The University - An Ivory Tower?

"Prospectors don't come out of universities", says Bob Lee, a Prince Albert "weekend prospector" . . . .

I think the more education you have, the less apt you are to be hypnotized. A mining engineer or, a geologist has a good education and is probably a good engineer, or geologist, but he'll probably not make a good prospector.

He will look at a map and say, "Don't go there. There's not supposed to be anything there". But the prospector and especially the "weekend" prospector, he'll go anyway.

The Gunnar uranium mine was found in granite. A geologist would have steered clear of it, because nothing is supposed to be found in granite. Even today with all our modern equipment, we are still finding mines "by hand". A lot of them are found by geophysics, but a lot of them are "grubbed out" by the prospector. Perhaps it's a case of "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".

Despite what Bob Lee says, and most geologists and mining engineers would agree with him, the University of Saskatchewan and particularly the Geology Department, has made its unique contribution to the industry, both in research and practical fieldwork, and in the training of personnel.

The work of the University is inseparable from the lives and contributions of two men - Dr Jim Mawdsley and Dr Rod Byers. Dr Glen Caldwell, Head of the Department, has fond, though sometimes critical, memories of Dr Mawdsley.

In many ways, I admired Dr Mawdsley very much and we had a wonderful relationship. We did have some fearful arguments on how to teach geology, but for ninety per cent of the time we had the most amiable relationship.

I don't think junior members of a faculty do their department heads any service if they are yes - men to them - if they agree with everything the heads say.

The way that geology was taught in this University during Dr Mawdsley's term was something drastically different from the kind of teaching, the kind of training program, that I got, and Byers got.

Dr Mawdsley had a mining degree from McGill and a PhD in geology from Princeton. But I think his first love was what I call mining geology. I use that umbrella term to cover everything from exploration to exploitation of mineral occurrences. He was tremendously biased, I thought, in favour of geological engineering and had very little time for honours students in the straight science program. I am not saying that he was narrow, only that he had a rather narrow idea of how geology should be taught. He used to refer to honours students as "one-track Charlies", and claimed they had their heads in the clouds rather than their feet on the floor, whereas he felt the geological engineers had their feet on the floor and could turn their hands to anything.

The pendulum has swung, I think, and today we are giving the best training program in geology and geological engineering that the Department has ever offered in its history.

Dr Walter Kupsch, a professor of geology at the University of Saskatchewan, like Dr Caldwell, talks of Dr Mawdsley, and sees him as one of Canada's great geologists . . . .

He came to the University in 1929, Prof. Edmunds was there then. After Mawdsley came he became Head of the Department. When he came here he turned right away towards the Precambrian Shield of Saskatchewan, in the La Ronge area. He worked a lot in the La Ronge area and even in those days paid a lot of attention to uranium. The work then was for the Department of Natural Resources, and his first report dates back to 1931. This was a mimeographed report, in which Dr Mawdsley discussed the mineral possibilities of northern Saskatchewan.

A report on the Rottenstone Lake deposit was done in 1946 by Dr Mawdsley for the Geological Survey of Canada. He had worked for the Survey before he came to Saskatchewan. Quite a lot of Canadian geologists got their training from the Geological Survey of Canada.

He did his work with a very definite view as to the commercial possibilities of mineral occurrences ["Finds", as they are called - BR]. He went all over the north looking at prospects, especially when uranium became the big thing after the second world war. He published a large number of reports on uranium discoveries.

Dr Walter Kupsch knew Dr Mawdsley intimately, and could talk in a kind way of some of his idiosyncrasies.

During those days there was not that much money, especially not for provincial government employees. There were always airplanes flying over you, working for some private exploration company, but not for the department. Mawdsley, coming from the Geological Survey of Canada, was a pork and beans man. I don't know what Mawdsley would have thought of having women as cooks and girls as geologists.

Here is one story that isn't mine, but I know it from Earl Christiansen, who was one of my students, and who is now working for the Saskatchewan Research Council. He was an assistant of Mawdsley, and they were out in a bush camp. Mawdsley, being a navy man, ran his camp a bit along military lines, very formal. So in the morning, Earl remembers he had the task of bringing hot water to Dr Mawdsley so he could shave. He was always very polite and thanked him profusely, but he expected to have his hot water brought to him. He took a dim view too, of other people letting their beards grow. Shaving to him was a ritual and he expected others to follow.

Dr Rod Byers followed Dr Mawdsley as Head of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. He, too, like Mawdsley, was a believer in economic, rather than academic, geology and spent much of his time in the bush, doing grassroots research: mapping and prospecting. Dr Caldwell, present Head of the Department, held Byers in high esteem.

I was a close personal friend of Rod Byers. I liked the man enormously, he was so quiet. In fact, when I first came to this University, it took me years, literally years, to get to know him.

I remember one Saturday morning when I was working, he came into my office and shut the door, and he sat there, and I knew there was something wrong. He said the University Administration wanted him to take the job as Head of the Department. I urged him very strongly to take it because Rod Byers was a tremendously fair - minded man, honest literally to a fault. This was in 1964, He didn't like the position I'm quite convinced of that, he was really unhappy in it. I think the only way he kept his sanity was to go off for two or three months to the East every summer. He did some geology, but mainly he had to get out of this administrative position. Byers was a very knowledgeable man, particularly in the field of structural geology and economic geology and to a lesser degree mineralogy and petrology.

When he mapped the Amisk [Beaver] Lake area with Clint Dahlstrom - Dahlstrom got his PhD out of it - the map they produced was one of the finest, if not the finest, the most detailed, piece of mapping of the Precambrian terrain in Canada at that time. It was a model in some respects, I do regret that work of his never got beyond a report of the Department of Mineral Resources. It was the kind of report that in its day, ought to have constituted something like a memoir of the Geological Society of America. If Byers had tried to have it published there his national and international prestige would have risen considerably. He wasn't particularly well-known internationally, he was well - known nationally, and deeply respected.

I honestly feel that of all the geologists with whom I have been in the field, I have not been more impressed than I was with Byers.

Dr Caldwell does not see the Geology Department of the University as an "ivory tower", so perhaps his philosophy does not differ that much from that of Drs. Mawdsley and Byers.

As I see the role of the Geology Department at the University of Saskatchewan, its prime role is providing students with a thorough grounding and a good understanding of the concepts and principles of all the major fields of the geological sciences. I do not think that a geological department can afford to be, or should ever become, simply the exploration arm of any mineral exploration company, or for that matter, of government.

We must have available in each province, I hope we have in Saskatchewan, universities which take very seriously the job of producing thinking individuals. In the case of the Geology Department of this University, thinking students who can assess critically, and draw logical conclusions from the field and laboratory, evidence provided to them by the rocks that they study and from it contribute, by either attacking, or reputing, or supporting, some of the concepts and principles of the past. That is not to say, by any stretch of the imagination, that I see this Department as an ivory tower institution producing bookish people who are highly theoretically trained but are impractical.

I think this Department right from its beginning under Dr Mawdsley and I do trust to the present day, has always had a very practical outlook. We have to face facts, ninety per cent of our students pursue careers either in the mining industry, or the petroleum industry in Canada. With much economic benefits to the province, to the country, and the international community. So, we have to turn out students who are capable of doing a practical job.

Relationships between the University and Government have become more distant through the years. Dr Kupsch expresses some regrets.

There has not been any comparable appointment after I had mine, which was a joint appointment by the Government of Saskatchewan and the University. In my day this was necessary, because the salaries were so low that the University couldn't get staff. The salary was only $3200 a year, so they paid me for doing work for the Province in the summer, to bring it up to a reasonable level. I feel there isn't that much contact any more between the Department of Mineral Resources and the University Department here, it's regrettable.

I think we missed a tremendous opportunity when Vern Hogg, Deputy Minister of Mineral Resources (it must have been in the late fifties), came to the University with a proposal to build a building for geology and the provincial Geological Survey right here in Saskatoon. What the reason was for this falling through, I don't know. Once that opportunity was missed, I think we've been losing.

There is some resistance to too close a relationship between the independent university and the more political government departments. But there are places where they do it, for example in North Dakota, and in some other States, where they have a much closer relationship, and government surveys and university departments are housed together in one building. It is regrettable that when you go to Regina and talk to people there, they know so little about what we're doing. We have so very little contact and I think we should have more.

When I joined the Department in 1950 I remember my first experience out in the field, I was going out with Vern Hogg, Deputy Minister of Mineral Resources, to show me the drilling of an oil well near Gronlid.We left our home one morning, and later my wife told me that about an hour after we had left, a man came who enquired whether we had left. She didn't know whom she was talking to. It turned out to be John [Brock] Brockelbank, the Minister of Mineral Resources, he wanted to go out and see the field operations. Nowadays ministers don't even come close to putting their mud boots on. I think it is very unfortunate that now people are tied to Regina, and they hardly ever see what goes on in the field.

His colleagues at the University can tell us a lot about the career and accomplishments of the late Dr Mawdsley, but only a daughter can tell us of the more personal and intimate side of his life, Jane Szombathy talks about her father:

I would say, looking back, that we had a very normal life. People had to work and I realized that a man with four children had to raise enough money to support those children. So it didn't enter my head that this was strange, that Dad would go away by the middle of May and not come back until perhaps two days before university started in the fall. In those days university didn't start until the end of September. We just accepted it, since it had been going on since before we were born when he came out to Saskatchewan in 1929.

I can remember Sunday night coffee parties, not coffee parties, but hot chocolate parties - once a month and the Ore Gangue. A handful of boys would come over, and my mother would make hot chocolate or my sister and me as we got older, and serve it with toast. They'd sit by the fire on Sunday night in the middle of winter, and just talk shop. I'm sure that's what it was, although we weren't in on those things, but we sort of knew what it was all about. Then it was time for us to go to bed, darn it.

As far as professors were concerned, I remember them, but I recall the students better - the Ore Gangue. They would be third and fourth-year students. I don't remember the exact year, but it was a red-letter day when we had nine geologists graduate, that would have been in the late thirties.

Dad went out in the summer by choice, he loved the fieldwork, he maintained that this was what kept him sane - getting back to nature. He loved all forms of nature and was very fond of the flora and fauna, everything to do with outdoor life. He said it rejuvenated him. Plus the fact he was intensely interested in what we call "hard-rock geology", the mapping and exploring of the North was a very exciting part of his life.

He went on past the years when most men give up, in his early sixties, he was still surveying and mapping. I remember when he finally agreed he was getting too old for the rigours of camp life. It was lumbago that was setting in, and it gets cold up there in the evenings, even in the summer.

It really amazed me, the stamina, the miles that man would walk. When you think, all through the thirties, forties, and fifties, he never did have a car, until after we were all married and gone, he either rode a bike or walked. He was a very humble man, we, unfortunately, learnt more about him after he died. He would talk of other peoples' accomplishments, but never his own. I do recall that he felt very honoured that a lake had been named after him in northern Saskatchewan, It's a small lake just south of Cree Lake. Another highlight was when he discovered uranium up in that country, at Charlebois Lake. That would have been in the forties.

A religious man? no, a non-religious man? no, I would say he was religious in a practical way, he very much saw God in Nature. He was baptized and raised an Anglican, but he was more a Unitarian. He was non - churchy, he lived his life by the Golden Rule and was very adamant about it - if you haven't something nice to say about somebody, keep quiet. The church - he didn't like the show, he didn't like the pomp.

My dad was very interested in art and architecture, and he dabbled a little bit, but he didn't have the time. The little bit he did we thought was really good. He always made his own Christmas cards, for years. He used the old-fashioned linocut, with the lino-cutting tools, and he had a hand-cranked press. The cards started very Christmassy, but became less so as time went on. Sometimes showing a building in Europe where he was attending a conference.

He died in the first week of December 1964, he had all his Christmas cards done.

During this time, Saskatchewan Government Airways was formed on a commercial basis, we were doing work for the Government and university people like Dr Mawdsley and Dr Byers. I can recall flying them around in an old WACO, loaded with rocks and a canoe tied on the side, how they ever flew, I don't know. This would have been in 1945 . . . . . .
Floyd Glass, one of Saskatchewan's early pilots, now owner - manager of Athabaska Airways.

Floyd Glass