Proceedings of the Board of Regents (1969-1972)

928

APRIL MEETING, 1971

public policy in her community and state for more than forty years.
Commencing as a young school teacher in her native Grand Rapids, she
labored with ceaseless industry and energy, through the League of Women
Voters, the Michigan Merit System Association, the National Municipal
League, and numbers of appointed committees and commissions, to enhance the integrity of civil service and the effectuality of local selfgovernment. Within the past decade, ideals dear to her heart have been
written into the Michigan Constitution, some of them by her own hand
as an expert delegate to the Constitutional Convention; and she has enjoyed the rare privilege, as Civil Service Commissioner, of implementing
and strengthening principles which she herself helped to formulate.
The University of Michigan takes delight in tendering this enabled
citizen and liberated lady the degree Doctor of Humanities.
DOCTOR OF LAWS
THOMAS GEORGE LONG, Bachelor of Laws in the Class of 1901;
senior partner of the law firm Butzel, Eaman, Long, Gust and Kennedy,
Detroit.
Taking advantage of his own superb abilities and the flexible educational system of the time, Mr. Long earned his law degree here at the
age of eighteen, just seventy years ago. During the long interval, he
established a legal practice which was a model and example of precision
and incisiveness, and which issued in some landmark judicial decisions
and legislative acts. He has been a trusted director of principal corpora',s in his city and state. He has also freely lent his wisdom and expertness
to public and religious organizations, including the Detroit Public Library,
which he literally saved from financial disaster, the Congregational Church,
the Detroit Council of Churches, and Olivet College. A chorus of grateful
praise from lawyers, librarians, executives, and churchmen commends
him to his Alma Mater.
Expressing the peculiar reverence which humanity feels for those who
have not sought honors but whom honors have found out, the University
happily confers upon this great and good man the degree Doctor of Laws.
C. VANN WOODWARD, Sterling Professor of History at Yale
University.
Professor Woodward's preeminence among living historians of the
United States is founded upon his mastery of many historiographic genres:
biography, panoramic narrative, and speculative, evaluative, and recommendatory essay. It is founded as well upon his sensitive awareness of
historical issues in all his discourse and teaching. He has fulfilled the
concrete mission of subsuming the history of the provincial South into a
total vision of the American experience. He has fulfilled the general
mission of weaning his fellows away from a potentially sterile academicism
and toward those perilous and problematic but unequivocally rewarding
realms of knowledge where our sense of the past modifies our sense of
what now is and ought to be.
The University of Michigan takes pride in offering this generous
and dedicated historian and teacher the degree Doctor of Laws.