 1950 to 1970, and Dalhousie would more than quadruple, from 1,553 in 1950 to 6,616 in 1970, some 426 per cent.⁷

What had created this crisis - for crisis it was - was the weight of demography. The war veterans came home in 1945 and 1946 and it showed at once in the rise of the birth rate. Dalhousie registration changed little in the 1950s, but by 1958-9 it started to climb; the big increases were between 1962-3 and 1965-6, when enrolment rose at an annual average of 13 per cent. In one year, 1964-5, enrolment jumped over 19 per cent above the year before. Thus the Dalhousie of 1,496 students in 1957-8 had become 2,613 six years later. Dalhousie was not unique; every university in the country, in varying degrees, was going through similar trauma. “Our university crisis far worse this fall,” said the Financial Post in October 1963, “as students jam in.” The Halifax Herald in February 1964 accepted “wholeheartedly” the need for a major increase in provincial spending on universities. The $250,000 a year for all the Nova Scotian universities was only the first drop in a huge bucket of necessities. Drastic and immediate increases were now required.

On 17 December 1962 a delegation of university presidents went to see Stanfield on just that mission. They wanted the $250,000 increased to $1 million, and even agreed about its distribution. Stanfield forestalled that; he created a University Grants Committee. He needed specific, detailed, and informed advice about what Nova Scotia should do, not only about the private universities but about public institutions such as the Nova Scotia Technical College, the Nova Scotia College of Art, and the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro. He also needed advice about facilities and standards, how to avoid duplication and increase cooperation between all the institutions. The committee he struck was a small but powerful engine. Chairing it was Larry MacKenzie, just retired from the UBC presidency; with him was Dr. Arthur Murphy ('30), a well-read and respected Halifax surgeon, associated with Saint Mary’s; the third member of the panel was E.L. Goodfellow, deputy minister of finance of Nova Scotia. Stanfield set it up formally on 7 January 1963 by order-in-council, and made it statutory in the Universities Assistance Act of 1965.⁸

Stanfield wanted his new University Grants Committee to give him an interim report by the spring of 1963 and a much fuller one in the autumn. It soon became obvious when the Committee met the Nova Scotian university presidents on 23 February, that MacKenzie was the committee, bringing to bear a range of experience of both universities and committees that quite eclipsed the others. The policy of the committee was to make recommendations to the Nova Scotian government sufficiently strong that they could not be refused. The course MacKenzie had pursued with the British Columbian government he was determined to follow with the Nova Scotian: get the government to respect his recommendations. Hence his remark to his colleagues, “The day the Government reduces our funds by one penny we can call it quits.”⁹

Hicks bluntly told the University Grants Committee how far Nova Scotia had to go to catch up to Ontario and British Columbia. In 1962-3 Dalhousie’s income was $3.9 million, the main sources of which were:

Over and above that Nova Scotia contributed to Dalhousie general funds only what might be called the Stanfield money, $67,520, 1.74 per cent of Dalhousie’s total income. As Hicks pointed out in 1963, Nova Scotia may have excelled in the past, but since 1945 it had fallen steadily and cumulatively behind other provinces. There was some irony in his saying this, for Hicks himself, as minister of education and as premier, had done nothing for the universities. Of course, in the 1960s circumstances had changed. Even the following year, 1963-4, when Nova Scotia had substantially increased its grants - Dalhousie’s was now 9 per cent of its income - the comparative grants per full-time student were startling:

Hicks did not feel that Larry MacKenzie was sufficiently seized of the urgency of Dalhousie’s position: its professional faculties were under enormous pressure, and its graduate studies had trebled registration between 1960-1 and 1963-4. Hicks and MacKenzie met to discuss this and other questions in November. A year later the University Grants Committee suggested that Dalhousie discuss with King’s, Saint Mary’s, and the Nova Scotia Technical College the prospect of a major university library, a common athletic centre, with Dalhousie assuming the bulk of the expensive scientific and pre-engineering programs. Hicks knew very well the jealousies and the difficulties implied in those suggestions. “I am sure you realize the delicacy of Dalhousie’s position,” he told the committee. But, he added, the new Association of Atlantic Universities had improved cooperation and such new departures might just be possible.¹⁰

The Association of Atlantic Universities (AAU) came from a suggestion by the Grants Committee in December 1963. Two earlier forums had been the Central Advisory Committee on Education in the Maritime provinces, set up in 1924, and more recently the APICS, Atlantic Provinces Inter-University Committee on the Sciences, founded in 1958 by W.R. Trost, who became Dalhousie’s dean of graduate studies in 1961. The purposes of these groups were narrowly focused. The AAU developed a broader mandate. It was started at Dalhousie in January 1964, at a meeting presided over by Hicks, where his warmth and verve were especially effective. It would be administered through an executive committee and an advisory board, its first executive director being Monsignor H.J. Somers of St. Francis Xavier. The early meetings went extremely well, so much so that Colin McKay, president of UNB, wished they had created the AAU ten years ago.

The business of the AAU soon ramified. One of its many advantages as a forum for common policies was that it could operate at different levels, involving presidents, vice-presidents, and others. In July 1964 the business officers of ten universities met to discuss common problems. Even physical plant supervisors had meetings. In 1966 the deans of residences, male and female, debated current issues such as, for example, the question of liquor on campuses. In general, the Atlantic universities did not permit liquor on campuses, a convention impossible to enforce. The deans agreed to recommend that drinking by students of legal age should be permitted on campuses at controlled outlets, subject to provincial liquor acts.¹¹

Henry Hicks was known for off-the-cuff remarks, sometimes barbed, but nearly always driven by a rich sense of humour. Not all his targets were amused.

A New Mode of Federal Subsidy

In the autumn of 1964 the AAU convened a special meeting at the Halifax Club to meet the Bladen Commission. Dean Vincent Bladen of the University of Toronto had been appointed in 1964 by the AUCC, at the request of the Pearson government, to recommend a new mode of administering the federal grants to universities in ways more consistent with constitutional propriety. The federal grants which it had administered since 1951-2 had started on the basis of 50 cents per head of population in each province. The amount was doubled in 1956-7 and by 1962-3 was $2. The Bladen Commission noted that the level of capital expenditures in the Atlantic provinces’ universities might have to be tripled or even quadrupled to bring them up to standards in the rest of Canada. The Pearson government did not like these recommendations and rejected them at a federal-provincial conference in October 1966. Instead, with the acceptance of the provincial governments, it adopted a new scheme: the unconditional transfer to the provinces of four percentage points of income tax, one of corporation tax, topped up by whatever was necessary to give each province one of two options, either 50 per cent of its expenditure on all post-secondary education, or $15 per capita of population, whichever was the greater.

The problem for the universities was that the money so transferred went to the provinces directly. Instead of getting a fat cheque from the AUCC, it would come from the provincial government. Nor was there any control over how the provinces would spend the federal money; if they chose, they could spend it on highways. They could also decide which option they preferred. Nova Scotia preferred the 50 per cent principle; thus future federal transfers would depend upon the level of provincial post-secondary spending. The more Nova Scotia spent on universities, the more it got.¹²

Since Ottawa had been giving $5 per capita in 1966-7, the increase for 1967-8 would, in effect, treble Ottawa’s contribution. The new arrangements offered some difficulties - Ottawa had not yet defined what operating costs would comprehend - but the new system was finally put in place in the 1967 Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act.

One effect of the government’s new mode of handling university grants was to force the AAU universities to deal more directly with the provincial governments; as Colin McKay put it to Hicks, “We should be content to work out with our provincial governments the securing of a fair share of the federal revenues paid over to the provinces.” That was not going to be easy. In a speech at the installation of Monsignor MacLellan as president of St. Francis Xavier in January 1965, Stanfield reflected about university autonomy when the province was now going to foot such a substantial proportion of the bill:

The public will not recognize the right of any university to do what it likes at the expense of the taxpayer. If Dalhousie should wish to maintain a graduate school in Egyptology the people of Nova Scotia are surely not compelled to finance it... In other words, academic freedom cannot mean freedom to use public money for objectives which the Legislature does not accept... A university may of course decide what its objectives are, and may raise money to achieve those objectives; but it cannot decide the objectives for which the taxpayer’s money may be spent.

That speech certainly fluttered the dovecotes and upset the presidents and the Chronicle-Herald. But Dalhousie’s president was not upset. As a former politician he understood what Stanfield meant, and indeed congratulated him on being so forthright. Stanfield for his part remarked that he intended no restrictions on academic planning, only that the legislature had to have authority to deal with universities.

An example of such efforts occurred later in 1965. A row developed over the University Grants Committee’s effort to streamline engineering education in Nova Scotia. Dalhousie and the Nova Scotia Technical College (NSTC) liked the proposals, but in the other universities they met so much resistance that Stanfield commissioned a report on the whole subject of engineering education from R.R. McLaughlin, dean of engineering at the University of Toronto. McLaughlin bluntly recommended the union of NSTC with Dalhousie, with NSTC becoming the Dalhousie Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. All the universities would continue to offer pre-engineering as before. This sensible recommendation was bolstered privately by C.J. Mackenzie a Dalhousie engineering graduate of 1909 (the last engineering class before the NSTC was started), and head of the National Research Council from 1944 to 1952. He told Hicks (the letter being passed on to Stanfield and to George Holbrook, president of the NSTC), that “The ideal solution for Nova Scotia is, in my opinion, crystal clear. The NSTC should become a Faculty of Dalhousie and be built into a strong applied science centre.”

That idea got short shrift from the other universities. Hicks was unusually cautious. He knew how tender a subject it was. He told C.J. Mackenzie that he doubted “how useful or effective it would be for me, as President of Dalhousie, to become an active protagonist of the views you have expressed.” Stanfield, in the face of the political power wielded by Acadia, St. Francis Xavier, and Saint Mary’s, was very guarded in his comment to Hicks:

There may be very rigid and widespread views on this subject. Consequently I do not know that we are likely to see any change or not. I think all we can do is see what happens to the recommendations made by Dean McLaughlin. My guess is that not very much will happen unless the government is prepared to push people around pretty fiercely, and this might have unfortunate repercussions.

Other universities feared Dalhousie; Acadia, for example, resented Dalhousie getting control over the entrance process to yet one more profession. It had Law, Dentistry, and Medicine: was that not, surely, enough, without adding engineering? It was an attitude analogous to that which had led the universities in 1907 to establish NSTC in the first place. Thus, except for the sharing of a few classes between Dalhousie and NSTC, nothing was done.

All the universities, Dalhousie included, could at times be greedy and noisy. In March 1965 the presidents of the Nova Scotia universities sent Stanfield a minatory letter about funding increases which he answered with some heat:

The time seems to have arrived for a very frank exchange of views. I would like to see you at your earliest convenience... I wish to say immediately, however, that I find... [part] of your letter [of March 5, 1965] together with its implications deeply offensive... It had seemed to me and to my associates in the government that this increased assistance to our universities [for 1965-6] would be very significant. If it does not appear so to you, one in my position is tempted to conclude that we might very well use this money for some other significant purpose, and we have many available.

Stanfield was not going to be pushed around.¹³

Provincial Capital Loans: The Lever for Building

Stanfield did mention, however, that there would be significant increases in capital grants. This was Nova Scotia’s other major contribution to universities, especially to Dalhousie. Hitherto capital grants to universities in Nova Scotia had been negligible. Dalhousie was given $150,000 in 1956 toward the new Dental building; other than that until 1964 the only capital grants had been to the Nova Scotia Technical College and to Dalhousie for the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building. In 1965 the Universities Assistance Act authorized capital grants. An ingenious practice developed of funding new university buildings: Dalhousie (or other university) would apply to the University Grants Committee for a provincial loan up to 90 per cent of the cost of construction of a proposed building and would find 10 per cent of the construction costs itself and pay for the land and the interior furnishings. Residences, being subject to funding by Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, were not eligible. The loan would be interest-free, and a separate accounting would be established for each building. The loan would be repaid by the university at 3 per cent per year; the government would set up a sinking fund to which it would contribute 2 per cent a year. At the end of twenty years the loan would be paid off, the 3 per cent annual contribution being part of the university’s operating expenses.

These two things - operating costs split between Ottawa and Halifax, and capital project loans arranged through the Grants Committee and the provincial government - were the base that allowed Dalhousie to build so rapidly in the 1960s, and enabled it to accommodate the trebling of student enrolment between 1960-1 and 1970-1. The Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation loaned money for residence extensions, up to 95 per cent of cost, the repayment period not to exceed the useful life of the building, in any case not more than fifty years. On this basis, Shirreff Hall’s east wing was finished in 1963, and the two extensions to Howe Hall, the northeast wing in 1964 and the southeast in 1967.

As those big numbers of students began to loom on the horizon in 1960, campus planning at Dalhousie began to take shape. On 15 December 1960 Senate moved that each faculty should submit proposals for a five-year plan, to be submitted by 28 February 1961 and discussed in Senate a year later. Out of this came, jointly with the board, the extension to Shirreff Hall, as well as the extensions to Howe Hall. Hicks had not given much thought to the physical planning of the campus. His instinct seemed to be that Dalhousie could put up a building wherever it liked. H.B.S. Cooke, dean of arts and science, uneasy with that cavalier attitude, told Hicks that campus planning needed priority, and soon. In November 1963 Cooke calculated that by 1970-1 his faculty would need nearly three times as much physical space as it then had available. Brought up short by that kind of analysis, Hicks recognized its urgency and so the Montreal firm of Marshall and Merrett was consulted. They reported in 1964. Campbell Merrett told the Board of Governors in July 1964 that Dalhousie would need 65 per cent more land than it had at present, at a cost of between $5 and $7 million. He recommended that most of the area between Coburg Road and South Street, between Oxford and Robie streets, should be slated for park and industrial zoning and that Dalhousie should get powers of expropriation to take what it really needed. Merrett even talked of Dalhousie going south of South Street and north of College Street.

President Henry Hicks breaking ground for the new Law Building.

Planners and presidents seemed not, or not yet, to have realized the fundamental disruption the expansion of Dalhousie would create for lives and property in Halifax’s south end; or, if they had, Dalhousie’s necessity was thought sufficient justification. Larry MacKenzie of the Grants Committee pointed out in November 1964 the need for high- rise thinking on the Halifax peninsula, that the delights of horizontal development would soon have to end. City staff were more conscious of local opinion; they saw the way the tentacles of Dalhousie’s growth were choking out well-established local housing, local life, to say nothing of depletion of local taxes. Thus they recommended against rezoning College Street, and would cut the Dalhousie request to as small an area as possible along University Avenue - that is, to one hundred feet deep on either side, which was only half of what Dalhousie had asked for. One Marshall and Merrett recommendation Hicks adopted immediately: the joining of the Macdonald Library with the Chemistry Building. That gave some 40,000 square feet of new floor space. Hicks believed that suggestion alone justified the expense of the report.

The new School of Architecture at NSTC, under Professor Douglas Shadbolt, graduated its first class of five students in May 1965. Their final-year project was to produce a development plan for the Dalhousie campus, using Marshall and Merrett data and with Dean Cooke as the “client.” They introduced the platform concept of indoor circulation areas between the major buildings at the basement level. They also suggested purchasing properties in the open market for departmental use between Studley and Forrest.

The architectural students’ plan appealed more to city staff than the Marshall and Merrett one, for it helped to resist Dalhousie’s plans for rezoning. Hicks suggested that Shadbolt’s students’ plan had helped to weaken Dalhousie’s case at City Hall, and that in turn produced a temporary sharpness between Shadbolt and Hicks. Hicks apologized graciously - he was good at that - but he was not above firing a few parting shots, offering his own comments on the Tech proposals. Nevertheless, both plans had merits. The Technical College plan assumed that Dalhousie’s departmental office needs could be met by ordinary purchase of properties in the open market, a sensible suggestion that Dalhousie had already begun to adopt, rather than by building a new departmental Arts and Science extension west of the existing Arts and Administration Building, as Marshall and Merrett wanted. On the other hand, the latter thought that official university buildings, between the Studley and Forrest campuses on University Avenue, would help tie the two campuses together. Thus the Law School, then the Student Union Building, and later the Arts Centre, were a product of this line of thinking.¹⁴

Few planners mentioned Dalhousie’s power needs, but the university engineer did. In February 1965 Professor Arthur Chisholm told the president that Dalhousie’s power use had grown so much that it really needed a sub-station. He described the existing complex of transformers, some owned by Dalhousie, some owned by Nova Scotia Light and Power, with assorted meters in different sections of the campus. The breaking point was the amperage that could be supplied on a 4,160-volt line. Dalhousie’s needs would soon exceed that. Then the supply would have to jump to 23,000 volts. It seemed to Chisholm that Dalhousie should take over complete responsibility for electrical distribution on both campuses, build its own transformer station to take the 23,000 volts, and put it all on one meter. There would be 4,000-volt feeders for the Forrest and Studley campuses. Hicks had been a radar officer in the Canadian army during the war and knew what Chisholm was talking about; accordingly the transformer station - the new central services building between Seymour and Henry streets - was begun in 1968. The location was Hicks’s idea, away from the main campus axis but sufficiently accessible. The 23,000-volt electrical distribution would be effected via utility tunnels connecting the major Studley buildings. These would carry not only high-voltage electricity, but telephone cables, steam (for heating), chilled water (for air conditioning where essential), with step-down transformers in several localities.¹⁵

President Henry Hicks addressing convocation, 1968.

In February 1965, as the Chisholm-Hicks correspondence developed about Dalhousie’s needs for electrical power, Hicks was being made aware of huge new increases to Dalhousie’s financial potential from quite another source. There had appeared on the scene a very rich widow, wealthier than Lady Beaverbrook, with a more civilized intelligence, but apt to be almost as ruthless: Dorothy Johnston Killam.

Dorothy Johnston Killam Comes to Town

Izaak Walton Killam died on 5 August 1955 from a heart attack while on a fishing trip in Gaspé. After paying substantial estate duties (which the government used to establish the Canada Council) Dorothy Johnston Killam inherited over $40 million. Within ten years she had made that into $93 million. Born in 1899 in St. Louis, Missouri, she was well educated, spoke passable French, and thanks to a long visit in Germany, German. She had wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, but her father had refused to countenance it. In 1921 she went to a party in Montreal and saw, as Douglas How relates it, “this tall, shy, withdrawn man with the eyes of an owl, and promptly announced to a friend her intention to marry him.” She did just what she said she’d do. She was twenty-two years old, he was thirty-six. When she married and moved to Montreal, she mastered golf and tennis with the same determination that had won her medals in swimming. She had no children; she had one miscarriage and no babies came after that. Her husband had especially wanted to fund research in science, medicine, and engineering. But he did not like donating money for bricks and mortar; if people wanted money for a project, they should at least be able to put up the building for it. Dorothy Killam wanted what her husband wanted: that the Killam money stay in Canada, that it should enhance Canadian higher education, that it should strengthen Nova Scotia. She wanted to arrest the export of Canadian researchers to the United States. Dalhousie combined higher education, research in medicine, science, and engineering (via physics), and was Nova Scotian. Moreover, Dalhousie gave Killam an honorary degree in 1946, and herself one in 1959.¹⁶

Her will was years in the making, and the influences in its process were partly Nova Scotian. About 1962 she invited Stanfield, apparently at Henry Hicks’s suggestion, to go to the World Series in New York. Mary Stanfield was not invited. Stanfield braved his wife’s anger and went. One night in the Plaza Hotel they talked until 3 AM; Stanfield’s impression was that she wanted to talk to someone whom she could trust. On the way to the New York airport the next day she outlined to him what she would like to do for Nova Scotia and Dalhousie.¹⁷

In January 1963 Dorothy Killam gave Dalhousie, under conditions of strict anonymity, 4,353,607 preferred shares in Canelco Services Limited, the income to be used to fund graduate scholarships in science, medicine, and engineering towards work leading to or subsequent to a doctor’s degree. There were as yet no dividends, but each share could be redeemed for $1; the university was cautious and only cashed one million shares, to produce an income of about $130,000 a year. (After Quebec launched the James Bay hydroelectric project in 1971 the value of the shares rose steeply to about $12 a share.) Dorothy Killam used the gift as a test run to see how Dalhousie handled it, and for a few years it was known as the Anonymous Donor’s Fund, its income being split between the Faculty of Graduate Studies (75 per cent) and Medicine (25 per cent). She clearly liked what she saw.¹⁸

In 1964 she had decided to change her domicile from Montreal to Halifax; she and her entourage (thirteen people plus dogs) descended on Halifax in April 1965. Her Halifax lawyer was Donald McInnes; at a McInnes dinner party in Dorothy Killam’s honour, Gene Morison Hicks, the president’s new wife, was appalled to hear her husband indicate that the Hickses would like to entertain Mrs. Killam. That dinner party, the final touches that would finally bring Dalhousie $30 million, cost Gene Hicks $35; she was still teaching and had to take the day off, so the Education Department duly docked her a day’s pay.¹⁹

In May Dorothy Killam asked Hicks to give another dinner party so that she could meet the Dalhousie deans; there were to be no ladies present but herself and Gene Hicks. It went well. She expected to leave the party at 10 PM and stayed till midnight. She sat by the window in the Hickses’ house quizzing each of the deans in turn, Cooke of Arts and Science, Stewart of Medicine, McLean of Dentistry, MacDonald of Health Professions (the newest faculty), MacKay of Law, Trost of Graduate Studies. She liked the young deans, especially McLean, who had a brilliance and a presence that appealed to women, as Hicks conceded enviously. Blonde, petite, Dorothy Killam liked to wear a black dress and diamonds; diamonds suited her and she never believed that they should be locked away. Dean Cooke, South African and a geologist, fascinated by both diamonds and lady, estimated she was carrying close to $1 million worth. Despite her flair for clothes, jewelry, and drama, she liked good taste and good manners and hated vulgarity, rough talk, noisy or drunken guests. She loved music and had a sophisticated taste; she was on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and launched a new production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau obne Schatten and others.²⁰

Dorothy Killam was sufficiently impressed with the Dalhousie men, board chairman, president, and deans, that she began to think she should make further revisions to her much-revised will. These changes would give Dalhousie all her uncommitted money, without being split (as at that point it was in the residue section of her will) between Dalhousie, UBC, the University of Alberta, and the Montreal Neurological Institute. On 22 July 1965 she phoned Hicks from her Riviera villa, “La Leopolda,” a place she had bought two years before. (The flight of steps leading up to it was made famous by a scene in the movie “The Red Shoes.”) She told Hicks that she now wanted to leave to Dalhousie all her uncommitted funds. She also wanted to leave in Halifax a second memorial building to her husband’s name, one on the Dalhousie campus to match the Children’s Hospital to which she was already committed. She was thinking of a centre for post-graduate education; Hicks, knowing that Dalhousie’s crying need was for a good library, suggested that it could also house a postgraduate centre. Dorothy Killam asked where such a library would go, for she knew Dalhousie geography by this time. Hicks told her at the corner of University and LeMarchant. “How much?” she asked. Hicks said he thought about $5 to $6 million. She thought it would cost at least that. (It would end costing $7.3 million.) Donald Byers, her Montreal lawyer, was already in France; he found her ready to redo her will, but also very weak from internal bleeding. She had had arthritis for years, but more seriously cancer, which was now either inoperable or which she refused to have treated further. She died peacefully at “La Leopolda” on 27 July 1965, five days after her last talk with Hicks, without the final changes being made.²¹

Dorothy (Johnston) Killam married Izaak Walton Killam in April 1922. After her husband’s death in 1955 she more than doubled the fortune he had left her. Of that, some 32 per cent came to Dalhousie, the largest gift it ever received.

Nevertheless her will, carefully wrought, gave much to Dalhousie. She left $93 million, so designed that only a small portion of it was taxable through estate duties on personal bequests. The rest went to institutions: Dalhousie $30 million, UBC $14 million, the universities of Alberta and Calgary dividing $16 million, and $4 million going to the Montreal Neurological Institute.

The Dalhousie gift was complex, tied to Dorothy Killam’s vision of what she wanted Dalhousie to be. It had three parts:

• $2 million, the income to be used for two Killam Memorial chairs in the sciences, to attract professors “of the highest distinction.”
• $8 million, known as the Killam Memorial Salary fund, separate from all other funds, and to be used to help pay salaries for professors other than those in arts, by which she meant, the fine arts.
• The residue section was complicated but Dalhousie emerged with a considerable share of it, just over 30 per cent, or about $20 million.

This residue or reserve fund was to be used to provide fellowships, known as the Killam scholarships. She described what she expected: “A Killam scholar should not be a one-sided person and each scholar’s special distinction of intellect should be founded upon sound character and good manners. No person should be qualified or disqualified as a Killam scholar on account of his or her race or religious opinions.” The scholarships were tenable for two years, subject to review (and possible termination) after one, and renewable for as many years as deemed appropriate. They were to be available to Canadians or foreigners; Canadians could hold their scholarships anywhere in the world suitable to their purpose; those scholars from outside Canada had to prosecute their study and research in Canada. The aim of the scholarships was clearly graduate study and research.²²

There was a danger in those big legacies to Dalhousie which Hicks was well aware of, and pointed out to Colin McKay of UNB. McKay wanted to use the Killam gifts to Dalhousie as an argument for the New Brunswick Grants Committee to raise its grants to UNB. The danger to Dalhousie, as Hicks said, was that the Killam income might be deducted by the government from its grants. That had happened at McGill, where private money it had collected was deducted by the Quebec government from McGill’s grant. The effect of such action, Hicks asserted, would be “to dry up completely the sources of donations to the universities in the future.”²³

The Killam money did for Dalhousie what government grants towards operating expenses and capital projects had not done: it gave Dalhousie funds it could call its own, which it could use to promote graduate work and research, and to attract scholars from across Canada, especially to its sciences but also to the new PH.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences, English, history, and political science.

Developing Graduate Studies

The major legatee of the Killam money was Dalhousie’s Faculty of Graduate Studies. It had been created in 1948 as an umbrella to handle the MA students who had crowded into several departments of Arts and Science after the war. Its first dean was a scientist and researcher, J.H.L. Johnstone; in 1956 he was succeeded by C.L. Bennet of English. In the Dalhousie of the 1950s, graduate studies had an easy-going, slightly ramshackle quality; that began to change when a PH.D. was started in biology in 1955. Within ten years the major science departments all had PH.D. programs, and graduate work became decidedly more earnest and purposeful. What drove this development was the steep rise in graduate work experienced by all Canadian universities in the 1960s, and in this Dalhousie exceeded the national average. When Hicks was told in 1961 that graduate studies would treble within four years, he thought it was gross exaggeration by an ambitious dean. It wasn’t an exaggeration. In 1960-1 Dalhousie had seventy-eight graduate students, in 1963-4 nearly 244, enrolment jumping by 66 per cent and 40 per cent in two successive years, with a further 35 per cent increase predicted for 1964-5. In fact Dalhousie was only able to accept one-fifth of those who applied, and those who were accepted soon exceeded Dalhousie’s capacity to fund them, since they far outstripped professors’ external grants. Dalhousie’s graduate enrolment was drawn from four roughly equal sources: Dalhousie itself, other Atlantic universities, other Canadian universities, and foreign universities, about half of which were British or American. The Killam money was the glitter that caught the attention of external students.²⁴

The dean who encouraged this development in the 1960s was Walter Trost, a chemist, who had come to Dalhousie in 1948 with a McGill PH.D. and an Oxford post-doctoral fellowship. On 1959 he had started the Atlantic Provinces Inter-University Committee of the Sciences (APICS), the first academic attempt by Dalhousie to reach out to the other universities to coordinate and develop post-graduate work in the sciences. Thanks to Trost’s energy and standing, it got full encouragement from the National Research Council in Ottawa, which in 1962 gave him a three-year enabling grant. Stanfield also helped. It went well; Trost, who was ready enough to build an empire within Dalhousie, was shrewd enough to be much more careful with other empires. When the Association of Atlantic Universities was founded in 1964, APICS became its committee on the sciences. Trost was appointed dean of graduate studies in 1961, almost certainly in recognition of his work in creating APICS. In 1965, when Mrs. Killam met the deans seriatim, she quizzed Trost perceptively about what graduate studies needed, with such questions as “How would you use the money? What other sources do you have?” She liked his answers. She liked him.²⁵

Trost also pushed for the PH.D. in the social sciences and humanities. There was more resistance here, for those disciplines required substantial library collections, which were difficult and slow to build, to say nothing of new staff. Nevertheless English began PH.D. work in 1965, History and Economics in 1967, Political Science in 1968.

Trost is a German word meaning comfort or solace, but he was often unlike his name. With colleagues who published, who did research, who did not mind him taking turf space, he could be inventive and helpful; but with those whom he did not respect, for whatever reason, or who threatened the growing hegemony of Graduate Studies, he was persistent, cantankerous and occasionally brutal. Alex McCarter of Biochemistry, one of the most valuable members of the Medical Faculty and in Senate, left Dalhousie in 1965 to be director of the Cancer Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario. “I feel bound to say to you as I leave Dalhousie,” he wrote Hicks, “that I have found the relationships of this department with the Faculty of Graduate Studies and particular with Dean Trost, a source of frustration and irritation.” Trost was not the main reason McCarter left, but as he put it, it contributed to “tripping the balance.” Even with the president Trost could be blunt. “I must totally oppose,” he told Hicks in March 1965, “any further cuts in the budget of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and of the Library.” Hicks did not like him the less for that. Nine months later when Trost said he had invitations from Queen’s and from Tufts (in Medford, Massachusetts) to give papers on his specialty, molecular orbital calculations in metallic systems, Hicks not only approved but was delighted. Be sure, Hicks said, “you take sufficient time to do a first-class job... I know the dangers of administrative duties making such inroads on the time of scientists like yourself.”²⁶

Perhaps that was Hicks’s effort to redirect some of Trost’s energies away from his empire of graduate studies, for there had been nine months of wrangling over its role and function. Every Canadian university had had to come to terms with graduate studies in its own fashion. Trost believed that the dean of graduate studies had to have a lively interest in professors’ appointments, in departmental budgets, in research programs, even in reporting publications, and in all departments, in all faculties, that did post-graduate work. The dean of medicine believed that most of that, in his faculty, was his concern and no one else’s but the president’s. The Faculty of Medicine, he said, “is not prepared to accept any precedent which places responsibility for research programmes of Dalhousie University in the hands of the Faculty of Graduate Studies.” Trost was never strong on tact, and it has to be said that the medical professors on the Forrest campus had long been used to doing their own thing in their own way; they were under a dean, Chester Stewart, who delighted in controlling his bailiwick and who was not ready to tolerate interference of a new and aggressive dean of graduate studies. One dean, H.B.S. Cooke of Arts and Science, found it possible to work with Trost, though even his tractable good sense was tried sorely that summer of 1965. President Hicks finally took the view that Dalhousie departments, those in Arts and Science not least, must have one departmental head, and that departmental budgets applied to all activities both graduate and undergraduate, and that these would go “through one dean only.” Hicks was not having departmental budgets carved up between two deans.²⁷

Trost and Dean Stewart fought their war on into 1966. Trost praised Stewart as an able and intelligent dean of medicine, but quoted another administrator’s opinion that Stewart was “the toughest and meanest in-fighter” that he had ever known. Part of the difficulty was a personality clash, part the distance between Studley and Forrest and the absence of understanding and communication. Stewart said most graduate students were “research assistants to a Professor, paid from his grant-in-aid, and chosen by him because of their research interests.” That was undoubtedly true in medicine, and in some science departments, but it was not true in the humanities and social sciences. A 1966 outside adjudication by President James Beveridge of Acadia, at Hicks’s request, solved little; what did it was Trost’s departure. He accepted the position of vice-president of the new (1966) University of Calgary. A new and more sensible dean of graduate studies, Guy MacLean, a historian, succeeded in cooling things down. As MacLean wrote in February 1967 about Studley professors’ joint membership in the two faculties, it “has not been a source of personal torment... Those who have been interested in graduate work have been active in the Faculty of Graduate Studies; those who have not been interested have ignored it.” It was a good Dalhousie recipe.²⁸

Chester Stewart and the Tupper Medical Building

Dean Stewart had presided over the Medical Faculty since 1954 and had won golden opinions. Alex McCarter of Biochemistry, who had been with him since 1948, remarked, “One could not wish for a better man to deal with.” Shrewd, perceptive, courageous, Stewart was a realist who enjoyed the dean’s office and its power. He was also a dean who preferred decision to discussion. An interesting example was the row that developed in Physiology over the successor to its head, Beecher Weld, due to retire in 1965. Weld wanted as his successor an able, flamboyant, outspoken, bilingual American, J. Gordin Kaplan, on the staff since 1950. To Stewart’s mind, Kaplan was too argumentative by half and he did not want him as head of Physiology; he wanted his own nominee. After consulting his Faculty Council and a small committee created by himself and Hicks, Dean Stewart invited John Szerb, the European-trained professor of pharmacology, to become head of Physiology, a subject in which Szerb would prove to be well qualified. Szerb accepted; he had an offer to move to the University of Ottawa in his old discipline, but he liked Dalhousie and the prospect of teaching physiology. His appointment was announced in February 1965 while Kaplan was on sabbatical leave in France. Kaplan was furious. He claimed the procedure dictatorial, blamed the dean for doing it, Szerb for accepting it, and returned in due course to wreak what havoc he could. He resigned a few months later to go to the University of Ottawa. Hicks was sorry to see him go but understood that Kaplan’s violent opposition to the new head made his staying at Dalhousie difficult. A year or two later, a Dalhousie colleague whom Kaplan knew and respected, John Aldous, met him in Ottawa and got a big bear hug from Kaplan - that, too, was Kaplan’s style. Kaplan promptly said, “I was a damn fool, wasn’t I, for leaving Dalhousie?” Aldous looked at him. “Yes, you were.”²⁹

Sometimes Stewart had to be unrelenting. In 1964 the New Brunswick government said it would pay Dalhousie $60,000 for support of the Medical and Dental schools; Dalhousie estimated that the sixty-two New Brunswick students in those faculties cost $4,000 each annually - about $250,000. It had always been difficult to get Fredericton to pay its fair share of Medical and Dental school costs; that was partly out of old New Brunswick jealousy of Nova Scotia, and partly an instinct for not letting haughty Halifax take good New Brunswick money. Early in 1965 it came to a showdown between Stewart and Hicks on the one side, and Premier Robichaud of New Brunswick on the other. Neither side was giving an inch. Dalhousie threatened to cut New Brunswick’s usual number of entering medical students, about twenty, down to four. The Robichaud government was warned, the New Brunswick Medical Association was advised, and the reasons explained. It got into the papers at the end of March and stirred up a hornet’s nest. Hicks went to Fredericton, but only got a promise of $100,000, when at least double that was needed. Dalhousie still wasn’t giving in. An exchange of telegrams in May brought another $50,000, at which point Hicks and Stewart agreed “to try to find places for as many deserving New Brunswick students as possible.” Early in 1966 Robichaud promised $225,000 for 1966-7, and added another $50,000 backdated for 1965-6. As the row developed, there was talk of building a Medical School in Saint John, and a New Brunswick Medical Schools survey committee was struck in October 1966, to which Dalhousie submitted a strong brief, arguing against another medical school. Newfoundland was planning to open a medical school within five years and a third in the region was unnecessary. The New Brunswick proposal was in fact given up. Robichaud then helped Dalhousie get a big federal grant for its new medical building, and that year, 1967-8, the New Brunswick grant was $397,000.³⁰

Dean Stewart’s major contribution was the creation of the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building. The Forrest Building was impossibly crowded and antiquated, and the Medical Sciences Building, put up with Rockefeller money in 1920-1 on College Street, was much the same; periodic review committees from the American Medical Association had noted it all pointedly. Dalhousie had made do, somehow, in the years since the war, but its A rating was probably dependent on getting substantial new headquarters.

The idea of naming a Dalhousie building after Sir Charles Tupper had occurred to G.F. Pearson half a century before. As premier of Nova Scotia in 1863 Tupper, with the help of the leader of the opposition, Joseph Howe, had brought Dalhousie into its new existence.

Both men remained on the Dalhousie board until they died, Howe in 1873, Tupper in 1915. In May 1916 Pearson had suggested the possibility of naming a building after Tupper to President Stanley MacKenzie. But the suggestion disappeared and when it surfaced again it seems to have come independently to the fertile and expedient mind of Chester Stewart. One day in 1962 he was seeing President Kerr; Stewart had seen an announcement by Diefenbaker of $100 million to help celebrate Canada’s centennial in 1967. Stewart wondered aloud if that might be tapped for a new medical building. Kerr was sceptical about such money for a private university. A fortnight later the light came on in the dean’s mind: a new medical building could be named after Sir Charles Tupper, a Father of Confederation, a medical doctor who was the founding president of the Canadian Medical Assocation, and the principal founder of the Dalhousie University of 1863. “Think of the advantages of that!” Stewart said as he phoned Kerr with the idea. Kerr thought well enough of it to pass it to Donald McInnes. Thus a letter went to the Canadian Centenary Council on 29 November 1962, suggesting good reasons for a substantial grant towards the cost of a new Dalhousie medical building, to be named after one of the Fathers of Confederation, also one of the longstanding governors of Dalhousie. It so happened that the president of the council was none other than Larry MacKenzie, who had retired as president of UBC just five months before. He took an immediate interest in the project and pushed it. So too did the Chronicle-Herald.³¹

Within a week of Hicks becoming president in the fall of 1963 he was plunged into the work for the new medical building. The board appointed J. Philip Dumaresq architect two days later. The site for it had been debated all summer by the Medical Faculty’s building committee. The chairman of the board building committee, R.B. Cameron, believed that the dean, the architect, and the university engineer should visit selected medical schools in Canada and the United States. First, however, they had to resolve the question of whether the new building should develop horizontally or vertically.³²

The estimated cost of the building at that point was $5 million, which was what Dalhousie asked for. After the Pearson government took power in April 1963, the centennial grant to Dalhousie took on a specific form, $2.5 million, which was matched by the province early in 1964. By September 1964 the space requirements had risen by over 50 per cent and the total cost likewise, to $7.5 million.

Philip Dumaresq turned much of the architectural work over to Michael Byrne, who consulted professors about space requirements. Byrne found the most useful medical authority to be Dr. Richard Saunders, Campbell professor of anatomy. During the planning stages Saunders was sceptical of closed-circuit TV terminals in his area of the building; yet when everything was done his two floors for Anatomy had more terminals than any other two in the building. He and Dean Stewart were more than once at odds; both were authoritarian and both liked to defend, occasionally to extend, their own turf. It helped that in the dean’s office much of the work for the new medical building devolved upon the assistant dean, Lloyd Macpherson, likeable, hard-working, sensible, who would himself become dean when Stewart retired in 1971.

The architects failed on some technical points, since they had not included furnishings needed for laboratories; and a Montreal firm, Affleck, Desbarats, had to redo some of the electrical and ventilation systems. Thus, by 1966, the cost was $10.5 million, with equipment estimated at a further $1.5 million. Fortuitously, the federal government’s Health Resources Fund was in place, providing $500 million across Canada for the cost of facilities for research and for training health professionals. An application to that fund by Stewart in January 1967 produced $9.5 million. By that time, the reinforced concrete frame of the fifteen-storey building had been completed, the outside skin and windows were on, furniture was at hand, and the building was on schedule.

A good view of the Dalhousie complex as of 1966 looking west towards the Northwest Arm, with the partly completed Sir Charles Tupper Building immediately in front.

It was not the only new Dalhousie building going up at that time. There were also the Weldon Law Building, Shirreff Hall and Howe Hall extensions, and the Student Union Building, all of which were under way at various stages. Hicks threw himself into it with tremendous energy. In 1964 he also spent six weeks in Paris as head of the Canadian delegation to UNESCO. In January 1965 he went to hospital with a severe viral infection, from which he did not emerge until March. His colleague, President Cragg of Mount Allison, was not surprised. “You have been going at a fearful pace.” A visitor in 1966, surveying Dalhousie’s administrative structures at Hicks’s request, remarked on the difference between the Dalhousie of 1961 and 1966. “I am impressed,” Earl McGrath of Columbia wrote, “with the enormous vitality you have poured into the place.” The fifteen-storey tower that now dwarfed the old 1886 Forrest Building was a symbol not just of Chester Stewart’s percipience, Lloyd Macpherson’s energy, but also of Hicks’s readiness to take on responsibilities and his deft use of his many connections in Ottawa.³³

Hicks had in hand a proposal for the Queen Mother to open the Medical Building as part of the centennial celebrations in July 1967. By Christmas, Prime Minister Pearson had agreed to come, and also the sixteenth Earl of Dalhousie, with the proviso that he could go salmon fishing on the Miramichi afterward with Hicks. There was hope that the grandson of Sir Charles Tupper, Sir James Macdonald Tupper of Vancouver, might attend, but he was old and ill and died as the building opened.³⁴

The Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building was opened on Friday, 14 July 1967, by the Queen Mother. The ceremony was planned for outdoors; but there was rain that morning and at 7 AM Dean Stewart and Arthur Chisholm, the university engineer, decided it would have to be held in the rink. A hot and muggy place it was, that foggy July afternoon; but everything else went well, in Hicks’s best style, grace, good humour, sufficient dignity but little stiff formality. The Tupper Medical Building was Nova Scotia’s biggest centennial project; it symbolized Nova Scotia’s contribution to medicare which was already in train and would begin on 1 April 1969. With Stanfield, Pearson, and other political dignitaries, Hicks and his wife dined that night with the Queen Mother on the Britannia in Halifax harbour. Then he went off salmon fishing with the sixteenth earl.³⁵

The Queen Mother at the convocation for the opening of the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building, 14 July 1967. L. to r., the sixteenth Earl of Dalhousie, Premier Robert Stanfield, the Queen Mother, President Henry Hicks.

The final bill for the building was $13 million and the equipment cost $5 million. The Kellogg Foundation gave money, Dalhousie alumni chipped in, so that the total received from federal, provincial, and other sources totalled $15,250,000. But Dalhousie still had to find the additional $2.75 million from somewhere. It was not the first nor the last time that it was left holding substantial and inconvenient remnants of big bills, and it would be a source of cumulative expense and frustration to Hicks and the Dalhousie board in the future.

The old Medical Sciences Building would now become the home of the College of Pharmacy. Pharmacy in Nova Scotia had received its first formal recognition in 1875 with the formation of the Nova Scotia Pharmaceutical Society, and a College of Pharmacy followed, affiliated with Dalhousie in 1912. In 1917 it was called the Maritime College of Pharmacy. George Arnold Burbidge, the Newfoundlander who had taught there since 1908, became its dean in 1925 and remained so until his death in 1943. In 1959 a survey by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Pharmacy recommended that it be incorporated into the university. That was done by the board in February 1961 and Dalhousie courses leading to the bachelor of pharmacy were set up, under its first director, J.G. Duff, brought from the University of Saskatchewan.

The idea for an umbrella faculty for all the paramedical groups came from the Medical Faculty Council in 1959 and was finally put in place in 1962 as the Faculty of Health Professions. The other main element in the new faculty was the School of Nursing. In 1949 the old hospital-based program, the RN, required admission levels of high school that sometimes depended upon the community. Windsor Hospital admitted to the RN girls with Grade 9; Halifax hospitals wanted junior matriculation. The RN program was described in one Dalhousie argument as the “poor girls’ university.” There was nothing wrong with that; but it explains why Dalhousie and the nursing profession sought in 1949 to upgrade the standards and training of nurses. Its first director was Electa McLennan, who did the hard pioneering work for twenty years. Her steely determination was masked by a lively sense of humour. She was a good person to have around in a crisis, and it was she who really built the Dalhousie bachelor of nursing. By 1963, when nursing joined the new faculty, it had ninety-five students, of whom 35 per cent were in the degree program. In that year, through the energy of Dr. Arthur Shears of Physical Medicine, the School of Physiotherapy was put together and added. Thus was the Faculty of Health Professions created. It got an exceptional dean, Dr. R.M. MacDonald, quiet, determined, unflappable; one’s instinct was to trust him with anything.³⁶

The first graduates of the new four-year bachelor of nursing program, July 1967, with Director Electa MacLennan in the centre and Assistant Director Jean Church upper right.

The Weldon Law Building

Law, too, got a new home. The building that had originally been designed and built for it in 1921-2, the faculty only got into in 1952. By then it was inadequate. In 1962-3 there were eight full-time professors (all but one of them, incidentally, Dalhousie graduates) and seventy-six students. That was expected to double in the next four years. New capital funding available from the province made planning of a new building both possible and desirable. After some difficulty in getting property (Dalhousie did not have, and would not have, powers of expropriation), a site was chosen on the north side of University Avenue, between Henry and Edward streets. Eastern Contracting was the low bidder on a contract for $1,385,166. The final cost was $1,809,801.

Dalhousie did for the new Weldon Law Building what it had never done before: it hired an interior decorator, an idea suggested by M.H.F. Harrington, the architect, and accepted without enthusiasm by Hicks, who suspected a frill Dalhousie could do without. However Beecher Weld, chairman of Senate’s Cultural Activities Committee, noted in May 1965 “the stark, uninviting character” of Dalhousie buildings, especially the interiors, and recommended using 1 per cent of the contract price to embellish them. Of all the new buildings at Dalhousie, the Weldon showed a sense of style, a feel for elegance, not always found in the interior of others.³⁷

The convocation to open the Weldon Law Building was held on 18 March 1967, with seven honorary degrees, among them one to Lady Beaverbrook. She was, for once, thoroughly pleased. Dalhousie had a president who knew how such occasions should be handled. She said to her secretary, R.A. Tweedie, on their return to New Brunswick, “This has been a day that I won’t soon forget.” She seemed to revise her opinion of Henry Hicks and the Dalhousie people generally; it was probably owing to that success that in 1968 she accepted Dalhousie’s invitation to become its second chancellor.³⁸

In these years the Law School tended to dominate student politics. In the 1967 election for Student Council president, Wayne Hankey ('65) of classics lost to Dennis Ashworth ('64, '68) a second-year law student, by 1,103 votes to 332, a lopsided victory made possible, said the Gazette, by Law School’s political machine. The Law School-Student Council connection encouraged Senate, in January 1968, to invite the Student Council president, and two colleagues chosen by the council, to become full members of Senate. They were welcomed to their first meeting on 12 February 1968. It was the result of work by the Senate Committee on University Government. But the person who was steadily behind bringing students into the governance of the university was the dean of arts and science, Herbert Basil Sutton Cooke.³⁹

Lady Dunn (Lady Beaverbrook after 1963), pleased with Dalhousie at last, opening the Sir James Dunn Law Library, March 1967.

Linch-pin: Basil Cooke, Dean of Arts and Science

Basil Cooke was a South African geologist and palaeontologist, whom Dalhousie had brought to Halifax in 1961 from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Educated at Cambridge and in South Africa, Cooke was forty-six years old on his arrival in Halifax. He already had a solid reputation in African paleontology, and would develop his pioneering work until well into the 1970s. Within two years Hicks asked him to be the new dean of arts and science. When he accepted, he told Hicks: “I’ll be making decisions when you are not here.” Hicks did not mind people making decisions. Cooke’s decisions had the weight of perceptiveness and patience behind them, a combination of virtues useful for a dean. The contrast between Hicks and his most important dean could not have been more marked: a president who couldn’t wait and a dean who could. Cooke was not a procrastinator; he had a forward mind, as his push for student senators illustrates, but he moved around obstacles rather than at them. Cooke knew well enough that academics tended to resist anything that looked as if it was being imposed from above. Thus when he wanted his faculty to do something that they might resist, he would get a few leading spirits to bring it up at a faculty meeting. Then from the chair he would proceed to pitch into it, why it should not be done. That would induce certain refractory elements in the faculty (there are always those) to prick up their ears and support the proposal. In this back-handed fashion, the dean would often get his way. Not always however. There was a move in 1967 to persuade Arts and Science to establish a Department of Geography, one with which Cooke sympathized. A small committee was struck and so recommended. But it was shot down by Economics and by Sociology, on the ground that Geography’s methodology was naive, its techniques descriptive, its purview already covered by other disciplines. The rest of the faculty was either indifferent or unfavourable, despite strong letters from outside authorities. Ultimately, Saint Mary’s would take it up.

One difficulty Dalhousie was not able to avoid was stress between pure and applied mathematics. Applied mathematics in some respects included theoretical physics, and the issue can be summed up in the experience of Alex MacDonald, a Cape Bretonner who graduated in 1945, returning in 1949 to Dalhousie to teach theoretical physics. In 1960 MacDonald went to Palo Alto, but did not like California; President Kerr, after the 1960s departures, was pleased to get him back in 1962 as professor of applied mathematics and head of a new division within the Department of Mathematics. With National Research Council money, MacDonald brought to Dalhousie its first big computer, an IBM 1620, so big and ponderous that it had to be hoisted with a huge crane into the upper floor of the Dunn Building via the roof. The IBM 1620 had hundreds of vacuum tubes and they all had to work, and the more the machine was used the hotter it got. Still, it did the work of twenty men in minutes. A modern desk-top computer is fifty thousand times faster and about that much smaller; that revolution got under way with micro-processors in the early 1980s.

Hoisting the new IBM 1620 into place at the top of the Dunn Building, March 1964.

Alex MacDonald was ambitious and in late 1964 he set out a roster of classes for 1965-6 that in effect pointed to the creation of a Department of Applied Mathematics. Dalhousie decided that this was not the way to go. It was amiable enough, but MacDonald resigned and went back to California. Hicks was philosophical, thanking MacDonald for getting the computer centre started, but observing that pure and applied mathematics usually developed “only with some friction.”⁴⁰

Cooke worked hard to bring in new staff, his wife Dorette doing much to help them socially when they came. The student-staff ratios in 1964 were bad: Biology was 99 to 1, and Economics needed a new appointment to bring its ratio down from 114 to 100. English was worse, new staff being urgently needed to prevent its ratio from going to 138. History got a new assistant professor, but Mathematics needed three. French had too many poorly qualified teachers, all overloaded with work. Political Science brought K.A. Heard from Durban, a South African liberal fed up with the regime, who became a tower of strength. Psychology was expanding so rapidly under Henry James that it was almost off the scale, and had a huge graduate program. Cooke did not panic; he rarely did. He urged Hicks and Hicks listened, though there was a crisis in April 1968 when the new premier, G.I. Smith, insisted that notification of university monies had to await formal Assembly approval of the budget. For over a month Hicks had to temporarily suspend all new appointments.

As for salaries, they were a growing problem by 1968. Dalhousie was unlikely to get new PH.D.s in English, Philosophy, or Political Science for less than $9,000. The Physics Department wanted to hire one of its own PH.D.s but Acadia and St. Francis Xavier were offering nearly $10,000, and Dalhousie had at least to match that. The problem was even worse, said Cooke, because five of the junior staff in Physics were not yet making $10,000! Several department heads besides Physics were making this same point: upward revision of salaries was essential, for “it would be impossible to make new appointments without grave injustice to loyal members of the departments of some standing.”

Overall, in Arts and Science full-time staff would go from 110 in 1963-4 to 315 in 1973-4, in the long run roughly equal to the increase in student enrolment. By 1973 the pattern of the origins of Dalhousie teaching staff was 65 per cent Canadian, 15 per cent Commonwealth, 20 per cent other countries. Of this last 20 per cent, about three-quarters were American. These proportions varied from faculty to faculty, and in Arts and Science from department to department. Sociology had many American (as did sociology departments in many Canadian universities), but that was slowly changing as new Canadian PH.D.s became available. History, Political Science, and English tried to strike a balance between Canadian, British, American, and other professors. But for the most part Dalhousie, Hicks in particular, was looking for talent; the nationality it came with was less important. That had been a Dalhousie characteristic from the beginning. The 1973-4 statistics for full-time faculty are of some interest:

Cooke was flexible. There was none of the hard edge to his dominion as there was in Medicine. Dean Trost of Graduate Studies asked early in 1964 if Cooke would agree that all future recommendations for new staff in Arts and Science be co-signed by Trost. Cooke recognized and conceded the point without jealousy or demur. Hicks thought Cooke might, in his honesty, be giving away too much. Hicks did not mind the departure, he told Cooke, “but I do not concede that it is necessary for the Dean of Arts and Science to so bind himself for the future.”⁴¹

One of Cooke’s major changes was getting his faculty to accept senior matriculation for admission to Dalhousie. Since 1963 the Nova Scotia Department of Education had been urging this upon all Nova Scotian universities, and in 1965 Dalhousie approved it, effective in the autumn of 1966. It was a bold move, resisted by some, for 36 per cent of Dalhousie’s entering students came with junior matriculation and only 16 per cent with full senior. The rest were in between. It gave Dalhousie one year’s respite form the rising tide of student numbers; freshman students would be one blessed year more mature. The proposal was accepted in principle by all the Nova Scotian universities, but only Dalhousie actually implemented it. The others, fearing for their enrolment and money, backed out. Some Dalhousie people were uneasy too; Dalhousie had always felt its first year much better than Grade 12, as doubtless other universities did. But Cooke and a strong majority in Arts and Science believed that on balance Grade 12 admission was better, and while second thoughts about it would surface from time to time, it stood.⁴²

Dalhousie had worried about the first-year failure rate under the old junior matriculation system. The downtown papers in November 1961 publicized the 46 per cent failure rate in English 1, suggesting that Grade 12 admission would obviate such a costly process. A.E. Kerr got Allan Bevan, head of English, to find comparative figures for first-year English. They were: UNB, 38 per cent; Mount Allison, 51 per cent; Saint Mary’s, 37 per cent; Acadia, 13 per cent. Dalhousie failure rates at Christmas 1964 showed figures similar to English 1 in other disciplines:

Some of the social sciences had less horrendous figures:

Failures in sociology 1 (15.2 per cent) and Spanish 1 (15.7 per cent) looked to some in the faculty as suspiciously low. The sociology failure rate dropped even further in April 1966 to 5.2 per cent. Students added that everyone passed Spanish 1. In general, failure rates eased between 1964 and 1966, even before Grade 12 admission was introduced; it was owing, said Dean Cooke, to more rigorous selection of students for admission, better instruction, and tutorials.⁴³

Arts and Science was expanding so rapidly that old Dalhousie traditions were being weakened almost without one being aware of it. Graduate Studies acquired a new emphasis from the Killam money and government research grants would follow. Left unsung, even unrewarded, was good undergraduate teaching. A number of departments in Arts and Science still held to the old tradition where senior professors taught and marked first-year classes, on the assumption that old hands were more skilled. But teaching styles were difficult to quantify; it was easier to reward research, tangible, assessable, and delivered across the desk in print. Gradually that became important; good teaching was all very well, but it became apparent that publication was the new way forward at Dalhousie by the end of the 1960s.

H.B.S. Cooke in 1971, having returned to paleontology after his deanship of Arts and Science, 1963-8.

Student life and a Student Union

Dean Cooke told the students in March 1966: “All education is really self-education”; that required self-discipline. “All play and no work makes Jack a quick drop-out,” he added. As the Gazette reported in 1967, if a student were at the Sorbonne, he would have no external discipline of any kind, none but those exigent orals at the end of the process; it did not matter whether one went to lectures or not, or even whether one stayed in Paris. Joan Hennessey, a graduate student in French, gave a supplementary class in French twice a week for those who needed it. She had the stern view that the vast majority of students who failed in any subject did so simply because they did not work. Of 250 students in French 1 (failure rate 36 per cent) ten came fairly often to her class, though most days she had only five students, and probably not the five that needed help the most.⁴⁴ A 1959 poem, in the style of A.E. Housman, touched the issue of self-discipline:

When I was once a Freshman I heard a wise man say, “Give hours from your leisure, Not lecture time away. Spend your spare time chatting, But keep your classes free.” But I was once a Freshman No use to talk to me.

Now I am a Sophomore I heard him say again, “The lectures that one misses Are never missed in vain; One pays by flunking finals And with nights of endless rue. Now I am a Sophomore, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.⁴⁵

A more ruthless comment on the same subject came in a February 1964 interview with “Joe P.”, a procuror of girls for any and every occasion, of whom, he said, there were about two hundred freelancing in Halifax. Had Joe anything to say to university students? Yes, Joe had, and it was pungent enough:

Most of you come from sheltered homes. You’ve never had to wonder where your next meal was coming from; never had to hope you’ll find a homosexual in a generous mood, or, if you’re a girl had to walk the streets or starve. When I hear you complaining about how hard your professors are on you with work, it makes me sick. And I’ve heard it... Take it from someone who knows. You’re getting an education that will make you somebody, and you’re getting it pretty damn easily. You don’t know how lucky you are.⁴⁶

Other forms of self-discipline were required, at least of male students, in the era of the mini-skirt that began in 1959. The young cavalier who wanted to make the right impression had to be decorous and controlled. The Gazette's 12 November 1959 article, “The Art of Dating, 20th Century Style,” closed with this delightful exercise, hypocrisy perhaps rewarded:

When opening the car door [for her], especially when the fashions are on short skirts, avoid looking at your date’s legs. She will appreciate your good manners, enjoy your feigned discomfort, and accept your modesty as a challenge. The sacrifice on your part is sure to be temporary.

Students for years had suffered from a lack of breathing space on campus. There had long been Atwood’s, crowded, noisy, confusing, unrelenting Atwood’s, with its mugs of hot, thin, watery coffee, steam looking for caffeine. For residents of Shirreff Hall and Howe Hall, there was space, but in 1967-8, 55 per cent of Dalhousie’s students were from metropolitan Halifax. During the day over two thousand students needed a pied-à-terre, to eat, talk, work, or even - this a new development of the late 1960s - have a glass of beer.

A Student Union building was one of Hicks’s early priorities. The students had been collecting money for it for years, and as of 30 April 1964 they had $118,294.97 on deposit at Eastern Trust, though the cost of construction was rising faster than the fund. By that time, the board had given Hicks authority to put together a suitable parcel of land. It was awkward, for Dalhousie needed power of expropriation and could not get it. As late as 1966 the project was being held up by Miss C.G.M. Musgrave’s property at 1247 LeMarchant Street; Dalhousie needed if not the whole property at least some few feet at the eastern end for the Student Union. The letter to Miss Musgrave showed Hicks both benign and forceful. “Believe me,” he wrote, “I know that this is difficult for you, and can only say that I am charged with the responsibility of directing the growth of a great university.” But Miss Musgrave was adamant and the building was redesigned without using any of the Musgrave lot. At one point the building was without the site of the present front entrance. The owner did not want to sell; however he was nagged by his wife about the virtues of having a fine apartment in the new Park Victoria. “God dammit,” he told her, “we’ll move there.” According to Arthur Chisholm, the university engineer, the papers were signed the next day. C.D. Davison again redesigned the building. Davison was a good architect for that building, careful, painstaking, level-headed, a useful balance against the gusts of enthusiastic suggestions that came from students.⁴⁷

Senate’s Building and Campus Development Committee, chaired by J.H. Aitchison of Political Science, received suggestions for the Student Union Building; one of them, from Dean Cooke, was acted on. The new building, Cooke said, should have a room large enough to seat at least a thousand students, preferably twelve hundred, with a floor suitable for dancing, with a simple stage for a dance band. There was no place on campus “with a congenial atmosphere where mass meetings of students can be held.”

In April 1967 ten firms were invited to tender and in July the work was given to MacDonald Construction for $2,673,000. Dennis Ashworth, president of the Student Council, wrote to Hicks on 7 July 1967: “I must also thank you, Sir, for the time and energy that you have expended into the planning of this building over the past few years. I am sure that without your enthusiasm the construction of this building would not be commencing as early as this summer.” But there was more to it than that. The Student Union had as administrator, since the mid-1960s, a retired naval officer, John G. Graham, who had come to Dalhousie to do an MA in economics. The students appointed him to help run Student Council business. He was manager and coordinator, working in the background and letting the students run their own show. He functioned as a template against which they would try out their ideas. He also provided year-round continuity. He had much to do with the planning of the building; it would turn out to be, indeed, a very good building. It was a little too good for the Chronicle-Herald. Under the heading “Gracious College Life,” it praised the design but had reservations about “the luxury of its appointments, furniture and equipment.” Randall Smith, of the Student Council, reminded the Chronicle-Herald that they should get their facts right; the students paid for the cost of the furnishings, and there was little enough luxury.

The major clue to good working relations between the Student Council and the president’s office was not only the Student Council presidents themselves, but also the rapport between John Graham and Eric Mercer, assistant to the president. Informally, they would try out ideas on each other, Graham representing the Student Council and Mercer the president and the administration. It was sufficiently successful that in the autumn of 1968 UNB made tactful inquiries about how it was done.⁴⁸

By that time the western end of University Avenue was a busy and messy place: not only was the Student Union Building up, but the Dalhousie Arts Centre, the Killam Library, the central heating plant and the tunnels and services relevant thereto, were all under construction. Dalhousie’s building program and its jocose and spirited director- general were still at full throttle.

An authority of deans, 1967. L. to r., W.A. MacKay, Law; G.R. MacLean, Graduate Studies; C.B. Stewart, Medicine; J.D. McLean, Dentistry; R.M. MacDonald, Health Professions; H.B.S. Cooke, Arts and Science.

Notes for Chapter 9

¹. The Jim Bennet poem is from Jim Bennet’s Verse (Halifax 1979), called “Just for Hicks (Henry D.)” and quoted with Jim Bennet’s permission. For personal characteristics, interview with Henry Davies Hicks, 8 July 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 4, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives; Henry Davies Hicks interview (typed transcript), Ottawa 1983, p. 10, Library and Archives Canada. ↩

². Interview with Jeffrey Holmes, Montreal, 3 June 1995, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 12, Dalhousie University Archives; “Dalhousie and the AAU,” in letter from Holmes to author, 18 July 1995, from Ottawa, Peter B. Waite Fonds, Dalhousie University Archives. Holmes was executive director of the AAU from 1971 to 1978. For Dalton Camp’s opinion on Henry Davies Hicks, see his Gentlemen, Players and Politicians (Toronto 1970), p. 152. Not least among Dalhousie academics who appreciated Hicks’s talent and who knew him at close quarters was H.B.S. Cooke, dean of arts and science, 1963-8. Letter from Cooke to Peter B. Waite, 29 Jan. 1996, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 29, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³. Dean Read reported to Senate, 14 Jan. 1963; there was then a motion that Senate express its dissatisfaction with that too soft mode of proceeding, but it was not carried; the sentiment of Senate was expressed by Read, thanking the chairman of the board for his cordiality. Also Senate Minutes, Horace Read to McInnes, 1 Feb. 1963, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴. Henry Davies Hicks interview (typed transcript), Ottawa 1983, p. 82, Library and Archives Canada; for Weldon see Peter B. Waite, The Lives of Dalhousie University, Volume 1, pp. 168-9. ↩

⁵. Board of Governors Minutes, 2 May 1963, UA-1, Box 50, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives. Hicks’s property was a 120' x 160' lot, and the question of what to do about his wish to continue to live there was given to a board committee, 27 June 1963. On 30 Aug. 1963, the executive committee agreed the university could buy Hicks’s Coburg Road house for $40,000. There may have been further negotiations on the price, for Hicks later mentioned that he had sold his property for $45,000 early in 1964. Letter from Henry Davies Hicks to Nicholas Destounis, 11 June 1964, President’s Office Fonds, “Properties,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. R.B. Cameron’s strong opposition to giving over the president’s house to Psychology is noted by F.R. Hayes, then vice-president, in letter from F.R. Hayes to H.B.S. Cooke, 16 Dec. 1963, President's Office Fonds, “Psychology,” UA-3, Box 515, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁶. Letter from A.E. Kerr to Stanfield, 27 June 1958; 5 May 1959; Stanfield to Kerr, 1 June 1960; Kerr to Stanfield, 20 June 1962, President’s Office Fonds, “Provincial Government -Nova Scotia,” UA-3, Box 272, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁷. E.F. Sheffield, “Canadian Universities and Colleges: Enrollment Projected to 1965,” Proceedings of the NCCU [AUCC] (Ottawa 1955). ↩

⁸. Letter from Hicks to Murphy, 26 Mar. 1963, President’s Office Fonds, “University Grants Committee,” UA-3, Box 501, Folder 19, Dalhousie University Archives; Stanfield to MacKenzie, 12 Dec. 1962, Norman A. MacKenzie Papers, box 184, University of British Columbia Archives; interview with Dr. Arthur Murphy, 19 July 1985, Halifax, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 46, Dalhousie University Archives. The statute that set up the University Grants Committee is 14 Eliz. 11, chap. 16. ↩

⁹. A short history of Larry MacKenzie’s work with the University Grants Committee of Nova Scotia is given in P.B. Waite, Lord of Point Grey: Larry MacKenzie of UBC (Vancouver 1987), pp. 196-8. ↩

¹⁰. Letter from Hicks to Arthur Murphy, 26 Mar. 1963, a four-page summary of their discussion of the previous day, with new information added; Henry Davies Hicks’s notes of the interview with MacKenzie, 30 Nov. 1963; Henry Davies Hicks to the UGC, 9 Dec. 1964; UGC to Henry Davies Hicks, 30 Nov. 1963, President’s Office Fonds, “University Grants Committee,” UA-3, Box 501, Folder 19, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹¹. Letter from McKay to Henry Davies Hicks, 21 Jan. 1964; letters also from President Cragg of Mount Allison (3 Feb.), Mons. Somers of St. Francis Xavier (5 Feb.), and Ray Gushue of Memorial (11 Feb.); Somers to Henry Davies Hicks, 31 July 1964; minutes of meeting of deans of men and women, at Mount Allison, 17 Oct. 1966, President's Office Fonds, “Atlantic Association of Universities,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹². There is a succinct description of this dramatic change by Dalhousie’s vice-president, Horace Read, of the 1966 AUCC meeting that had to digest the changes proposed by the federal-provincial conference of October. Hicks was away in Paris at UNESCO meetings. See box 34, “UGC,” letter from Read to Henry Davies Hicks, 15 Nov. 1966, addressed to Prince de Galles Hotel, Paris, President's Office Fonds, “University Grants Committee,” UA-3, Box 501, Folder 19, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹³. Letter from Colin McKay to Henry Davies Hicks, 5 Nov. 1964, “University Grants Committee,” UA-3, Box 501, Folder 19, Dalhousie University Archives. For the Stanfield speech and its effects, see Chronicle-Herald, 13, 14 Jan., 12 Feb. 1965; Dalhousie Gazette, 22 Jan. 1965; Henry Davies Hicks to Stanfield, 25 Jan. 1965, dictated from hospital, President’s Office Fonds, “Provincial Government - Nova Scotia,” UA-3, Box 272, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. On the proposed amalgamation of NSTC with Dalhousie, see Henry Davies Hicks to Rev. W.P. Fogarty, engineering, St. Francis Xavier, 11 Feb., 29 Apr. 1965; St. Francis Xavier statement of 8 Nov. 1965 about engineering education; Dean McLaughlin’s report was done in the week of 10 Jan. 1966, and is short and to the point; C.J. Mackenzie to Henry Davies Hicks, 14 Apr. 1966; Henry Davies Hicks to Mackenzie, 21 Apr. 1966; Stanfield to Henry Davies Hicks, 10 May 1966, President’s Office Fonds, “Nova Scotia Technical College,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. Stanfield’s reply in 1965 to the Nova Scotia university presidents is Stanfield to the presidents, 12 Mar. 1965, President's Office Fonds, “Atlantic Association of Universities,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹⁴. Board of Governors Minutes, 6, 10 July 1964, UA-1, Box 50, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives; letter from Henry Davies Hicks to Senator Isnor, 9 July 1964, President’s Office Fonds, "Correspondence - Marshall & Merrett, Architects," UA-3, Box 437, Folders 1 and 2, Dalhousie University Archives; letter from R.A. Cluney, Dalhousie’s lawyer, commenting on the city staff report on Dalhousie’s application for rezoning, n.d. but 1965, President's Office Fonds, “City of Halifax, 1964-8,” UA-3, Box 487, Folder 1, Dalhousie University Archives. The Technical College plan by architecture students was published in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal, and in the Halifax Mail-Star, 10 Sept. 1965. The correspondence is Shadbolt to Henry Davies Hicks, 21 Sept. 1965; Henry Davies Hicks to Shadbolt, 24 Sept. 1965, President’s Office Fonds, "Correspondence - Marshall & Merrett, Architects," UA-3, Box 437, Folder 2, Dalhousie University Archives. Also interview with Douglas Shadbolt, 1 June 1990, Vancouver, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 58, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹⁵. Letter from A.F. Chisholm to Henry Davies Hicks, 11 Feb. 1965; Henry Davies Hicks to Chisholm, 12 Feb. 1965, President’s Office Fonds, “Campus Development Plans,” UA-3, Box 504, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives; Henry Davies Hicks to Chisholm, 21 Dec. 1966, President's OFfice Fonds, “Central Services Building,” UA-3, Box 605, Folder 4, Dalhousie University Archives; Chisholm to Peter B. Waite, n.d. rec’d 18 Dec. 1995, from Great Village, NS, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 27, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹⁶. Douglas How, Canada’s Mystery Man of High Finance: The Story of Izaak Walton Killam and his Glittering Wife Dorothy (Hantsport 1986), p. 54. The source for the story of her miscarriage is interview with Donald McInnes, 2 Aug. 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 28, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹⁷. Interview with Robert Stanfield, 4 Dec, 1986, in Ottawa, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 67, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

¹⁸. “The Killam Canelco Endowment at Dalhousie, an Academic Plan,” by K.T. Leffek, May 1985. K.T. Leffek was dean of graduate studies, 1972-90. ↩

¹⁹. Interview, Henry Davies Hicks, 9 Aug. 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 4, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

²⁰. The party with the deans is described by Henry Davies Hicks in my interview with him, without any dates, interview with Henry Davies Hicks, 9 Aug. 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 4, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. It is clear from correspondence that Dorothy Killam asked to meet the deans; the meeting probably took place about 15 May 1965. Letter from Henry Davies Hicks to Mrs. Killam, 10 May 1965, President’s Office Fonds, “Mrs. I.W. Killam,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

²¹. Interview with Henry Davies Hicks, 9 Aug. 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 4, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives; interview with Donald McInnes, 2 Aug. 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 28, Dalhousie University Archives; Douglas How, Canada’s Mystery Man of High Finance: The Story of Izaak Walton Killam and his Glittering Wife Dorothy (Hantsport 1986), pp. 163-4. ↩

²². There is a full copy of her will in President’s Office Fonds, “Mrs. I.W. Killam,” UA-3, Box 489, Folder 11, Dalhousie University Archives. The residue was split in a peculiar way. Two-fifths would go to the four universities named in the text, in the proportion 40:25:25:10, Dalhousie getting the 40. The other three-fifths was to be divided between the Canada Council and the named universities, the latter sharing in the same proportions. The trustees determined that of the three-fifths, the Canada Council would get 40 per cent and the named universities 60 per cent. The net effect of the residue section of the Killam will was to give Dalhousie just over 30 per cent, or about $20 million. ↩

²³. Letter from Henry Davies Hicks to McKay, 3 Jan. 1968, President's Office Fonds,"The University of New Brunswick - Correspondence," UA-3, Box 437, Folder 10, Dalhousie University Archives. In this letter Hicks gave McKay a full and accurate summary of the Killam gifts. ↩

²⁴. Letter from W.R. Trost to Henry Davies Hicks, 5 June 1964, President’s Office Fonds, “Graduate Studies,” UA-3, Box 442, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives; President's Report, 1959-1963, pp. 72-3. ↩

²⁵. Trost gave the history of APICS in a letter to Dr. Fred Simpson, its director in the 1980s, letter from Trost to Simpson, 10 July 1987 (copy) from Victoria, in Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 61, Dalhousie University Archive; letter from E.W.R. Steacie to Trost, 23 Nov. 1961, from Ottawa, President’s Office Fonds, “Atalntic Provinces Inter-University Committee on the Sciences (APICS),” UA-3, Box 557, Folder 5, Dalhousie Ubniversity Archives. ↩

²⁶. For McCarter’s opinion, see letter from J.A. McCarter to Henry Davies Hicks, 27 Apr. 1965, which includes several examples of Trost’s rudeness, President's Office Fonds, "John Alexander McCarter," UA-3, Box 95, Folder 29, Dalhousie University Archives. One colleague, Mirko Usmiani of Classics, came in 1961 to congratulate Trost on his appointment as dean. Trost kept him waiting, then said, “You do not come into this office unannounced. You will wait until I am ready to see you.” Usmiani, who prior to this used to just walk in, walked out and never returned. Interview with Mirko Usmiani, 31 Dec. 1991, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 77, Dalhousie University Archives. There were also others, Allan Bevan, head of English, for one. On the other side, Devendra Varma of English, widely published, found Trost helpful and open. Interview with D.R Varma, 19 July 1993, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 79, Dalhousie University Archives. Letter from Trost to Henry Davies Hicks, 19 Mar. 1965; Henry Davies Hicks to Trost, 29 Dec. 1965, President’s Office Fonds, “Graduate Studies,” UA-3, Box 442, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

²⁷. Letter from Trost to H.B.S. Cooke, 29 Jan. 1965; C.B. Stewart to Henry Davies Hicks, 14 Oct. 1964; Hicks’s views are in two letters: Henry Davies Hicks to Cooke, 29 Jan. 1965, and Henry Davies Hicks to Cooke and Trost, 15 July 1965. To this letter Trost replied in a minatory epistle the next day, which exasperated Cooke, who disliked its tone and the intransigent attitude it represented. Cooke to Henry Davies Hicks, 23 July 1965, President's Office Fonds, "Graduate Studies," UA-3, Box 442, Folder 7, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

²⁸. Letter from Trost to Henry Davies Hicks, n.d., but marked as received 28 Jan. 1966. Guy MacLean’s views on the “Organization of Graduate Studies” is 20 Feb. 1967, President's Office Fonds, "Graduate Studies," UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

²⁹. McCarter’s comment is in letter from McCarter to Henry Davies Hicks, 27 April 1965. For Kaplan, see President's Office Fonds, "J.C. Szerb," UA-3, Box 229, Folder 5, Dalhousie University Archives, where there is extensive correspondence, among which Szerb to Kaplan, 8 Feb. 1965, and Kaplan to Szerb, 12 Feb. 1965. Both letters are marked confidential, but by President Hicks. Dean Stewart’s view of Kaplan as possible head of Physiology is abundantly clear in Stewart to A.E. Kerr, 30 Jan. 1962, confidential. There is also 1966 correspondence with Hicks and two successive presidents of the Dalhousie Faculty Association, G.H. Hatcher (1965-6) and C.R. Brookbank (1966-7). For John Aldous’s recollection, interview, 1 June 1990, Vancouver, Peter B. Waite Fonds, Ms-2-718, Box 2, Folder 51, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁰. There is a considerable file on this vexed subject, including angry telephone calls from the president of Mount Allison and Premier Louis Robichaud. See President’s Office Fonds, “Provincial Governments, New Brunswick,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives, both calls logged 29 Mar. 1965. For some newspaper references see Saint John Telegraph-Journal, 2 Apr. 1965, and Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 28 June 1965. There were charges that New Brunswick students were being excluded on political grounds which Dean Stewart vigorously denied. “No student had ever been discriminated against for political reasons.” Chronicle-Herald and Mail-Star, both 25 June 1965. ↩

³¹. See President’s Office Fonds, “Sir Charles Tupper Building,” UA-3, Box 491, Dalhousie University Archives. In this box there is a reference to a letter in Henry Davies Hicks’s office, Pearson to MacKenzie 26 May 1916, without attaching Tupper’s name to any building. Hicks had the habit of going through the old presidential files and pulling out letters that intriged him. Interview with C.B. Stewart, 9 June 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 69, Dalhousie University Archives; letter from Kerr to Alan Clarke, provisional secretary, Canadian Centenary Council, 29 Nov. 1962; Norbert Prefontaine to Kerr, 12 Dec. 1962; Prefontaine was the executive director of the Centenary Council, President’s Office Fonds, “Sir Charles Tupper Building,” UA-3, Box 491, Dalhousie University Archives. The support of the Chronicle-Herald is 27 Dec. 1962. ↩

³². Letter from R.B. Cameron to Philip Dumaresq, 3 Sept. 1963; Stewart to Henry Davies Hicks, 9 Sept., 2 Oct. 1963, and 17 Jan. 1964, President’s Office Fonds, “Sir Charles Tupper Building,” UA-3, Box 491, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³³. On the Tupper Medical Building, see letter from Arthur Chisholm to Peter B. Waite, n.d., received 18 Dec. 1995; also 24 Feb. 1996, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 27, Dalhousie University Archives; interview with Dr. A.H. Shears, 27 Dec. 1995, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 59, Dalhousie University Archives. There is a strong letter in President’s Office Fonds, Stewart to Kerr, 16 May 1960, confidential, in which Stewart details struggles with Saunders. For Hicks, see Cragg to Henry Davies Hicks, 19 Jan. 1965, President’s Office Fonds, “University Grants Committee,” UA-3, Box 501, Folder 19, Dalhousie University Archives; McGrath to Henry Davies Hicks, 4 May 1967, President's Office Fonds, “McGrath Report,” UA-3, Box 598, Folder 10, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁴. Letter from Dumaresq to Henry Davies Hicks, 7 Nov. 1966, progress report; Henry Davies Hicks to J.S. Hodgson, principal secretary to the prime minister, 30 Sept. 1966; Henry Davies Hicks to G.G.E. Steele, under-secretary of state, 24 Oct. 1966; Henry Davies Hicks to Charles Beazley, clerk of the NS Executive Council, 16 Dec. 1966, President’s Office Fonds, UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. Sir James Macdonald Tupper was seventy-nine, and inherited his title from his elder brother in 1962. Old Sir Charles Tupper was a baronet, hence his knighthood was inherited, via the male line. See also Chronicle-Herald, 8 July 1967. ↩

³⁵. Letter from H.L. Scammell to Henry Davies Hicks, 17 July 1967, from Cape George; W.A. MacKay to Henry Davies Hicks, 15 July 1967, from Halifax, President’s Office Fonds, “Sir Charles Tupper Building,” UA-3, Box 491, Folder 8, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁶. President’s Office Fonds, “School of Nursing", UA-3, has correspondence and memoranda. See also Peter Twohig, ‘“To produce an article we are not capable at present of producing’: The Evolution of the Dalhousie University School of Nursing, 1946-1956,” Nova Scotia Historial Review 15, no. 2 (1995), p. 32; the reference to “poor girls’ university” is in a Dalhousie memorandum, 9 Oct. 1948. I am grateful to Dr. Twohig for making an early draft of this article available to me. See also letter from C.B. Stewart to Kerr, 5 Dec. 1960, President’s Office Fonds, “Faculty of Health Professions 1958-1962,” UA-3, Box 339, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁷. John Willis, A History of Dalhousie Law School (Toronto 1979), pp. 205-11. Letter from M.H.F. Harrington to H.E. Read, 17 Feb. 1964; Art Chisholm to Henry Davies Hicks, 29 Dec. 1964; same, 12 Feb. 1965; Henry Davies Hicks to McNeill, 8 Mar. 1965, President’s Office Fonds, “Weldon Building,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives; Senate Minutes, 11 May 1965, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁸. Letter from Lady Beaverbrook to Henry Davies Hicks, 2 Mar. 1967, personal; R.A. Tweedie to Henry Davies Hicks, 20 Mar. 1967, from Fredericton (two letters), President’s Office Fonds, “Weldon Building,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

³⁹. Dalhousie Gazette, 23 Feb. 1967; Senate Minutes, 12 Feb. 1968, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴⁰. Interview with H.B.S. Cooke, 31 May 1990, White Rock, BC, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 71, Dalhousie University Archives. As to a Department of Geography, see Faculty of Arts and Science, Minutes, 31 Jan., 3 Oct. 1967. The letters urging the establishment of Geography were from two well-known geographers, Kenneth Hare, president of UBC, to Cooke, 5 June 1967, and E.G. Pleva, head of geography at the University of Western Ontario, to A.S. Mowat (secretary of the Faculty of Arts and Science), 10 July 1967, Dalhousie University Archives. On pure and applied mathematics, see A.J. Tingley, Mathematics at Dalhousie (1991), pp. 23-6; letter from Henry Davies Hicks to MacDonald, 14 Apr, 1965, President's Office Fonds, UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴¹. Letter from Cooke to Henry Davies Hicks, 6 Feb. 1964; Cooke to Henry Davies Hicks, 16 Jan. 1968, President’s Office Fonds, “Faculty of Arts and Science,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. For information on staff, see report of 8 May 1974, on citizenship of full-time faculty, see also Years of Growth and Change: Dalhousie University 1963-4 to 1973-6, The President’s Report, pp. 2, 18-19. For the Cooke-Trost co-signing of staff recommendations, see Cooke to Henry Davies Hicks, 25 Feb. 1964; Henry Davies Hicks to Cooke, 26 Feb. 1964, President's Office Fonds, UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴². Senate Minutes, 21 Oct. 1963,11 May 1965, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴³. Halifax Mail-Star, 24 Nov. 1961, “Grade 12: A College Prerequisite”; letter from Kerr to Henry Davies Hicks, 1 Dec. 1961, President's Office Fonds, "Committee of Deans," UA-3, Box 254, Folder 4, Dalhousie University Archives. The failure rates are given in the Dalhousie Gazette, 19 Feb. 1965, with further comments on 20 Oct. 1966. ↩

⁴⁴. Leading article on Dean Cooke, Dalhousie Gazette, 15 Mar. 1966; on the Sorbonne, 9 Nov. 1967. Letter from Joan Hennessey is in Dalhousie Gazette, 23 Jan. 1964. ↩

⁴⁵. The Housman parody is from A Shropshire Lad, by Jim Hurley, in Dalhousie Gazette 7 Oct. 1959. ↩

⁴⁶. “Joe P.”’s interview is in Dalhousie Gazette, 12 Feb. 1964, entitled “Halifax: the Seamy Side.” ↩

⁴⁷. Letter from James Cowan ('62, '65) chairman of the DSU Committee, to Henry Davies Hicks, 13 July 1964; Henry Davies Hicks to Cowan, 15 July 1964, President’s Office Fonds, “Dalhousie Student Union,” UA-3, Box 549, Folder 5, Dalhousie University Archives. The matter of Miss Musgrave’s property is the origin of the “L” at the back of the SUB. Dalhousie some years later acquired Miss Musgrave’s lot. Letter from Henry Davies Hicks to Miss C.G.M. Musgrave, 4 May 1966; Henry Davies Hicks to Chisholm, 26 May 1966, President’s Office Fonds, “Properties,” UA-3, Dalhousie University Archives. The second lot was owned by Bruce Knight; Chisholm to author, 24 Feb. 1996, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 27, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩

⁴⁸. Letter from E.B. Mercer ('37) (assistant to the president) to Arthur Chisholm and J.H. Aitchison, 13 July 1965, reporting Dean Cooke’s suggestion favourably, President’s Office Fonds, “Dalhousie Student Union,” UA-3, Box 549, Folder 5, Dalhousie University Archives. This was the origin of the McInnes Room, named for Donald McInnes’s mother and father, Charlotte McNeill and Hector McInnes. In 1968 the students gave Dean Cooke a gold medal for his contributions to their building. Dalhousie put in to the University Grants Committee for a capital assistance loan covering construction costs plus land. The application was rejected because land costs were not authorized. Hicks saw the premier about that and a separate application was submitted for land costs. The students paid for the furnishings. See Ashworth to Hicks, 7 July 1967; E.B. Mercer to B.F. Macaulay, vice-president, administration, UNB, 22 Nov. 1968. Interview with J.G. Sykes, university architect, 14 Feb. 1996, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 71, Dalhousie University Archives; Chronicle-Herald, 13 Nov. 1968, letter from Randall Smith. ↩