Honorary Degrees of Retiring Faculty
Ronald J. Mason, Professor of Anthropology, 1995
"Ronald Mason, not many scholars, even anthropologists, can take credit for the federal government's recognition of a National Historical Site, but your work at the Rock Island State Park in Door County more than twenty years ago not only achieved that, it confirmed your standing--as one of your colleagues has said--as 'the leading expert in Midwestern Archeology.' The 'Mason-Quimby line,' a kind of archeological great divide, is known to every student of your discipline. In these instances and more, your path-breaking research and writing have brought distinction to Lawrence as well as yourself, and your book on Great Lakes Archeology is regarded as the standard text in the field. We take pride that you have established a reputation for the university's department of anthropology that will continue indefinitely.
That you have achieved so much is certainly notable; that you have done so while at the same time teaching undergraduates at a consistent level of excellence is remarkable. Indeed, you have made your students full partners in your scholarship, and in the process you have inspired them in the classroom, the laboratory, and the excavation sites, to stretch their minds--and, no doubt, their backs--in ways that have shaped their futures. You have identified your own strengths as expertise and enthusiasm; we would add the obvious dedication to your students everyone else admires.
Of special note, I have the pleasure of announcing to you and those gathered here today that your colleagues in Midwestern archeology have been preparing a festschrift in your honor, the first ever offered by the Midwestern Archeology Conference, that will include twenty original articles written in recognition and gratitude for your exemplary career. Tentatively entitled Just the Facts, the work will pay tribute to your stubborn insistence that archeology is an empirical science and that the facts are everything.
Your legacy will thus be commemorated in print, but it will also live on at Lawrence in the record of excellence you have established here, in the lives of generations of students whom you have touched and changed, and the regard of those colleagues who will continue to look to you as mentor and friend and, just maybe, to share with you a bottle of Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet 1991.
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."