Bibliographic Essay
This essay describes the main sources of Dalhousie history, primary and secondary; it does not pretend to cover all the sources mentioned in the notes that follow. The main sources for Dalhousie’s history, 1925-80, are in a way patent: minutes of the Board of Governors, Senate minutes, and those of the several faculties. They have disadvantages; they are as a rule the bare bones of what went on, rarely the whys and wherefores.
To get behind the scenes one needs correspondence. When President Kerr retired in 1963, his successor, Henry Hicks, got Kerr’s secretary, Miss Lola Henry to spend some months organizing the Dalhousie presidential files. Miss Henry had worked briefly for President A.S. MacKenzie, was secretary to Carleton Stanley and to A.E. Kerr. She knew more about the presidential files than anyone. She put together what is now the President’s Office Fonds in the Dalhousie University Archives. This fonds contains correspondence which is indispensable for Dalhousie history from 1911 to 1963.
Between 1963 and 1980 Henry Hicks kept his own set of files which are now housed at the Dalhousie University Archives. They were put together after his retirement in 1980 and are quite comprehensive. Only a few files go back beyond 1963, though for some reason Psychology does.
Carleton Stanley kept personal papers beside his presidential ones and they are exceptional. Stanley was an excellent correspondent, wrote to colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, his letters vivid, literary, lean and opinionated, the way he was. Lola Henry had the useful habit, before his letters went out, of checking whether there were any postscripts; if so, she would type them on the bottom of her carbon copy. Some of Stanley’s most revealing asides are recorded in this way. Lola Henry much admired Carleton Stanley, but she found A.E. Kerr, his successor, a bore, and he was bad at dictation, being forever distracted by what he saw out the window. Kerr’s letters were unusually flat and prosy, and Lola Henry made little effort to improve them. A.E. Kerr kept no personal papers, or apparently not. Kerr’s Dalhousie papers are entirely subsumed within the President’s Office Fonds.
Henry Hicks’s personal papers are not very useful, but his presidential ones are sufficiently comprehensive that there is almost no need to look elsewhere. One could say that with Hicks everything was personal. He also dictated letters with the speed of light, quick, vigorous, to the point, with rarely a look backwards.
A certain number of personal papers outside Dalhousie have significant Dalhousie material, The R.B. Bennett Papers at the University of New Brunswick have considerable Dalhousie correspondence, not surprising since Bennett was on the Dalhousie Board for almost two decades. There are Dalhousie letters in the Sidney Smith Papers at the University of Toronto Archives, and a substantial collection in the C.D. Howe Papers in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. There are a number of collections of professors’ papers at the Dalhousie University Archives, though none are as comprehensive as the MacMechan Papers, which run out after his death in 1933. H.L. Stewart’s are preoccupied with publishing. And there are some papers that ought to be there that unfortunately are not. G.E. Wilson’s papers, which must have comprehended a vast correspondence, were lost or more probably burnt after his death in 1974. His friend and colleague, J.G. Adshead, who died in 1979, seems to have left no papers. His diaries, rescued by Mrs. Marion Cumming, are now at the Department of Mathematics at Dalhousie. There are a number of collections of professors’ papers that are not yet open.
Dalhousie University Archives has also extensive collections of faculty and departmental papers, most of which I have not found it possible to canvass in any detail. There are some useful departmental histories, most of which are cited in the notes, for Chemistry, Geology, Mathematics, Psychology, Medicine (department of, not faculty), Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Pharmacology. There is a good history of the Faculty of Dentistry, Oskar Sykora’s Maritime Dental College and Dalhousie Faculty of Dentistry: A History (Halifax 1991), and a superb one of the Faculty of Law, John Willis’s A History of Dalhousie Law School (Toronto 1979). A valuable addition is R. St. J. Macdonald, ed., Dalhousie Law School, 1965-1990: An Oral History (Halifax 1996).
A most refreshing and fruitful source has been interviews with Dalhousie colleagues, alumni, and alumnae. These are all cited as interviews and if outside of Halifax, the place where the interview was held. The word “interview,” however, conceals considerable variation: some are quasi-formal hour-long interviews; many are over lunch, some just gossip over drinks or coffee. All are recorded not by tape recorder but by notes that I made either at the time or as soon as possible afterward. Tape recorders stiffen people’s minds, or they did as a rule with the people that I was interviewing. They are also formal and cumbersome.
The most important source for student life is of course the Dalhousie Gazette. Decade by decade from 1925 it gradually becomes less stylish, less obviously literary; in the raucous days of 1968-70 the Gazette is a lonely voice, a bittern crying its radicalism in a wilderness of its own making. From 1925 to 1964 it is not difficult to find quotable and intelligent poetry in the Gazette. Then for a decade it becomes more difficult. About 1973 the literary touches are gradually picked up again. For student news and events on campus the Gazette can sometimes be vulgar and tasteless, but one still needs it, and some events on campus after 1973, such as the great Dalplex controversy, it covered quite well.
In 1970, simply because the Gazette no longer gave regular campus news, the university itself established University News which came to appear weekly during term time. It gave reasonably dispassionate coverage of university affairs and needs to be used in the 1970s to supplement the Gazette.
What historians call secondary sources – that is books or articles about Dalhousie or Dalhousie people, as opposed to those written by them – there are some important ones. For political background, Murray Beck’s Politics of Nova Scotia: Volume Two, Murray-Buchanan 1896-1988 (Tantallon 1988) is essential. David M. Cameron’s More than an Academic Question: Universities, Government, and Public Policy in Canada (Halifax 1991) is indispensable for the history of government support, both provincial and federal, of universities in Canada from 1956 to 1990.
Of the several university histories, the most useful are John Reid’s Mount-Allison University: Vol. II, 1914-1963 (Toronto 1984); Stanley Brice Frost’s McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning: Volume II, 1895-1961 (Kingston and Montreal 1983). James Cameron’s history of St. Francis Xavier (Montreal 1996), came too late for me to use. One of the best of the modern university histories is A.B. McKillop’s Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791-1951 (Toronto 1994), though as the title suggests, it is only peripherally relevant to Dalhousie. Paul Axelrod’s Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties (Montreal 1990) is a fine example of how to make good social history of universities. It is analysis, readable and informative. John Reid’s essay, “Beyond the Democratic Intellect: The Scottish Example and University Reform in Canada’s Maritime Provinces, 1870-1933,” is splendid, and ought to have been cited for volume 1 of Dalhousie’s history as well. It is in Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education (Kingston and Montreal 1989), pp. 275-300.
There is no modern history of Halifax to take up where T.H. Raddall left off in Halifax, Warden of the North (Toronto 1949), which stops at the end of the Second World War. William March’s Red Line: The Chronicle-Herald and The Mail-Star, 1875-1954 (Halifax 1986) is useful for Halifax background.