University of Massachusetts Amherst - Index Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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I9INDEX29 glexanber n er£cm Jladummte ALEXANDER ANDERSON MACKIMMIE was born in Nova Scotia, of Scotch parents, and studied in the public schools of Nova Scotia, until he was sixteen. At this early age he began to teach school, inspired perhaps by the same urge for the dissemination of learning which prompted Duncan Ross, his grandfather, to found the first school in Durham, and which impelled James Ross, a kinsman and the first president of Dalhousie College to strive so hard for the kindling of the fire of knowledge. For six years did Professor Mackimmie teach school, laboring over his books in the same persistent way which has characterized him all his life, — and then an opportunity for foreign travel presented itself to him. The next three years were spent in the South of Europe and so precise was the observation of the student-traveller that European History loses its drabness and takes on a new fulgency when Professor Mackimmie makes the subject live and breath, by his tales of his travels in Northern Africa, or Italy, or Spain. But at the end of three years he returned to the New World, and the fall of 1903 found him at Princeton, and a member of the Sophomore class. Three years later he graduated from Princeton with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude and the reward of the Boudinot fellowship in modern languages for 1907. For the next two years Professor Mackimmie taught at Truro Academy, but in 1908 he came back to the state and town where he was to make his home for many years and began to teach at M. A. C. as instructor in French. In 1909-10 he served as assistant to the Acting Dean and in 1911 he received his appointment as assistant professor of French. Professor Mackimmie, the student, was as yet unsatisfied and in 1914 he received his degree of Master of Arts from Columbia University. A year later he was made associate professor of French, a position which he held until 1919 when he was appointed Professor of French. Even then, however, the quest for learn- ing proved dominant, and in 1922 he studied in Spain. As a result of his labors he received the Diploma de Competencia, Centro de Estudis Historicos, Madrid. It is a most unusual and difficult task for a man who has taught for many years to begin to teach an entirely new subject, and yet Mackimmie showed again his tremendous versatality when, in 1924 he was appointed Professor of Economics, and thus forsook his languages for laws of living. Two years later he was made head of the Division of Humanities here at the Massachusetts Agricultural Col- lege. This then is the abbreviated history of one of the most popular professors on our campus. A sketchy biography such as this is wholly incompetent and useless, for nothing of the personality of the man is in evidence. One cannot say in a few words that, which would of necessity take pages, if it were to be said well. 10