Queens University - Tricolour Yearbook (Kingston, Ontario Canada)

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GOWNED UNIVERSITY FATHERS QUEUE UP 24

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23

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TO SEE DR. CORRY INSTALLED PRINCIPAL When I was being asked to consider the post in which I have just been placed, 1 was not told nor did I know that the appointee would be describet! as the thirteenth Principal of Queen's University. Whether knowledge in time would have affected my decision, 1 cannot say. I do know that, without attending to superstition at all, there are grounds enough for some apprehension. The spectre of numbers before which the universities have been quaking for a decade has almost become a presence. The presence itself will raise thorny problems. Other largely independent developments will require responses that must be discussed and pondered. There is little prospect of cloistered calm in which to think about them. Of these hazards, I have at least been aware. Before going on to speak of some of these, I say gratefully that I start with some very great advantages. In the ten years of the Principalship of W. A. Mackintosh, Queen's University has been a happy place: there are no rooted rancours to be over- come. In this encouraging atmosphere, standards have been defended—and raised, wise appointments made, and new ven- tures auspiciously launched. As far as 1 know, we are not any- where in untenable, exposed positions from which we have tr retreat. It has become a commonplace for outsiders to say, in the words of Falstaff, Fore God, you have here a goodly dwelling and a rich. Another important advantage for us all is his continuance as Vice-Chancellor. For me. it is particularly reassuring to know that I shall be able to profit, as I have in the past, from his deliberate imperturbability, his imperviousness to ail slogans, and his instinct for the jugular of a bristling difficulty. ... if university education is to provide larger reservoirs of talent for business and government to draw on. it must also feed in greater volume than before the scattered springs of thought and action in the wider community. If there are to be more controllers, there must also be many more persons fitted to rally opinion for controlling the controllers. A community that is to remain free and become more civilized must always have the inner capacity to impose limits on the wicldcrs of power. The newer responsibilities give more point than ever to the older responsibilities. I know that becoming more civilized calls for more than I have asserted. Without a vision beyond themselves, the people perish. It is widely held nowadays that we have become en- slaved to the material and the immediate. The evidence foe this point of view seems to me less than conclusive. 1 would rather say that our worst troubles come, not from the fading of vision but from an obscuring of the upward path in our immediate foreground. Nothing stays put around us any more we lose our sense of direction in the fog of incessant change, and naturally we flounder. We can't relate what ts happening all around us to the inherited values we still honour when we can see how to move. The first charge on the universities is to throw a steadier and longer beam from the lamps of reason