Annual Report 1998

THE KILLAM TRUSTS ANNUAL REPORT 1998 Trustees of the Estate of the late Dorothy J. Killam 1 2 THE KILLAM TRUSTS The Killam Trusts were established in 1965 under the Will of Dorothy Johnston Killam for the benefit of Dalhousie Uni- versity, Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill Univer- sity, University of Alberta, The University of Calgary, The University of British Columbia and the Canada Council for the Arts. Mrs. Killam also established similar trusts during her lifetime for the benefit of Dalhousie and the Canada Council. To date, over 3,700 scholarships have been awarded to graduate students and faculty. The Killam Trusts also provide funds for Killam Chairs, salaries for Killam professors, and general university pur- poses. The Canada Council, in addition to awarding Killam Fellowships, also awards annually the Killam Prizes in Medicine, Science and Engineering; they are Canada's high- est awards in these fields. In the words of Mrs. Killam’s Will: “My purpose in establishing the Killam Trusts is to help in the building of Canada’s future by encour- aging advanced study. Thereby I hope, in some measure, to increase the scientific and scholastic attainments of Canadians, to develop and expand the work of Canadian universities, and to promote sympathetic understanding between Canadians and the peoples of other countries.” NNN 3 Izaak Walton Killam Born in 1885 at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Died in 1955 at his Quebec fishing lodge. Izaak Walton Killam was one of Canada's most eminent financiers, rising from paper boy in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to become head of Royal Securities. Having no children, Mr. Killam and his wife Dorothy Johnston Killam devoted the greater part of their wealth to higher education in Canada. Notwithstanding his prodigious financial accomplishments, Izaak Walton Killam was a very reserved man who eschewed publicity and was virtually unknown outside a small circle of close acquaintances. 4 Dorothy Brooks Killam, née Johnston Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1899 Died in 1965 at La Leopolda, her villa in France Unlike her reticent husband, Dorothy Johnston Killam was an extrovert who loved company and people generally. After she and Mr. Killam were married in 1922, they lived in Montreal, the centre of the Killam financial empire. Mr. Killam died in 1955, and it was left to Mrs. Killam to work out the details of their plan in her will. When she died in 1965, she left their combined estates to specific educational pur- poses and institutions, as well as a large gift to The Izaak Walton Killam Hospital for Children in Halifax. 5 THE KILLAM TRUSTS 1998 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE KILLAM TRUSTEES NNN The story of the Titanic has once again captured the world’s imagination, with Canadian James Cameron’s movie drawing record audiences everywhere. The cinematic spec- tacular has also transformed Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, where the real Jack Dawson (who gave his name to the fictional hero of the movie) is buried, along with 150 others whose bodies were plucked from the cold waters of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. Such is the popularity of the movie – or, more accurately, of Leonardo DiCaprio, Holly- wood’s latest heartthrob who plays the part of Dawson – that thousands of tourists as well as native Haligonians, many of them teenage girls, now flock to the cemetery to pay homage. These graves mark the passing of the Edwardian era, the high point of twentieth century confidence and joie de vivre. About fifty meters or so from the Titanic graves are those of Izaak Walton Killam and Dorothy Johnston Killam. If the former signify the ending of a glamourous but long-lost age, then just as surely the latter mark the beginning of a glorious new age of research at Canadian universities. When Mrs. Killam died in 1965, leaving some $100 Million of her and her husband’s estates to higher education (including lifetime gifts), only a few Canadian universities sponsored graduate and post-graduate research programs of any kind. Most Canadian scholars who wanted to earn a Ph.D. degree or pursue postdoctoral work had to go to other countries, usually the UK or the USA. The Killams realized this 6 “brain drain” was holding Canada back, and their determina- tion to stop it led them to devote their fortunes to higher education in Canada. They wanted especially to help universities in the regions of Canada where Mr. Killam had made his money, and where advanced research existed only in an embryonic state, if at all. To an extent only vaguely comprehended by today’s scholars, even those at the “Killam universities”, it was the Killam gifts that were responsible for transforming that dismal scene. Today, not only Canadians but students from many lands round out the complement of doctoral scholars at the Killam universities. And today the market value of the Killam Trusts stands at some $345 million, roughly the size of the Rhodes Trust in England and the Nobel Foundation in Sweden. Since 1967 the Killam Trusts have assisted 3,350 graduate and post-graduate scholars at The University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, The University of Calgary, Dalhousie University and the Montreal Neurological Insti- tute at McGill University. Under the Killam Program at the Canada Council for the Arts, 400 professors in mid career from universities across Canada have been awarded Killam Fellowships, releasing them from teaching duties so they could pursue concentrated research for two uninterrupted years. The Council also sponsors the annual Killam Prizes in Medicine, Science and Engineering; worth $50,000 each, they have been awarded to 48 eminent Canadian scholars to date, and are Canada’s leading prizes in these fields. The Killam vision has succeeded beyond even its found- ers’ expectations. Today, the Killam universities compete with their counterparts worldwide, and their scholars’ work is as good or better than anyone’s. 7 Jack Dawson may be a celluloid star, but for thousands of Canadian and foreign scholars the real heroes of Fairview Cemetery are Izaak Walton and Dorothy Johnston Killam. NNN At all the Killam institutions the Killam Scholarships and Prizes are awarded strictly on merit. No considerations of race, religion, national origin or gender enter into the compe- tition. Yet the trend is unmistakable: more women scholars are taking graduate degrees than ever before, and more are receiving Killam awards. At two of the four institutions awarding predoctoral Killam Scholarships (Dalhousie and UBC), women Killams outnumber men, and by a fair margin (46 to 30 at Dal; 23 to 17 at UBC). And, in a recent turn of events, women outnumber men even in mathematics, engineering and the sciences (23 to 20 at Dal; 12 to 11 at UBC). At the other two institutions, U of C and U of A, men outnumber women, but again the sciences are well repre- sented by women scholars. Overall, in all four universities women outnumber men 87 to 75, while in the sciences men maintain only a slight lead: 47 to 42. The change since the Killam Scholarship Program be- gan in 1967 has been remarkable, especially in the sciences. In those days, few women took advanced degrees, and fewer still in the sciences. You can see the results of this history in the statistics from the Canada Council’s Killam Program. In the years 1968 to 1991, just 16 women were awarded the Council’s Killam Research Fellowships, compared to 298 men. But in the past eight years, 14 women have won, compared to 78 men – a small percentage still, but growing rapidly. Besides, unlike the Killam universities’ predoctoral Killam Scholarships, the Council’s Killam Fellowships are awarded to professors in mid-career; so the percentage of 8 women should rise dramatically in the next ten to twenty years as today’s doctoral scholars take up university posts and pursue teaching and research as their life’s work. We cannot close this discussion without referring to the three eminent women scholars who have won the Canada Council Killam Prizes: Dr. Brenda Milner of McGill, the 1983 Prize winner in Medicine; Dr. M. Daria Haust of the University of Western Ontario, the 1990 Prize winner in Medicine; and Dr. Martha Salcudean of UBC, the 1998 Prize winner in Engineering. Dr. Milner holds the position of Dorothy J. Killam Professor at the MNI, and continues to focus her research on the cognitive functions of the frontal and temporal lobes of the human brain. Dr Haust is a full professor in the Department of Pathology at Western. Inter- nationally renowned for her work in atherosclerosis, her most recent award is an Honourary Doctorate from Charles Uni- versity, Prague, in April of this year. Dr. Salcudean made history in 1985 as the first woman head of a department of mechanical engineering in Canada, and again this year as the first woman to win the Canada Council Killam Prize in Engineering. She now holds the prestigious Weyerhauser Industrial Research Chair in Computational Fluid Dynamics at UBC. No doubt some cultural and perhaps other barriers remain to the advancement of women scholars in the fields of medicine, science and engineering. But if the Killam experi- ence is any guide, one would have to conclude that these are steadily falling away. NNN 9 This year’s Annual Dinner to honour the three winners of the Canada Council’s 1998 Killam Prizes was held in Vancouver on April 22. The Prize winners, in addition to Dr. Salcudean, were Dr. Fernand Labrie, Professor at Université Laval and Director of its Hospital Research Centre (CHUL), in Medicine; and Dr. Juan C. (Tito) Scaiano, Professor at the University of Ottawa, in the Natural Sciences.

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