Monday, November 12, 2007

Another Richard Nixon

Yes, there was another Richard Nixon (his middle name was Williams, not Milhaus). A native of New Hanover County, North Carolina, he graduated from the University of North Carolina on June 2, 1859. He and my paternal grandfather were classmates. All of this I stumbled upon on the Internet, which provides a photocopy of the original program of the commencement exercises from the university library.

The use of Latin at prestigious universities was cool at that time--the state of North Carolina was referred to as Carolinae Borealis, the officials of the university as Gubernatori, and the graduating students as Juvenes hodie primi gradus in Artibus honorem petentes. The students' names were put into Latin where possible: Nixon's first name was listed as Ricardus, my grandfather's middle name (which was Henry) as Henricus; others were listed as Gulielmus (for William), Georgius (for George), Robertus (for Robert), and so on.

Young Nixon was one of the eleven graduating seniors who was a commencement speaker during the morning ceremonies (there were four more in the afternoon). His topic was "The Imagination; to be Cultivated." The other speakers were North Carolinians except those noted below. Their topics were:

"Latin Salutatory"
"The Hamiltonian System"
"Objections to an Elective Judiciary"
"The Persecution of the Jews" (New York)
"The Man of Letters"
"The Common Sense Man" (Alabama)
"The Independent Thinker" (Virginia)
"The American Student"
"To be great is to be misunderstood"
"Comparative merits of Curriculum Colleges"

There was "Music" (otherwise unidentified) between each speech.

The commencement ceremonies included a Christian hymn, a prayer, reading of "Psalm CXVII", and a benediction.

My grandfather's 1859 diploma (all in Latin) hangs in my house alongside mine, also from the University of North Carolina, presented to me 90 years later in the class of 1949 (all in English). There were no hymns or psalms at my commencement, but my diploma does say "...this sixth day of June in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-nine..." I guess that no such religious phrasing is included in the university's diplomas today.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Name:
Location: United States

Mycroft Watson is the nom de plume of a man who has seen many winters. He is moderate to an extreme. When he comes to a fork in the road, he always takes it. His favorite philosopher is Yogi Berra. He has come out of the closet and identified himself. Anyone interested can get his real name, biography, and e-mail address by going to "Google Search" and keying in "User:Marshall H. Pinnix" (case sensitive).

Powered by Blogger

FREE hit counter and Internet traffic statistics from freestats.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Free Top Ten Search Engine Submission!
  • Excite
  • What-U-Seek
  • Webcrawler
  • NetFind
  • Lycos
  • Infoseek
  • AltaVista
  • HotBot
  • Goto
  • Northern Light
Site Title
URL
Name
Email
Free Advertising
 Blog Top Sites a href="http://www.blogtopsites.com/"> Blog Top Sites