Arthur Kroeger
Arthur KroegerConvocation Address
University of Alberta, June 7, 2004
I want to begin by saying "Thank you" to the University of Alberta for the honour they have done me today. To be recognized in your home province and by your home University is different from any other kind of honour. If you want to speak of special days, they don't come any more special than this.
I also want to say how pleased I am that in the audience today are a number of old friends from my days in Consort High School. Some were my fellow students; some were teachers who played an important part in my life. We go back a long way together, and they know some things that were not covered in Dean Woolf's very generous citation that you just heard. I'm going to tell you about a few of those things, but for the rest of what you might call the real story, I will rely on my friends' discretion.
I do not intend today to offer a lot of uplifting advice to the graduating class. You are probably your own best sources of advice. Instead, I want to use this occasion to thank the University of Alberta for what it did for me after I arrived here at the age of nineteen. It was this University that gave me my start in life.
We hear a lot today about universities as centres of groundbreaking research and with some reason. President Fraser and his colleagues have done a brilliant job of making the University of Alberta one of the leading research institutions in North America. Their achievement speaks for itself so today, I want to speak about another important function of our universities. It is commonly called teaching but I prefer to call it "developing people." This function is harder to measure than research, and the measurement is best done by those whose personal development is shaped by the University — people such as today's graduating class.
And people such as myself.
I arrived at the University with an undistinguished record. In high school, I had shot pool, played hockey, and hung around with my friends. As a result, I ended my Grade XII year two courses short and spent the following year working in my brothers' garage. My high school teachers had pushed me to think of going to university, and they must have been deeply disappointed at my performance. But there is a saying: "Just because I didn't do what you told me doesn't mean I didn't hear what you said." And in my year off, I had ample time to reflect on what they had said. I made up my two courses at summer school in Red Deer and thus gained admission to the University. I remember that when I arrived here from Consort, the campus seemed a large, intimidating place.
While I was in the process of settling in, I encountered some professors at a social event. Somewhat to my surprise, they gave me a bit of a pep talk and said I should go into the Honours program in second year. On another occasion, two professors from the Department of Modern Languages urged me to parallel my English literature courses with courses in French so that if in a particular year I was taking 18th-century English literature, I should match it with a course in 18th-century French.
I was impressed by what I heard but I was also a bit puzzled. Here I was, a semi-literate nineteen-year-old from a rather remote and rural part of the province, and they wanted me to go into honours?
But the thought stimulated a response. I had already set about learning how to study and now I increased my efforts. It took a while for any results to show but eventually they did.
And here perhaps I do have one message for the graduating class. It is to push yourselves to find out where your limits lie. It wasn't until I was into my second year that it began to dawn on me that I might be good at something.
For many people, their late teens and early twenties are a period of extraordinary personal growth. My professors did a great deal to make this so in my case. The legendary F.M. Salter was widely acknowledged to be one of the most stimulating faculty members in the University. He would intersperse his lectures on Shakespeare with explanations of things such as how book publishing worked in the 16th century. To this day, if I lapse into sloppy usage when writing, I can still see Professor Salter's reproachful red ink in the margin.
He would also regularly say to us: "Just remember: three quarters of everything you know for sure is false." It was a startling thought at first, but in later life, it became a useful check on me when I became excessively certain about the rightness of my views.
I learned another lesson from him after the Christmas break in second year. He walked into class with our first-term essays, peered at us over his glasses, and said, "Well, now I know you need me." Many years later, when I was a Deputy Minister, I found that recounting this anecdote was a useful way of delivering a gentle message to my departmental staff when things had gone wrong.
Taking first-year French from the formidable Manoel Faucher was like no experience I had ever had: rural Alberta meets the Sorbonne. The more advanced courses I took from him in third and fourth year were the best introduction to French literature that I could have had anywhere. And at the same time, his colleague Dr Ed Greene, an equally impressive teacher in his own way, reassuringly told us now and then that he liked going to Edmonton Eskimo games.
One other person among many whom I'd like to recognize today is J.T. Jones, who succeeded Professor Salter as head of the Department of English. When I had graduated and was starting in my first job, I received a brief note from Professor Jones at the end of October. The note was only three sentences long. The first two dealt with my job and some material he was enclosing. The third read, "The Dean tells me that the application date for Rhodes Scholarships has been postponed to November 4 because of a shortage of good applicants. Sincerely, J.T. Jones."
Today, the note — framed — hangs on the wall of my study. It was the message that changed everything. But I am sure that, so far as Professor Jones was concerned, he was just doing his job.
And so were all the other professors who made such a difference to me. My only regret is that too much time has gone by, and it is now not possible to thank them in person.
I think — hope — that members of today's graduating class will carry away with them comparable recollections of what they gained while they were here — that those of you who are to become doctors will remember 20 years from now what you heard from your professor of biology; that those of you who become teachers will always be conscious of how important you can be as developers of people.
When you look back, I think you will find that these have been the most formative years of your lives. You are fortunate to have spent them at a great university.