Honorary Degrees of Retiring Faculty
Thomas Randall Dale, Miller-Wheelock Professor of English, 1981
"Thomas Randall Dale, you have devoted your life to the life of the mind. Study of English and history at University College, Toronto, prepared you for teaching English literature, but the needs of the Royal Canadian Navy for an historian transformed the professor into the Lieutenant Commander. Then the University of Chicago transformed the Canadian graduate student into the American scholar. An inheritor of the classical tradition, you have taught us, students and colleagues alike, at Downer and at Lawrence, the power of the past to illuminate our lives. Though college mottoes may seem at times dim echoes of that past, your career has truly combined the Downer with the Lawrence motto, Sit Lux with Veritas est Lux.
In a time when academe anguishes over the basic skills, it is right and proper to praise your solid contribution to their improvement on this campus, in your many patient weekly conferences and in establishing a workable student tutoring system. It is even more important to acknowledge the range of your learning and the quietly generous spirit in which it has been offered. You not only regularly instruct us in your special field of Romantic and Victorian literature, but you have also turned your hand to Latin poetry, Milton, women in literature, and C.S. Lewis. You have, in classroom, lecture, and publications, achieved distinction in the study of Sir Walter Scott, gathering clans here, at the Newberry Library, at the University of Florida, and most recently at Annamalai University in South India.
Scholar at home and abroad, camper, canoer, indefatigable walker, you are proof that, properly distilled, a good Scot travels well.
Too long for a motto, but not at all beyond your stride, is this exordium from Cato: Disce, sed a doctis, indoctos ipse doceto: Propaganda etenim est rerum doctrina bonarum. (Learn from the learned; the unlearned, teach; For knowledge of goodly things should be spread wide.)
By the authority vested in me, I now confer upon you the degree of Master of Arts, ad eundem, and admit you to its rights, its privileges, and its obligations."