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GWENDOL YN DAVIES An Introduction to James DeMille's 'Inaugural Discourse' of 1861 In Stephen Leacock's 1914 Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, the president of Plutoria University, Dr Boomer, deplores the old classical Concordia College nestling among the elms, 'our original home, the fons et origo of our studies, the faculty of arts' (Leacock, 57), and celebrates instead the busy, student-filled towers of the faculties of industrial and mechanical science 'fronting full upon the street'(54). Comparing favourably with 'the best departmental stores or factories in the City,' notes the narrator, the new side of the campus throbs with whirling machines that measure everything from wind to earthquakes, offers 'such a vast variety of themes, topics, and subjects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn,' and emits 'a shower of bulletins and monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough' (55). By contrast, Concordia, the liberal arts college, 'stands so quietly and modestly at the top end.of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no one could mistake it for a factory' (54). It is no wonder, then, that Dr Boomer wants 'to knock the building down and to build on its site a real facultas ten stories high, with elevators in it' (58). Leacock's 1914 satire on the fragility of the liberal arts tradition in a social environment increasingly dedicated to utilitarianism strikes a note of continuity for anyone surveying the history of the Nova Scotia university system, for from James DeMille's 'Inaugural Discourse,' delivered at Acadia University in Wolfville on 7 June 1861, to the October 1994 release of the 'Green Paper on Higher Education' (Critical Choices: The Nova Scotia University System at a Crossroads), the viability of research and study deemed 'non-practical' has been under scrutiny. The 1994 report, noting that 'demands for highly qualified personnel in the labour force' are changing 'the complexion of the university,' raises as one question for debate the priority to be given research geared to 'regional or national socia-economic interests' (Critical Choices, 37). In doing so, it touches upon issues not only central to Leacock's satire in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich but also raised most presciently by James DeMille six years before Confederation when he accepted the chair of Greek and Latin Literatures at Acadia, the Baptist college where he himself had matriculated in 1849. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1995 432 GWENDOLYN DAVIES A somewhat eclectic scholar, James DeMille (1833-80) joined the Acadia faculty in 1861 after completing formal studies at Acadia College (1848-50) and Brown University (1852-4), travelling throughout Europe (1850-2), working as a bookkeeper in a mining company in Cincinnati (1855-6), and operating a bookstore in his native city, Saint John, New Brunswick, from 1857 to 1859 (Monk, 42-3, 45-54, 83, 89). Furthermore, he had begun to write popular essays and fiction for periodicals such as Putnam's Monthly while still a student at Brown UniverSity (Monk, 73), and, at the time of his appointment to Acadia in 1861, was actively contributing stories and essays to his brother's Baptist publication, the Christian Watchman. Over the next nineteen years, DeMille was to continue writing successful popular novels for New York and Boston publishers, achieVing, as he himself pOinted out to the Literary World in 1878, a 'union of sensationalism with extravagant humour' (quoted in Parks, xxv). The most enduring and substantial of these works, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published posthumously in 1888, was reputedly begun by DeMille in the mid-1860s, the period when he held his appointment at Acadia as Professor of Greek and Latin Literatures (Parks, xxiii-xxiv)~ DeMille was appOinted by the Board of Governors of Acadia (of which his father and brother were members) on 3 July 1860, although his responsibilities in Saint John did not allow him to assume his new post until the summer of 1861. His 'Inaugural Discourse/ delivered at the Acadia College Anniversary on Friday, 7 June 1861, was well received and was published in the Christian Watchman on 12 June 1861. (It...

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