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James Douglas, Queen’s third Chancellor (1915-1918), led quite a varied life as a Presbyterian minister, a metallurgist, and industrialist, and a historian. He was born in Quebec City and educated at Queen’s (BA 1858) and The University of Edinburgh, where he was ordained as a minister in 1861.

Shortly afterward, he made a surprising career change, becoming a mining chemist in Quebec. In 1875, he entered industrial life in the US. He discovered valuable copper deposits in Arizona, invented new metallurgical processes for the reduction of copper, and reached the presidency of three major mining companies.

Douglas also founded a huge smelting centre in Douglas, Arizona, which was named in his honour. Throughout his career he retained a deep interest in and affection for both Canada and Queen’s. He wrote several works of Canadian history and donated close to $1 million to various University causes.

In 1910, Douglas established the Douglas Chair in Canadian and Colonial History. It was the first Chair in Canadian History in Canada, and in an unusual step, he had an actual chair made to accompany his gift. The chair was made out of teak, and was handcarved with Canadian symbols.

Douglas’ biggest gift was to provide half of the funds for Douglas Library, which was completed in 1924 and named in his honour. He was elected Chancellor in 1915 after the death of Sir Sandford Fleming and served until his own death in 1918.

“The true university of these days is a collection of books”, wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1841, the year of Queen’s founding. A century and a half later we might say, less poetically, that the true university is a collection of information resources. Yet Carlyle’s essential point remains valid: a library is a university’s lifeblood, vital to its function and growth as both a teaching and a research institution.

Joseph S. Stauffer, in whose honour the new library is named, was a quiet, unassuming man who graduated from Queen’s in 1920.

Born in Galt, Ontario, on May 16, 1896, to Joseph and Magdalena Stauffer, he attended Galt Public School and Collegiate Institute until 1914, when he enrolled in Applied Science at Queen’s to major in metallurgy. World War I intervened, however, and after only a short time in Kingston, he enlisted in the Royal Navy Air Service. He served overseas in 1916 and 1917, then returned to Queen’s to complete his degree. Following his graduation, he worked for two years as an engineer, then pursued graduate studies in fuel technology at the Imperial College of Science in London, England.

Once back in Canada, Stauffer began developing business interests in a wide range of areas, including fuel technology, telephones, textiles, stamping and finance, eventually amassing a large fortune by dint of hard work and what appeared to others to be a magic touch. He remained modest about it, however, confessing to Alumni Affairs correspondent Herb Hamilton that he had accomplished “limited successes and plenty of failures”.

His lifestyle was also modest. He and his wife Annabelle spent most of their married life in a small apartment on Jamieson Street in Toronto, where they lived unostentatiously, even frugally, allowing themselves only one real luxury — an annual vacation cruise.

Education was important to Stauffer, and his generosity has benefited every academic institution he attended, including Queen’s.

“Outstanding” is the word he used to describe his education here, and the many ways in which he has assisted the university over the years would seem to reflect his opinion. Both during his lifetime and after his death in 1978, through the Joseph S. Stauffer Foundation, Queen’s has been the recipient of many substantial and often anonymous gifts, one of the most important to date being the Foundation’s major contribution to the Joseph S. Stauffer Library.

Although he shunned the limelight all his life, Stauffer’s family feels that he would be pleased to have his name associated with such a valuable educational resource. Thus it is in grateful recognition of his longtime generosity to Queen’s that the university dedicates the Joseph S. Stauffer Library in his honour.

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The law library at Queen’s University is named after one of Canada’s pre-eminent legal scholars, William R. Lederman (1916-1992). Lederman was a noted constitutional scholar and the first dean of Queen’s Faculty of law. He was born in Regina and educated at the University of Saskatchewan (LLB 1940) and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a Vinerian Scholar. He made a name for himself as one of Canada’s leading constitutional lawyers while teaching at Dalhousie University (1949-1958) and was invited to be the first Dean of Queen’s new Faculty of Law in 1958. He served in the post until 1968 and continued to teach in the faculty until the 1980s. He was constitutional adviser to then-Ontario Premier John Robarts between 1965 and 1971 and was a mentor to many other constitutional scholars in Canad

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