DISTINGUISHED SON OF UNIVERSITY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 174, 20 April 1935, Page 10

DISTINGUISHED SON OF UNIVERSITY

Dr. Diamond Jenness, Canada GREETINGS EXTENDED TO HIS ALMA MATER The Senate of the University of New Zealand in January last awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature to Mr. Diamond Jenness, M.A., a graduate of Victoria University College, Wellington, who is on the staff of the National Museum of Canada. Ottawa. The executive committee of the Senate, at its meeting in Wellington this week, received the following letter from Dr. Jenness:— “Will you please convey to the Senate of the University of New Zealand, and to the Academic Board, my deepest appreciation of its graciousness in awarding me the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature. Such an honour from my own country, from the university where I spent four of the happiest years of my life, gives me greater pleasure than I can express. “We who have wandered away from our New Zealand homes feel that we carry a double responsibility, for while we owe our best services to the countries that have adopted us, we realise that those services inevitably must reflect credit or discredit on our motherland Like most men, I live too close to my work to be able to appraise its true value, yet I can ask for no higher reward than to have it thus recognised and crowned by my own university. “Old Clay Patch at Kelburn.” “I wish that 1 could absent myself from Canada long enough to attend the graduation ceremony in May, but that is not nossible. May I, however, as a foster-child of Victoria University College, send her a greeting, and express the joy with which I have followed her splendid growth. I can still remember how her first building slowly took shape on the ‘Old Clay Patch at Kelburn’, and I feel an immense pride that in so brief a term of years the infant college has become one of the great institutions of the Empire.” The degree awarded Dr. Jenness is the first honorary Doctorate in Literature the University of New Zealand has awarded, and in all the third honorary degree. Honorary Doctorates in Science have previously been awarded Lord Rutherford of Nelson, director of tiie Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, New Zealand's greatest living son, and to the late Dr. Leonard Cockayne, formerly of Wellington. Dr. Jenness, who is chief of the division of anthropology, National Museum of Canada, was born in Wellington In 1886. He was educated in Victoria University College, where he took his M.A. degree with first-class honours in 1908, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was research student in ethnology at Papua, for Oxford University in 191112, ethnologist with tiie Canadian Arctic Expedition. 1913-16. and Canadian ethnologist from 1916 to 1925, in which year he was appointed to his present position.