Alexander Stewart Hunter, Professor of English and Ethics, and Lecturer in International Law. After 1909, Hunter appears in the catalogue as a “Special Lecturer in English literature.” In the 1908 Yearbook, The Owl, where students provided antic captions for the faculty page (see the image for Crawford, below), the students attached this description to Hunter’s photo:
“Uncle Alick,” Ph.D., LL.D. and do not forget it. Nice man, for often there is a smile behind that upturned mustache (which, by the way, is his and therefore at his disposal and not yours). Looks like the Kaiser when he is fixed up and like Mark Twain when he’s mussed (fixed down). If you can give “that calf illustration of mine. It’s a good one,” or an exact quotation from the book, he is delighted. His Ph.D. was gotten on his “knowledge of the American boy,” and that LL.D. was given for laying down the law to the young ladies, genus-American, species—W.U.P., “The young ladies must cease their conversation.” Makes the eagle scream on all possible occasions. At ease on state occasions—and all others.
Alexander Wellington Crawford (1866-1933), Professor of English (and sponsor of the Dramatic Club), was born in Ontario, Canada. He took at BA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from Cornell (1902), where he worked with Hiram Corson, who had published one of the first critical studies of Shakespeare in the U.S., an Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare(1899). Crawford taught at Ursinus and Beaver Colleges in Pennyslvania from 1902-1906 before coming to the Western University in 1907. In 1909, he left to take a position as the Chair of the English department at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, where taught for the remainder of his long career. Crawford edited a teaching edition of Julius Caesar (1918) and published articles on Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning. He was a pioneer in the teaching of Canadian literature. He was the author of Hamlet, An Ideal Prince and other Essays on Shakespearean Interpretation (1916), The Philosophy of F.H. Jacobi (1905), Germany’s Moral Downfall (1919) and The Genius of Keats (1932).
Allan Davis, Assistant in English and Instructor in Public Speaking
Peter Harden Eley, Instructor in English