Proceedings of the Board of Regents (1963-1966)

JANUARY MEETING, 1966

1207

his signal abilities and his unswerving loyalty. They trust that he will long benefit
the University by his continued association and will freely avail himself of the
courtesies extended to him in his new rank, Professor Emeritus of Biological
Chemistry.
Upon his retirement from the active faculty at the end of the past academic W. G. Dow:
term, WILLIAM GOULD DOW brought to a close nearly forty years of distin- Memoir
guished service to the Electrical Engineering Department, including six and a half
years as its active and vigorous chairman.
A native of Faribault, Minnesota, Professor Dow was graduated in engineering
from the University of Minnesota; he then served for two years as an officer in the
United States Engineers and gained industrial experience with Commonwealth
Edison and Westinghouse Electric. Having come to The University of Michigan in
1926 to pursue graduate study and to teach, he earned a master's degree in his
specialty in 1929 and rose through the several ranks to a professorship in 1945.
Professor Dow's services and accomplishments have been so numerous and so
various that it is impossible to detail them here except by general category. Active
in wartime research at Harvard University and in the United Kingdom, he
remained an electronics consultant to the Bureau of Standards and served on
national and international panels on vacuum-tube development and rocketry. The
body of research which he has undertaken in the development of ever-subtler electronic instruments of detection, communication, and control is a kind of mirror of
human advances in the use of electrical energy during his lifetime. His professional
career has further embraced membership on eight committees of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers, chairmanship of the Institute's Committee on
Electronics, influential editorial offices for professional journals, and a host of
additional duties.
In the Engineering College, where he elected to remain at a financial sacrifice,
he presided over a departmental diversification and growth which kept pace with his
own professional growth. Committed to a sound educational foundation, he also
advanced research programs of genuine educational relevance that leavened understanding with imagination and kept existing knowledge pressing against its limits.
Nor did he neglect or pass off the detailed executive and deliberative labors needed
to insure the good order and discipline of his department and of his college.
In 1961 the University of Minnesota conferred a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award on him; in the following year The University of Michigan honored
him with a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award; in the year after that the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers granted him its Medal for Electrical Engineering Education.
The Regents of the University, seizing the occasion upon which they appoint
him Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, now extend to him their own
warm and personal congratulations and gratitude. They felicitate him further on the
new chapter of his eminent career which he is commencing as Senior Research
Geophysicist.
IRVING ALBERT LEONARD, the distinguished Hispanic-American scholar, I. A. Leonard:
has completed his retirement furlough and become eligible for emeritus appointment. Memoir
Shortly after his graduation from Yale University, Professor Leonard went to
the Philippine Islands as a representative of a commercial firm and was there
attracted into teaching at the University of the Philippines. Upon his return to the
United States, he earned his doctorate at the University of California, where he
remained on the staff until 1937. Before coming to Ann Arbor in 1942, he served
as an assistant director of the Rockefeller Foundation and taught at Brown
University. His successive offices here have included a professorship in romance
languages, chairmanship of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures,
concurrent professorships in romance languages and history, the Richard Hudson
Research Professorship in History, and, after 1962, the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
University Professorship of Spanish-American History and Literature.
In the cultural history of Colonial Spanish America, Professor Leonard became an authority second to none in the world. One of his several books, Baroque
Times in Old Mexico, won the H. E. Bolton Prize Award. He was further a warmly
respected member of scholarly councils and editorial boards. In his teaching, to
which he was deeply devoted, he communicated to his students a quiet excitement
and something of his own breadth and penetration. To departmental, College, and
University committees, he imparted a kindly and proportioned common sense. In the
Shakespearean phrase, "he had a daily beauty in his life" which was felt in all his
academic and personal associations. In 1963 the Henry Russel Lectureship, the
acknowledgment of primacy within this scholarly community, was fittingly conferred on him.